How To Increase Organic Traffic On Your Site?
What Is Organic Search Traffic?
Organic-search traffic is the traffic comes from search engines such as Google and Bing.
Search engines' goal is to serve the most relevant content matches with the searcher intent. They algorithmically evaluate all pages in their index to find the best match. Once it is done, results are listed on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The searcher clicks to the page that is likely to be the best match for the search query.
This is what I call the life cycle of organic search traffic.
However, this is not the entire story. There are so many things to be done by the websites to get a good SERP position in the index.
Good SERP positions achieved by implementing search engine optimization strategies.
Websites that regularly publish high quality and SEO optimized content can continuously increase organic search traffic, and boost search rankings.
The better you rank for competitive keywords, the more organic traffic your website is likely to receive.
Is Organic Seach Traffic Free?
Organic-search traffic is the best form of traffic a website can have. Because it doesn't require constant push once the flow of traffic is established.
It is almost every time used as a synonym for free traffic. The general perception is, create the content and search engines will take care of remaining.
This type of approach is partially true since there is still an upfront cost to be paid. That cost is creating great content, and publishing it in an environment that search engines think it is worthy to send traffic.
What Are The Best Strategies To Increase Organic Traffic?
Most of the practices used to bring organic search traffic in the past are not working today. The reason is very simple, the expectations are changed.
Here are some actionable tips we can implement considerably fast to improve organic traffic on a website.
⭐ Publish Content Regularly
How many times we hear the saying “Content Is King”. There is a good reason behind. Useful content published frequently will dominate any niche.
If you can constantly publish comprehensive posts, that provide great information search engines will rank your content. This is valid even if you start with a brand new domain.
Publishing regular content is dictating search engines that you need to be taken more seriously.
If you niche down in a particular micro-niche, you can outrank the highest authority websites with regular publications.
Practices to rank a website on Google are almost the same as what you need to do to increase your organic traffic. If you haven't seen my post about the Google ranking factors, I would recommend reading it.
⭐ Write Long-Form Of Content
“Longer is better” applies to content marketing as well.
10 years ago a 500 word of content was good enough to rank on Google. This is today called “thin content” and considered not sufficient to answer people's questions.
Today, most content marketers targeting organic traffic create content at least 1500 words. It is not uncommon to see thousands of words content in many niches.
Why do people create a longer form of content now?
Because it works. Content that is longer naturally includes more topics and keywords. It also prevents “keyword cannibalization” that may damage our SEO rankings. Google tends to rank longer content better than shorter ones.
⭐ Write Content That Is Useful & Usable
Useful content is the relevant content that responds to users' questions. Usable content is the ease of consuming the content. We ideally want to create content both useful and usable for the reader.
Once a user lands on a page, our content is expected to be easily accessible even for people with disabilities. Google started to give more importance to accessibility recently.
If you will outsource your content work with a professional agency like Content development pros.
⭐ Break Long Paragraphs Into Smaller Ones
Longer paragraphs are very difficult to navigate. Break your long paragraphs into smaller ones. I personally don't exceed a maximum of 3 lines for any paragraph, since it is difficult to navigate and lowers the user experience.
⭐ Use Many Compelling Headings & Subheadings
Break your content into digestible pieces by using headings and subheadings. I sometimes use all headings from H1 until H6. Google's algorithm credits how do you structure your content on-page.
⭐ Make Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is an essential part of any content marketing plan. If you don't spend enough time investigating which keywords to target you limit your success. I highly recommend reading my post about keyword research.
🍏 Use Keywords Unknown To Other People
If you are targeting only the same keywords everyone is pursuing you are limiting your chances. Check my very informative post about how to find and rank for unknown keywords. Once you learn to rank for unknown keywords you tap the absolutely free traffic no is targeting.
🍏 Use LSI Keywords In Your Content
Latent semantic indexing keywords are the conceptually related word to your content. By including them in your content you make your content more understandable for the search engines. I recommend reading my post about using LSI keywords in your content.
🍏 Mention Brands & Authority People In Your Content
Including the names of the brands and authorities in your niche will make you get listed more often in SERP. What it means having more free traffic from the search engines.
🍏 Focus On Long Tail Keywords That Have Low Competition
Long-tail keywords have less search volume. However, they are easier to rank since the search query gets more specific.
For instance, It may be hard to rank for “dog food” but it will be easier to rank for “vegan dog food ideas”.
⭐ Improve The Readability Of Your Content
I notice one common point many bloggers have today. It is writing a very simple form of content. Even the nerd content marketers trying to write understandable for a 5th grader.
Readability is an important part of the Google algorithm. Each content receives a readability score that contributes to the overall SEO score of a page.
Luckily, it is not difficult to score our content for its readability. There are many 3rd party tools and plugins developed for this goal. If you are using WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can score the readability of your content.
