Every website owner wants to drive organic traffic to their site. But how do you go about doing it?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but there are some tried and true strategies that can help you increase your organic traffic.
In this guide, we’ll share the ultimate strategy for driving organic traffic to your website.
Why You Need to Drive Organic Traffic
As a business owner, you’ve likely heard the term “organic traffic” before.
For those of you who don’t know, organic traffic is the traffic that comes to your website from natural or “unpaid” search results.
In other words, someone found your website by typing in a relevant keyword or phrase into a search engine like Google or Bing.
The benefits of this type of traffic are numerous.
For one, it’s completely free to generate organic traffic, unlike paid traffic which can get quite costly over time.
Secondly, it’s typically high-quality since people are more likely to have clicked on something that is relevant to their search intent than an ad that they may not be interested in.
Lastly, it generally has a much lower bounce rate than paid traffic since people who click on it are more likely to stay on your site since they were already interested in what they were looking for.
Now that we’ve gone over what organic traffic is and why you should care about it, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually generate it.
The Different Types of Organic Traffic
There are two main types:
1. Search engine traffic: This is the kind of traffic that you are probably most familiar with. When someone types a query into a search engine like Google or Bing and clicks on one of the results, they are counted as organic search engine visitors.
2. Referral traffic: This is the kind of traffic that comes from other websites. When someone clicks on a link from another website that points to your site, they are counted as referral visitors.
The best strategies for driving organic traffic
There are a number of strategies that can be used to attract organic traffic, and the best approach will vary depending on the type of business and the products or services being offered.
However, there are a few general tips that all businesses can follow to drive organic traffic. So let’s take a look at them.
Identify the keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for
Keywords and phrases are the foundation of any good Search Engine Optimization campaign.
They are the terms and phrases that your target audience is searching for when they are looking for information, products, or services related to your business.
Identifying the right keywords and phrases to target can be a challenge, but there are a number of tools and resources available to help you.
The first step is to brainstorm a list of potential keywords and phrases.
Once you have a list, you can begin to research how often these terms are being searched for and whether or not they are likely to generate traffic.
You can also look at your competitors to see what keywords and phrases they are targeting.
It’s important to take the time to identify the right keywords and phrases, so you can ensure that your SEO campaign is off to a strong start.
There are many tools you can use to access keyword data:
- Keyword Explorer by Moz: Keyword Explorer is a professional, dynamic program that covers nearly every aspect of keyword research. It helps marketers brainstorm keywords, build lists and filter them by topic. You can also analyze metrics, click-through rates, and other measures of effectiveness, as well as spy on and assess keywords used by your business rivals.
- SEMrush: SEMrush is one of the best tools for professional SEO analysis. One of its many features allows you to identify and analyze the keywords your competitors are using simply by entering your competitor’s URL into the SEMrush search bar. This information can be invaluable in helping you to improve your own SEO strategy. In addition, SEMrush also provides a range of other features, including competitor research, traffic analysis, and keyword tracking.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs’ Keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer allows you to quickly and easily assess a huge range of keywords in over 170 countries, making it an invaluable tool for any international marketing campaign. With its broad range of features, including keyword difficulty, click-through rates, related keyword lists, and search volume, the Keywords Explorer is sure to help you take your marketing to the next level.
- Google Keyword Planner: This allows you to research potential keywords for your business, estimate the number of searches for those keywords, and get insights into how difficult it would be to rank for them, oh and it’s free.
Optimize your website content around those keywords and phrases
In order to ensure that your website is seen by as many people as possible, it is important to optimize your content around long-tail keywords and phrases that potential customers are likely to search for.
By doing some research and using the right tools, you can identify the terms that people are using when they search for businesses like yours.
Once you have a good understanding of the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your business, you can start incorporating them into your website content.
In addition to using keywords throughout your site, you should also make sure to use them in your titles and descriptions.
