HomeGlossaryOrganic Search

Organic search is an increasingly competitive space, as businesses develop SEO campaigns aimed at improving their standing on SERPs. The links to organic (non-paid) results that appear for a search engine query are ranked in accordance with the signals these companies use to assess a website’s value to the user.

Factors influencing organic search rankings

Unlike paid search ads, organic listings are determined and cannot be influenced by anything other than the engine’s perceived quality of a website. Of course, other personalization factors can influence how an engine will determine which results are most relevant to individual users. Some commonly acknowledged organic result ranking factors that determine overall and indivudals’ SERPs include:

  • Search engines’ quality algorithms (such as Google Panda)
  • Users’ locations
  • Users’ search history
  • Users’ preferred websites and search patterns
  • Content recommendations from logged-in searchers’ social contacts (such as Google+ data for Google searches or Facebook data for Bing searchers)

Different search engines set varying standards for moving up in these rankings, which frequently change as they look to assess the value of their search rankings to users.

SEO campaigns have become encouraged by search engines as they look to improve the value of their organic listings.

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