As an agency that drives both organic and paid traffic to client websites, we've seen the data time and time again: websites that focus on both organic and paid traffic eventually learn that leads from organic traffic have a cost per conversion that is significantly lower than leads from paid traffic.
In this post, I'll outline 11 ways you can get more organic traffic to your website, particularly traffic with the potential to become leads.
The following tips will assist you in achieving your objectives if you're looking at how to increase organic traffic to your website:
- Have a Blog
- Use Long-Tail Keywords
- Target Keywords You Can Rank For
- Pay Attention to SERP Results
- Write Evergreen Content
- Follow On-Page SEO Basics
- Audit or Refresh Existing Content
- Create Custom Visuals
- Use Internal Linking
- Build External Backlinks
- Use Schema Markup for Rich Results
In case you are unfamiliar with the phrase, “organic traffic” refers to website visitors who find the material on your website in any unpaid search engine results. Google search generates the majority of organic traffic; Statista estimates that Google has about 93% of the market for search engines. The same SEO techniques apply regardless of whatever search engine your users use to find you.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of raising a website's visibility in search results to get more relevant organic traffic. Below, we go through 11 ways to get more organic traffic to a website using SEO best practices.
You may schedule a call with us here if you're interested in our assistance in creating a plan for more organic traffic to your website.
1. If Customers Have Lots of Questions Related to the Services and Solutions You Offer, Have a Blog
A blog is a section of a website that publishes informational content. A blog might help nurture potential prospects through the buying journey by responding to their questions.
To put it another way, someone who searches for terms like “can my insurance company refuse my claim if I was late with my previous payment” very well may be looking for an adjuster. It would be beneficial for an adjuster to have a blog post on their website that responds to inquiries like these.
An excellent opportunity to reach a prime client who could be interested in your services is to start a blog. Second, and perhaps more crucially, it gives you a chance to show off your knowledge by delving deeply into the creation of content for a subject you are well-versed in, emphasizing your distinct understanding of the issues faced by your potential customers and your capacity to solve them.
Through internal linking, blog posts may spread PageRank to service or product pages and draw inbound links (backlinks); we go into more detail about internal and external links below.
Source:Â https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/pillar-cluster-model-transform-blog
Another advantage of blog posts is the development of subject authority, which may make a website competitive in a crowded area, for example, by using a pillar-cluster model.
According to Google's E-A-T, or expertise, authority, and trust, blog posts should be written with competence and be easy to read for both users and search engines.
Utilizing keyword information can help you find blog topics that:
- Target the searches your target customers are performing.
- There should be enough monthly search volume that it’s worth your time.
- Are you of appropriate competitiveness (you’ll often not be able to outrank websites like the New York Times)?
Spending time on a topic that no one is interested in or that is too competitive for your website is the last thing you want to do.
2. Target Long-Tail Keywords
Users enter keywords into search engines to get both organic and paid results. To understand search intent and provide relevant content to their target users, SEOs employ data from keyword research. Based on their volume, competitiveness, and specificity, keywords may be grouped.
Head phrases, also known as short-tail keywords, are often targeted by service and product pages since they are more general, have greater search volume, and are frequently more competitive. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are more niche and specific-volume searches.
“SEO services” is an example of a heading term that a company like ours could wish to target. Ranking for this keyword is quite competitive due to its high monthly search volume (MSV). While being less competitive and having a lesser search volume, a keyword like “SEO services for plastic surgeons” also has the advantage of being more specific to what a user is searching for.
In other words, chances are that we would get a lot of queries from companies that we would not be able to help if our company appeared on page 1 for “SEO services.” For instance, we've never worked with major ecommerce companies whose websites feature millions of pages. We would, however, be uniquely positioned to help someone doing this search since we have extensive experience with SEO for cosmetic surgeons.
Long-tail keywords may sometimes take the form of questions, such as “how to acquire more organic traffic to your website” (do you see how we specifically targeted this long-tail keyword to get it in front of you?”).
