What is Natural Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Natural search, sometime known as organic search, refers to the listings that appear on a search engine results page (SERP). Websites are listed here in order of relevance to the search term typed in. This order is determined by many different factors, both relative to the website and external factors, such as the number of sites linking to it. These are often referred to on-site and off-site optimisation respectively.

Natural search is often referred to as “free” because there is no media costs like paid search or display advertising. This is a misnomer as you will have to invest time and budget for a team to work on your natural search campaign.

Time is an important factor here. It can take anything up to 6 months from the start of a campaign or site built to achieve good rankings. This will depend on the types of keywords you are optimising for.For those with a budget we always recommend running a paid search campaign whilst your natural search campaign matures.

Search engine spiders

To produce relevant natural search results, search engines such as Google need to collect data from around the web.

To do this they use a set of highly sophisticated computers which visit each website, much like we do. Once it visits the site it will collect the data (text, images, video etc.) and store the information in its database. We refer to this process as “indexing”. If your site has not been indexed (visited and stored by the search engine) then your website will not appear on the SERPs.

Once this data is collected the search engine will use an algorithm (calculations) to determine what search phrases that page is relevant to, and more importantly how relevant that page is to the search term it is being optimised for. This relevancy is what determines your position on the SERPs. If you are seen to be highly relevant then you will have a good, high position.

So why call it a spider? Well, the term comes from the action of the search engine “crawling” the “web” for information; hence the term “search engine spider” was coined.