Optimizing your website content around keywords and phrases can help to improve your search engine ranking and attract more visitors to your site.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are those that contain three or more words and are thus much more specific than shorter, general keywords.
For example, rather than just using the keyword “car wash,” you might use a long-tail keyword like “how to wash a car.”
Using long-tail keywords is a great way to rank higher in voice search results since these searches tend to be much more specific than regular text searches.
To optimize your website for voice search, simply identify one long-tail keyword using this guide, find lots of semantically related keywords, and write a long-form, comprehensive blog post that suitably positions those semantically related keywords throughout.
These steps can help ensure that your website ranks high for voice search results, driving more traffic–and potential customers–to your site.
Use those keywords in your website’s title, meta description, and header tags
If you want your website to rank high in search engine results, it’s important to use the relevant keywords you just gathered from the steps above throughout your site.
That means including them in your title, meta description, and header tags.
The title is the most important place to use keywords, as it’s what appears in the search results.
The meta description is also important, as it gives potential visitors a brief preview of what they’ll find on your site.
Finally, header tags help search engines understand the structure of your content and make it easier for them to index your pages.
Make your posts easy to read
Formatting your content for the web is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
One way to increase the readability of your content is to use short paragraphs.
Aim for paragraphs that are 3-4 sentences long.
If necessary, you can even use one-sentence paragraphs, but use them sparingly or your post will look like a grocery list.
Another way to improve the readability of your content is to use subheadings.
Subheadings help to break up the text and make it easier for readers to skim and find the information they’re looking for.
In addition, bullet points are a great way to break up large chunks of text and make it easier to read.
Use white space to your advantage by breaking up the text with relevant media, including photos, videos, and graphs.
Finally, be sure to proofread your content before you publish it.
Nothing will drive readers away faster than poor grammar and spelling errors.
Take the time to edit your work carefully before you hit “publish.”
Repurpose and refresh your old relevant content regularly
It’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and information in your industry. But let’s be honest – who has the time to constantly write new content?
A much simpler solution is to regularly refresh and repurpose your old content.
This way, you can keep your existing content relevant and authoritative, without spending hours writing new material from scratch.
So which content should you focus on refreshing?
Start with time-sensitive content, like posts about your specific expertise/industry or other evergreen topics.
These are the kinds of subjects that are always changing and evolving, so it’s important to make sure your information is current.
You should also target posts that are already getting some organic traffic but have the potential to perform even better.
With a little updating, you can give these posts a boost in the search results and attract even more readers.
Once you’re ready to update your older blog posts, you can follow the zindo+co updating guidelines:
- Rewrite a new introduction and conclusion to the post
- Remove/update any sections that are weak or uninformative to the overall article
- Write as much as possible to add the most value to the piece
- Check for updated statistics, facts, or quotes, and make sure all links to their sources are no more than 2 years old
- Replace any outdated, broken, or irrelevant images
- Update any examples/case studies with new, current ones
Promote your website content on social media and other online platforms
In order to draw attention to your website, it is important to promote your content on social media and other online platforms.
One way to do this is to create a social media profile for your website and make sure to post new content regularly.
In addition, you can use hashtags and other tools to make your content more discoverable.
You can also submit your website to directories and promotional websites.
These steps can help you reach a wider audience and increase traffic to your site.
Monitor your website’s search engine rankings and make necessary adjustments
Search engine ranking is an important metric to track for any website.
After all, if your website isn’t appearing on the first page of search results, you’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can help you to monitor your website’s search engine ranking.
Google Analytics, for example, provides detailed data about where your website ranks for various keywords.
Armed with this information, you can make necessary adjustments to improve your website’s visibility.
Let’s say you notice that your website is ranking lower than usual for a particular keyword, you may need to tweak your content or adjust your SEO strategy to accommodate this.
Keep monitoring your website’s search engine ranking and making appropriate changes, and this will ensure that more people are able to find your site.
