As more and more businesses shift their focus to the digital realm, the competition for online visibility has become fiercer than ever. Now everyone is looking for the most effective ways to increase organic traffic to their website. That means you may be left behind if you don’t step up your game.
Fortunately, there are a plethora of proven strategies that can help you achieve this goal. However, we’ve compiled 12 of the most effective ones to help your online presence flourish.
So, buckle up and prepare to take your website to new heights!
What is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors that land on your website through natural, unpaid search results on search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
In other words, these visitors have found your website by clicking on a link in the search engine results pages (SERPs) rather than through paid advertising or direct marketing efforts.
How Does Organic Traffic Work?
Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine which web pages are the most relevant and useful for a particular search query. These algorithms consider various factors, such as the quality and relevance of the website’s content, backlinks from other websites, and user behavior.
When a user types in a search query, the search engine returns a list of relevant web pages based on these factors. The top-ranking pages typically receive the most clicks and organic traffic.
To increase organic traffic to your website, you must optimize it for search engines. This involves keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and building high-quality backlinks.
Why is Organic Traffic Important?
Whether you’re a blogger or a billion-dollar brand, generating organic traffic is helpful to all websites. But why should we increase organic traffic?
Here are some of its advantages.
- Cost-effective
Unlike paid traffic, which requires spending on ads, organic traffic doesn’t cost money. It only takes time to build a strategy, learn about SEO, and create optimized content. However, if you focus on this SEO, you can drive more traffic to your website without it costing you a fortune.
This means the return on investment is quite impressive. And this is what every business wants.
- Long-term benefit
While paid traffic can bring instant results, organic traffic can benefit your website long-term. A good ranking could take 6-12 months to achieve, but once you achieve the result, it requires less maintenance cost in the long run. On the other hand, this is not the same as paid traffic because you’ll pay every time a user clicks on your ad.
- Builds Trust and Credibility
People tend to trust organic search results more than paid search results. When a user types in a search query and sees a list of organic search results, they perceive these results as more credible and trustworthy than paid search results.
In other words, searchers think organic search results give more relevant answers and are thus more likely to click on them.
- Attracts relevant and Targeted Audience
Most times, organic traffic means that users are actively searching for something related to the content on your website. Simply put, they are more likely to be interested in what your website offers, making them a valuable potential customer or client.
Because of that, they are more likely to engage with your website, spend more time on it, and even convert into a paying customer. In fact, 53% of website visits come from Organic search while 27% is from paid. This shows that customers acquired through Organic search are higher than paid search.
Ultimately, when you increase organic search, you are reaching a relevant and targeted audience, which in turn drives conversions and contributes to the success of your business online.
How to Check Any Website’s Organic Traffic
SEO competitor analysis means you research your competitor’s website to gather insights about their SEO strategies. This is very important, to know where you can improve.
Here are the steps to check any website’s organic traffic using Ahrefs:
- Go to the Ahrefs website (ahrefs.com) and sign up for an account if you don’t already have one.
- Enter the website URL you want to check in the search bar at the top of the page and click “Search”.
- Ahrefs will display various metrics related to the website, including organic traffic. Click the “Organic Search” tab under the “Overview” section to view the organic traffic data.
You can view the website’s organic search traffic over time, including the total number of organic keywords, the estimated monthly organic traffic, and the top organic search keywords.
Also, by clicking on the relevant tabs, you check more detailed information about the website’s organic traffic, such as the top organic search pages, the top organic search countries, and the top organic search devices.
12 Effective Ways to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website
Although increasing your organic search may not be an overnight success, it is not impossible. With the right strategies, you can achieve this goal.
Here are 12 ways to increase organic traffic to your website
- Focus on User Experience on Your Site
User experience (UX) refers to how easy and enjoyable it is for visitors to use your website. By improving your site’s UX, you can make it more appealing to users and search engines.
To improve UX, you can make your site easy to navigate, using clear and concise language and ensuring that your site loads quickly.
- Optimize Your Content With LSI keyword
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are related terms and phrases that search engines use to understand the context of your content. They are also known as secondary keywords, and as a result, they depth and support your main keyword.
Also, they add more context to make it easier for users and search engines to understand your content.
For example, if the main keyword is “increase Organic traffic”, your LSI keywords can be how to increase organic traffic or “increase organic search”
Ultimately, by including these keywords in your content, you can help search engines better understand what your content is about, which can improve your ranking. Some tools you can use to find LSI keywords include LSIGraph and Google’s related searches feature.
- Create high-quality content
Creating relevant and high-quality content is crucial to attracting visitors to your website. It’s not just about improving your search rankings but also about engaging your audience and converting them into customers. But what exactly does high-quality content look like?
According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, high-quality content should be easy to read, well-formatted, informative, and valuable to your audience. It should also be actionable, expertly written, authoritative, and trustworthy.
These standards are part of Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) criteria for evaluating content.
- Publish Guest posts
Guest posting is a strategy where you write an article for another website in exchange for a link to your site.
By submitting your content to other websites, you can tap into their audience and encourage readers to visit your site through a backlink.
However, you must target sites that attract a similar audience to make the most of guest posting as a traffic generation strategy. This will ensure that the readers who visit your site are interested in your content and more likely to become loyal followers. Additionally, you should create valuable and engaging blog content that resonates with your target audience.
Also, you should consider the target website’s domain authority (DA). Those with higher DA scores are more likely to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs), which as a result, can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results and reaching a wider audience.
- Refresh Outdated Content
Google is constantly updating its algorithms to provide the best possible user experience. Unfortunately, these updates can sometimes cause a drop in your page’s ranking. This is because the value of your content can decrease over time as customer needs and interests change. Additionally, the keywords you initially used to improve your search rankings may no longer be relevant.