In addition to writing high-quality content, using long-tail keyword phrases in the content—such as section titles or FAQs—increases the probability that the content will be relevant to more searchers and, therefore, increase the quantity of organic search traffic.
3. Target Keywords You Have a Chance to Rank For
Usually, content that doesn't get any visitors is lacking in one of the following areas:
- It doesn’t target any keywords
- It doesn't target competitive keywords with significant search volume; if no one is searching for information on the topic, it's unlikely that the content would drive organic traffic and leads.
- It focuses on a subject or keyword that is very competitive. It's unlikely that your neighborhood business can outrank Healthline for “acne treatments.”
Not all keywords are ideal to target for a website's content, even if a potential piece of content satisfies all three of these requirements. They should touch on a topic that a prospective consumer would search for online—we don't want traffic just for the sake of traffic.
SEO tool metrics may be a source of advice on the best keywords to target. For instance, the keyword research tool Ahrefs calculates the keyword difficulty score or the approximate number of backlinks needed to rank in the top 10:
But it's important to note that SEOs sometimes exaggerate these metrics. An item on a local plastic surgeon's website has a higher ranking than The NY Times and Insider for this keyword:
Other tool metrics to consider are the keyword volume and the domain authority of the websites that rank for the keyword.
As Googlers have said, tool metrics are not meant to be a checklist. Instead, they serve as a rough road map for keyword research. A keyword should, above all, be relevant to the needs or questions of the target audience.
The quality of the content also comes into play. Even if a website has higher domain metrics, a better piece of content that is more comprehensive than the competition and has more interaction might outrank the latter.
4. Pay attention to the format of the search engine results to identify content opportunities.
Depending on the query a user inputs, the SERP, or search engine results page, will provide a vastly varied range of content types. Search engines' early incarnations showed merely 10 blue links for results, but in modern times, search engines like Google return a variety of SERP features, including highlighted snippets, local packs, and things people have also asked for.
If a SERP, for example, includes a lot of YouTube or other video content, you should focus on producing a video to target these keywords because this indicates that the search intent is largely for video and written content may struggle to rank in such a piece.Â
Along with SERP characteristics, the actual results themselves might provide advice on the kind of content to produce. For instance, a query with a transactional intent may return product and category pages as well as shopping results. A query with an informational intent may return blog posts or how-to instructions.
The greatest opportunity for your content to generate organic traffic is to create it in a way that matches the SERP results and, by extension, the user intent of the majority of searches.
5. Write Evergreen Content
Because it covers subjects unrelated to recent events or popular topics, evergreen content is constantly relevant. As an example, the material in this Healthline article is evergreen content since it has been and will remain relevant to its subject:
On the other hand, a legal firm that decided to write content like the one below would experience a brief uptick in traffic, but it is unlikely to do so long-term in the same way as an article that provides answers to readers' questions about being attacked in a bar might.
While creating content around a breaking news story or a popular trend might initially increase organic traffic, it will eventually lose its relevance. Because the page may continue to rank for months or years without being replaced by fresher, more relevant content from rivals, evergreen content has a higher chance of attracting organic traffic over the long term.
Even if a piece of content is evergreen, it may still need to be updated from time to time. Below, we go into further detail.
6. Follow On-Page SEO Basics
When the goal is to drive organic traffic, even the best content needs to be optimized for search engines.
On-Page SEO
The term “on-page SEO” refers to a collection of strategies intended to increase a page's visibility in search results by taking care of essentials like headers, image alt text, URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions.
A visitor should be able to anticipate the type of content that will be shown on a page by being able to quickly understand URLs, for instance. Title tags and meta descriptions fall into the same category.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags often serve as visitors' initial exposure to a page in the search results, which may have a substantial impact on search rank and clickthrough rates. While not a ranking factor, meta descriptions may help increase clickthrough rates by advertising a page's contents in the SERPs.