The Worst Ways to Drive Organic Traffic
There are a lot of great ways to drive organic traffic to your website. But there are also a lot of bad ways that can end up penalizing your rankings, so we thought we’d share them to help ensure you steer clear of these tactics.
1. Using black hat SEO tactics
2. Buying links or otherwise manipulating link popularity
3. Creating low-quality or thin content
4. Stuffing keywords into your content excessively
5. Engaging in duplicate content practices
6. Cloaking your content
7. Creating doorway pages
8. Participating in link farms
How to Measure the Success of Your Organic Traffic Campaign
As mentioned above, organic traffic is defined as the number of visitors that come to your site as a result of unpaid or free search engine results.
Essentially, it’s any traffic that isn’t coming to your site through an advertisement.
Organic traffic is also important because it is the main driver of website traffic.
Search engines are the primary source of traffic, which means that if you want to increase your website traffic, you need to focus on driving traffic to your site.
There are two ways to measure the success of your campaign:
- The first way is to look at the number of unique visitors that come to your site from organic search results. This number can be found in your Google Analytics account.
- The second way to measure the success of your organic traffic campaign is to look at the conversion rate for visitors who come to your site from organic search results. A conversion can be defined as a goal that you have set for your websites, such as a sale, sign-up, or download. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
Both measures are important in determining the success of your traffic campaign and a glimpse into how well your campaign is performing.
The future of organic traffic
It’s no secret that organic traffic continues to be one of the most important sources of traffic for businesses online.
After all, it’s free, it converts well, and it has the potential to scale immensely. But what does the future of organic traffic look like?
There are a few trends that suggest that organic traffic will only become more important in the years to come.
First, professional SEOs are becoming more and more common.
As businesses realize the immense value of organic traffic, they are investing more in professional SEOs who can help them grow their traffic.
Second, Google search is continuing to invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
This means that the algorithms that power search engines are only going to become more sophisticated, which will likely lead to even better results for businesses that invest in SEO.
Finally, as more and more people around the world gain access to the internet, the pool of potential organic visitors is only going to grow larger.
All of these trends point to one conclusion: organic traffic is only going to become more important in the years to come. So if you’re not already investing in SEO, now is the time to start. The future of your business might depend on it.
The Ultimate Strategy for Driving Organic Traffic
Here’s a quick step-by-step list for driving traffic to your website:
1. Make sure your website is informative and easy to navigate
2. Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions to help improve your SEO
3. Promote your website through social media, forums, and other online channels
4. Create high-quality content that people will want to share
5. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive
6. Use Google Analytics to track your progress and traffic sources
Conclusion
By using the right keywords and phrases, optimizing your website content, and promoting your content on social media and other online platforms, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your website.
Monitor your website’s search engine rankings regularly and make necessary adjustments to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts.
Are you ready to get started? Contact us today for more information about how we can help.
FAQs about organic traffic
What is meant by organic traffic?
Organic traffic is the term used to describe visits to your website that come as a result of unpaid search engine results. In other words, these are visitors who find your site through a search engine like Google, without clicking on an ad. Organic traffic is often seen as the most valuable kind of traffic since it represents people who are actively interested in your product or service.
How does organic traffic work?
Simply put, it is any traffic that you generate without having to pay for it. This means that you are not paying for advertising or using other paid methods to get people to come to your website. Instead, you are relying on professional methods like content marketing and search engine optimization to attract visitors organically.
What is organic and inorganic traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the traffic that comes to your website without you having to pay for it. This can include traffic from search engines, social media, and referrals from other websites. Inorganic traffic, on the other hand, is the traffic that you have to pay for, such as through PPC campaigns or display advertising.
What is good organic traffic?
Organic traffic is simply traffic that comes to your site from search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. When someone types a query into a search engine and clicks on your result, that’s organic traffic. You can also get organic traffic from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Anywhere people are talking about your business or sharing your content is a potential source of organic traffic.
