Want to know how to increase organic traffic? Website growth is still determined by the number of people who visit your website, also known as your traffic. More traffic means more views on your content, which potentially translates into more leads, more sales, and better profits.
More traffic isn’t always a good thing. Non-human traffic can inflate your numbers artificially with no real value half of the time. Poor search optimization can bring in a lot of traffic but very little lead generation (meaning, very few visitors stick around to think about buying what you’re selling). Intelligent search engine optimization provides relevant, lead-heavy, organic traffic. And to no one’s surprise, that’s the most challenging kind of traffic to generate and grow.
In this article, we’re exploring how to increase organic traffic to your website.
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How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website
Organic traffic comes to a website from unpaid, natural search engine results. This type of traffic is highly sought after because it does not require advertising. Unlike advertising, organic traffic flows to your website because people have searched for terms related to your brand, product, or service.
The key to increasing organic traffic is understanding how search engines work and how people use them. Once you understand how these two things work together, you can make changes to your website that will help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Attracting organic traffic to your website can be a challenge, but there are several things you can do to improve your chances of success.
As a business owner, you’re probably interested in increasing the amount of organic traffic month-over-month. Search engine optimization (SEO) makes this possible, as SEO strives to increase a website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Many factors contribute to how well your website ranks in the SERPs. Search engines consider these factors when determining whether to show your website in the SERP listings.
You can think of SEO as improving the visibility and ranking of your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO aims to make your website appear as high up in the SERPs as possible.
Here’s how to increase organic traffic to your website.
Defining Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to your content from search engines like Google and Bing through actual search queries.
For example, if you head to Google and look up “basketball shoes for men size 14” and click on the first result, you’ve contributed organic traffic to that website – likely an online shoe store. Because you’re interested in a specific product they’re offering, your organic traffic is most valuable, making you a potential lead. If you go through with your purchase from that first click, you’ve become a successful sale.
What makes organic traffic “organic”? Borrowing from the term’s use in agriculture and grocery markets, anything “organic” in the context of search engine optimization (SEO) refers to something that is naturally generated – i.e., no use of “pesticides” and “commercial fertilizers” (paid traffic, inflated click-through-rates, bots, etc.)
Organic traffic is important because SEO is more than just a numbers game – you’re trying to get the attention of real people, sitting behind their screens, looking for a product or service, or informing themselves on a product or service in your niche. The more real and interested people you attract to your content, the higher your chances of seeing a return on your SEO investment.
The Importance of SEO
If organic traffic is defined as all traffic directed towards a page through a search engine, it’s only natural that your priority should be search engine optimization.
SEO has been around since the early days of DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory, and Go.com and essentially comprises a set of tools, rules, and doctrines that help websites become more likely to be picked as the top results for any given relevant search query. At the time, search engines were essential lookup functions for directories that effectively served as the Yellow Pages of the early internet.
But as the world wide web began to grow exponentially, the systems behind looking up and recommending specific kinds of content became equally sophisticated. Today, there are 200 ranking factors behind any given Google query, and the Google algorithm alone goes through over a thousand changes every year.
Keeping up with these SEO changes yourself can be a daunting prospect. Ideal SEO campaigns involve UX troubleshooting, crawlability and indexing, keyword optimization, competition and data research, social media work, digital content creation and scheduling, backlinking, studying customer search intent, developing online trustworthiness, and improving a website’s domain authority, and much more.
The good news is that not a lot of content on the web is properly optimized. This means that taking the time to invest in your SEO seriously can massively improve your ranking and get you much more organic traffic quickly.
Investing in SEO can provide valuable organic traffic month after month, year after year.
- Chris Rice, SEO Manager
But the stiffer the competition, the harder it is to make a dent. It’s easier to rank for users in your neighborhood looking for a restaurant with your specific niche or cuisine than it is to compete with Nike, big box department stores, and Amazon every time someone looks up “basketball shoes”. Let’s go over some of the ways you can make the biggest difference to your organic traffic.
Do Competition Research
It helps to know what you’re dealing with in terms of competition for a number of reasons:
First, determining how far your competition is ahead in terms of SEO can indicate whether it’s worth trying to compete with them on the same search terms, or whether your resources are better spent trying to invest in another niche for now.
Second, competition research is vital for discovering those untapped niches. By determining where the weak spots are in your competitor’s strategy, you can grow alongside them and bide your time.
Third, competition research of a successful competitor can give you a blueprint for your own early SEO campaigns. SEO tactics aren’t trademarked – rather than reinvent the wheel, why not learn from the successes and failures of those who came before you?
Untapped Target Keywords
Many companies can get ahead through free SEO tools, but the best keyword research and data analysis tools for SEO cost a pretty penny. They’re worth it, however, for the wealth of information they can provide to guide your SEO tactics and help you maintain a healthy head start.
In the hands of an experienced team, these premium SEO tools let you target keywords that have a great potential for lead generation, but are criminally underutilized among your niche or competitors, letting you pull ahead by some metrics, even if you can’t rank for the most popular search terms.
Optimize Your Best Performers
Any given website is made of different webpages, not all of which are available to the public. Those that are, are crawled and indexed by major search engines and added to their “list” of available addresses for search users to discover. This means that every individual piece of content you’ve uploaded and indexed for the world to see can rank and grow at an individual pace – a blog from three years ago might be your best performer by far, pulling far ahead of your home page, landing page, or any of your other content, for example.
These best performers offer critical pieces of information for determining just why they became such a hit, what kind of audience you’re attracting with this content, and how you can translate this growth into growth for other parts of your website.
Furthermore, because this is the content with the highest concentration of traffic on your website, it’s important to continue to optimize it over time, by improving the quality of the content, adding onto it, updating it with new information, adding affiliate links to related products or inbound links to your own products and services, creating a better call-to-action towards the middle or end, and so on.
Leveraging Backlinks Successfully
Backlinks are a powerful yet complex tool to use in SEO. There’s not much you can do to grow backlinks “organically” – if your content is interesting, unique, and original, there is going to be a higher chance that other websites link to it, especially ones for whom your content (and by extension, your product and/or service) is relevant.
These are the best kinds of backlinks because they lead to more traffic, and they signal to search engines that your content is to be trusted, carries weight and authority, and is more relevant within your niche than other posts like it.
However, you can also “create” backlinks, although you must be careful when doing so. Backlinks can be purchased or negotiated through guest posts and careful collaboration. But misusing these avenues can lead to hefty penalization.
Track Your Progress
Whatever you end up doing to improve your SEO, it’s critical to continuously track your progress, and review your traffic for every minor change. It’s not enough to operate on a gut feeling in SEO – optimization is key, which means gathering evidence that your changes or new methods are leading to a marked improvement in growth and other metrics (such as lead generation and sales).
SEO is complicated, and it gets a little more complicated each year.
If you have little or no experience with modern SEO, your best bet is to work with a professional team. An SEO audit can give you a better idea of what’s missing from your current strategy, but it helps to build a new one from the ground up with a team of digital marketers that know what they’re doing.
If you find this content helpful, please share it with your team or join the discussion by adding a question or comment below.