Alt Text
Alt text may provide a search engine with extra details about an image and its placement on a page, in addition to being important for accessibility and screen reader users. Images not only increase engagement (such as time spent on the page), but they may also appear in image search results, which is another potential source of traffic.
Header Tags
Finally, headings are important for logically segmenting the content of a page. The most crucial information must be provided first, then any supporting data, using the inverted pyramid as a guide. In addition to allowing users to quickly skim for the most relevant information, headings may help search engines understand the content of a page.
7. Audit or Refresh Existing Content
You likely have content on your website that just needs a little editing to drive traffic. You may also have content on your website that is hindering its growth.
Low-quality content may influence how a search engine evaluates the overall quality of a website. As an impact of new competition or adjustments to search engine algorithms that affect search results, previously high-performing content may lose rankings (and consequently traffic).
Regular audits of your content might reveal chances to boost organic traffic. One such audit is content pruning, which involves de-indexing, deleting, or redirecting low-quality pages to other relevant content and merging them into it.
Furthermore, as the pages start to lose rankings, even high-performing evergreen content may need to be updated every few months (or years). Lost rankings are often not a punishment for a website, but rather an indication of new competition or that search intent has changed and the content is no longer as relevant as it once was.
You may find chances to increase organic traffic to your website by updating current content and removing “unsalvageable” content.
8. Create Custom Visuals
By fostering more engagement with pages (such as a longer average time on page) or even by directing traffic from image search, custom images may help boost organic traffic. The emergence of MuM and multi-modal search is especially worth monitoring since, in the future, search behavior can rely more heavily on visual content.
Custom product images may provide a way for ecommerce shops in particular to differentiate themselves from the competition. To offer the visitor a better understanding of how a product appears or works, it is best practice to display it from a variety of perspectives. All images should be of high quality while also being optimized for web performance, such as using Google's Core Web Vitals.
9. Add Internal Links to Pages You Want to Get More Organic Traffic
Internal links are links between pages on your website:
They help in directing users to relevant content (as well as search engine bots) and prevent users from going back to the search results. Internal links may enhance organic traffic by dispersing PageRank throughout a website and assisting Google in determining the significance of certain pages and their content.
An internal link to a product page, for instance, might help spread the value (PageRank) of backlinks from authoritative websites to a page that would not normally get many inbound links, such as a popular blog post that gets backlinks.
Using optimized anchor text for internal links is a best practice. This entails employing anchor text to connect to another page that precisely conveys the subject of that page. Although it's important to concentrate on organic linking rather than keyword insertion, the anchor text may often be a keyword in these situations.
10. Earn Backlinks from Other Websites
Backlinks are inbound links that point to another website. Building the right kind of backlinks is one way to potentially increase organic traffic since search engines take a website's backlink profile into account when determining a website's rating.
Numerous SEO tools may alert you to potentially harmful or “toxic” links, but unless they were created using blackhat techniques that put your site in danger of a manual penalty, you should usually ignore or strongly disregard them.
Quality backlinks, on the other hand, are those that originate from relevant, authoritative websites. Writing excellent content and sharing it to increase visibility, such as via social media, is one way to build backlinks naturally. Actively build backlinks, there are more appropriate ways to.
11. Use Schema Markup for Rich Results
A defined format called structured data is used to provide search engines with additional details about a page's content. JSON-LD is the recommended format for structured data on Google.
Although using structured data by itself won't increase organic traffic, some types of structured data can produce search feature enhancements, like star ratings or price details that appear within a search snippet, and can help a page stand out from the competition and potentially increase click-through rates:
Choosing the Right Method to Increase Your Organic Traffic
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for more organic traffic to a website; there are several effective methods. Instead, the best results come from a complete SEO strategy that takes into account numerous aspects of a website's content, web performance, and links. The best course of action is to work with seasoned SEOs who can lead you through improvements, whether your website needs new blog content, recent keyword research, or a content audit.