⭐ Use Proper Grammar & Punctuation
Let's be honest with our selves, no one likes to read a page full of spelling and punctuation mistakes.
Google doesn't like it as well since it decreases the user experience. It is a good idea to scan for these mistakes before publishing any content.
You can use tools like Grammarly to correct your writing errors even when you are typing it. If you create your content in Google docs, Google will also highlight the writing issues for you to rectify.
⭐ Use WordPress only
WordPress is no more a blogging platform only. Today it is implemented by almost everywhere from the company websites to certain government organizations.
The practicality it provides made it #1 CMS (Content Management System) in the world.
Why I recommend sticking with wordpress only?
It is going to save you a lot of time with your content marketing. It has infinite source of plugins, and flexibility of customization for our needs.
⭐ Improve User Experience
Providing good user experience is more important than ever. Search engines prioritizing content that is useful and usable by the reader.
📌 Use A Good Site Architecture
Building a good site architecture is highly important for any website targets to rank high on Google.
Internal linking between different pages will make our site easier to navigate. It will also tell search engines the importance of
📌 Remove Annoying Pop Ups & Content Blocking Ads
Times have changed. Annoying pop-ups, javascript animations, content blocking ads all became obsolete. Google's efforts to increase user experience killed traditional marketing methods which were common practice in the past.
📌 Choose A Mobile Responsive Theme
If you have selected a decent WordPress theme most of the times your website will be already mobile responsive. Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test that lets you know if your site is mobile responsive.
⭐ Write Compelling Meta Titles
No matter how much you optimize your site if people don't click your site on search results you will not receive organic traffic.
You have to give people good reasons to visit your website. Make sure you don't have clickbaity titles. Write titles coherent with the content on your page.
In fact, only improving your meta titles and description by itself can make an immense difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site is receiving.
Make sure you don't write very long meta titles and descriptions else it will get truncated by the search engines. If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can optimize the character length easily.
⭐ Optimize your images
Optimizing your images makes your website faster. But this is not the only reason you want to optimize your images.
Image optimization helps your images to rank on Google image search, that potentially can bring you additional traffic. You can read this post explains how to make image SEO right.
⭐ Consider Building Backlinks That Are Legit
Backlinks are still the most important off-page SEO factor. You need to build backlinks if you want to build authority.
The strategies and techniques implemented to build backlinks depend on the budget and personal risk tolerance. If you want to learn how to do it right, I would recommend reading this post about the backlinks.
⭐ Implement White Hat SEO Strategies
People used to spam and could rank their sites very well in the past. Google patched most of these loopholes and took action against the sites trying to manipulate its algorithm.
Building a website that generates income is hard. It takes a lot of time, effort. Why take crazy risks while there are white hat SEO strategies you can take advantage of.
⭐ Implement E-A-T practices on your website
E-A-T stands for “Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”. Google recently increased the importance of E-A-T as a ranking signal.
Publish the names and bio of all authors creating content for your website. Google wants to know who developed the content.
Critical pages like YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) must be created by experts that are recognized in their niche.
The rater guidelines state that:
“The reputation and E-A-T of the creators of the MC [main content] is extremely important when a website has different authors or content creators on different pages.”
Make sure you or the writers writing content for you have the established expertise.
⭐ Acquire Non-Link Mentions
This one is important and easy to execute. Google hinted that non-link brand mentions and the sentiment may signal Google about the quality of your site.
Google's Gary Illyes mentioned that:
“If you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet, and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that. Then you are doing great.”
⭐ Improve Social Presence Of Your Website
It is no surprise search engines using social signals as a ranking factor. Although we don't know it effect we want our content is shared and mentioned on social media.
At a minimum distribute your content around the social media sites to make it more visible on the web and to have referral traffic from social media sites.
⭐ Advertise On Adwords & Facebook
If you have a budget, using paid advertising can boost your organic search traffic. You should definitely have great content people would share and link back to your site.
Both Google and Facebook offer display advertising campaigns. Display campaigns have more volume than PPC. It can be great to ignite the visibility of your site, in addition to building authority and trust.
⭐ Beware Of Internal Duplicate Content
If you are using WordPress there are good chances you have internal duplicate content issues.
A lot of times Category and Tag pages compete with the actual content you have developed. Check here to learn how to find and fix duplicate content issues.
⭐ Use Silos To Structure Your Website
Silos are a great way to build authority without creating new content. By using silos you create a map for the search engines to understand your site better.
⭐ Use Structured Data
Structured data is presenting the information on your site in a way that more understandable for search engine robots.
It also benefits to improve user experience on your website. For instance, if you build a table and place your data into that you use structured data.
You should definitely consider implementing it for your on-page SEO.
⭐ Boost Your New Pages by Internal Linking
You have built a new piece of content. The very first task before promoting it at somewhere else is linking it from your other pages.
It will help link juice and authority pass to the new page you have created. Also, search engine spiders will crawl the new page easier.