However, by refreshing outdated content, you can improve your SEO performance and increase your rankings and SEO organic traffic.
Here are some things to take note of the following when refreshing outdated content.
- Replace outdated visuals and create new ones to illustrate concepts.
- Add new links
- Fix broken links and images.
- Add new keywords
- Use Social Media
In 2023, the estimated number of social media users will be 4.89 billion. While you can take advantage of the population, sharing links on social media is not enough. To get the best result, you must ensure that you:
- Craft compelling descriptions
- Use relevant hashtags
- Engage with other old and new customers
- Tag influencers
- In addition, you can also run contests and giveaways.
However, while doing this, ensure you add the link to your website and engage CTAs in each strategy.
- Analyze Your Keyword Gaps
Keyword gap analysis involves identifying your competitors’ keywords in their SEO strategy, which you are not targeting. This enables you to identify potential keywords that users search for but are absent on your website or content.
As a result, closing the keyword gap can help increase your website traffic and make you more competitive.
You can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SE Ranking to assess your website keyword gap. Although these tools can be costly, if you are on a tight budget, you can take advantage of free trials, particularly with SE Ranking.
8. Use Email Marketing
Do you have an email list? You can leverage it to drive traffic to your website. You can share some of your blog posts with your subscribers via email. Then give an engaging call to action or ask them to finish reading the content on your website.
However, it is essential to send your email campaign to individuals who are genuinely interested in your content, either because they have shown interest in the past or because your content can help address a current issue they are facing.
This type of audience is likelier to spend a longer time on your website, which indicates to search engines that your website is a valuable resource. As a result, Google will recognize your website’s authority and improve your ranking in search results.
Also, remember that personalized emails have better open and click-through rates than generic emails. That means simply including the recipient’s name can make a difference.
Although building an email list from scratch requires a lot of work, tools such as OptinMonster, SendLayer, etc, can make work easy.
9. Use Winning Headlines
To attract human readers and not just improve search traffic, it’s crucial to use attention-grabbing headlines. Research shows that 80% of people only read the title of a blog post, and optimized titles can lead to a 500% increase in conversions.
While crafting compelling headlines can be difficult, you can gain inspiration from successful headlines that have gone viral in the past. BuzzSumo is one tool that can help you find winning titles for your content. Simply enter your main keyword phrase into the search box and discover eye-catching headlines for your content.
10. Focus on Low-Competition Keywords
Low-competition keywords are search terms with few companies or websites vying for high organic rankings through SEO. Due to the lower competition, these keywords can provide excellent opportunities for an SEO strategy.
Usually, they have modest search volumes (typically 100-200 searches per month), but these are often overlooked.
You can find the search volume for specific keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner. Targeting these low-competition keywords can significantly increase traffic, especially for new websites. They’re relatively easy to rank if you produce well-researched and well-structured content with them.
11. Internal Linking
Internal linking is an effective way to generate organic traffic to your website. By linking relevant pages within your site, you can guide your visitors to other valuable content, increase their engagement, and improve the overall user experience.
In addition, internal linking can help search engines understand the structure of your website and identify the most important pages. As a result, it can positively impact your website’s SEO and lead to higher organic traffic.
However, it’s crucial not to overuse internal links as too many can appear spammy.
12. Perform Keyword Research
Performing a keyword search gives you an idea of what your audience wants. This means you identify the words and phrases your target audience is searching for. Subsequently, you can optimize your content around those keywords to improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
This, in turn, can lead to increased visibility, more clicks, and, ultimately, higher organic traffic. You can use various tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz Keyword Explorer to perform keyword research.
Organic VS Paid Traffic
SEO organic traffic refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid search engine results, while paid traffic comes from visitors who click ads.
Both can effectively drive traffic, but organic traffic is more sustainable and of higher quality. Also, visitors are more likely to engage with your content and convert it into customers. In contrast, paid traffic depends on ongoing ad spend and may be less likely to lead to long-term success.
Why Did My Organic Traffic Drop?
It’s essential to use Google Analytics to track your website’s growth, and you might notice a drop in your organic traffic.
There are several reasons why this could happen, including the following:
- Increased Competition
If your competitors invest more in their SEO strategies, produce better content, or provide a better user experience, they may attract more organic traffic and leave you behind.
- Algorithm Changes
Search engines periodically update their algorithms, and if your website’s content or SEO strategies aren’t in line with the latest updates, it can cause a drop in your organic traffic. To avoid this, ensure you’re staying up to date with current search engine algorithms.
- Technical Issues
Issues such as poor content quality or outdated information can cause users to spend less time on your site or avoid it altogether, resulting in a drop in organic traffic.
- Personal changes
Technical changes like a new layout or migration to a new site can cause issues that result in a drop in organic traffic. Be sure to continue running optimization efforts even after your website has undergone technical changes.
- Google Penalty
If your site is penalized by Google for using plagiarized content, buying backlinks, or keyword stuffing, it can result in a drop in traffic. To avoid penalties, ensure your content is unique, avoid buying backlinks, optimize for speed, and fix site errors and broken links.
- Seasonal Changes
Websites may experience fluctuations in traffic due to seasonal changes. For example, a website that sells Christmas umbrellas may see a surge in traffic during the rainy season but a drop in traffic during the dry season.
Conclusion
If you want to grow your brand and website, you must focus on how to increase organic traffic.
Whether you have a big brand or are a blogger, it is crucial to your business or brand’s success.
Fortunately, by following the 12 strategies discussed in this article, you will surely cut the high costs of ads and increase organic traffic on your website.