12 Ways to Increase Organic Traffic Today
You don’t have to be a big brand to benefit from organic traffic.
You can have a small site, too, like this one, for instance.
With two blogs/month, I’ve brought in 30,000 more impressions in the last three months. Why is this important? More impressions mean more eyeballs.
When more people are clicking on content to go to your website…
- You can build authority as a thought leader.
- Increase the number of potential leads who can benefit from your product/service.
- And open the door for more opportunities (vs. you chasing after them).
That’s the biggest benefit to organic traffic, right? You can get inbound traffic to your website that compounds over time and increases awareness.
So, how do you do this? How do you get people to find your site online and increase organic traffic? Here’s how…
Table of Contents
What is organic traffic?
Think of organic traffic as those who find your website from searching on Google, Bing, etc. Usually, your website page or blog post shows up in search due to someone typing in a keyword or phrase.
For example, maybe you typed in “how to increase organic traffic?” or “organic search traffic,” and Google served up this option in the Google search results for you to click on. So hello there! Thanks for stopping by:)
How to drive more organic traffic?
To understand how to drive more organic traffic, you first need to understand how much organic traffic is funneling to your website today.
The easiest way to do this is to look at Google Analytics. It’s a free tool you can sign up for if you have a website.
Once you know what you’re starting with, measuring the change in organic website traffic going forward will be easier.
Below are 12 ways to consider to drive organic traffic now.
#1. Check Google Search Console to fix any technical SEO problems.
No matter how much high-quality content you create, broken links will not benefit your website. You want to make sure your website has a solid technical back-end.
So, first, it’s important to evaluate the health of your website, and Google Search Console is another free tool you can utilize.
The core website vitals and page experience are displayed under the “Experience” section in the tool’s left-hand navigation. When you click on these. What do they say?
The above screenshot shows us that this is a website that’s good when it comes to site security; however, there are 161 URLs that need attention on mobile, and 145 poor URLs that need immediate attention on desktop.
Any time you see the colors orange or red, it’s a sign you’ve got some technical items you need to fix before getting focused on creating content.
#2. Research and understand your target audience’s pain points & challenges.
Your content marketing strategy needs to be based on audience insights.
The best content you can provide on your web pages and blogs must resonate with your readers. This means it should fully address any questions or current problems they may have.
Some of the best places to discover these pain points come from consumer surveys, industry reports, social media comments, and online forums.
#3. Embrace search engine optimization to boost your site’s visibility.
After you have looked at the audience research and evaluated WHAT content would be best to create, it’s considering all SEO best practices.
Your SEO checklist should include the following:
On-page SEO
You want to ensure the content is structured with the correct headers (H1, H2, H3, H4), optimize title tags for keywords, optimize images (size and alt-text), include internal links to other relevant content, and ensure mobile friendliness.
Off-page SEO
You want to consider backlinks. What other higher-domain sites can you get to link to your content once it’s published? Engaging with others and sharing your content on social media is important to increase organic traffic to your website. Encourage the use of reviews and testimonials to show social proof.
Technical SEO
Page load speed is crucial. Back to #1, you want to ensure any technical problems are fixed. Also, make sure your website follows SSL security measures and that any crawl errors are fixed. Include a sitemap and eliminate any duplicate content.
Content strategy
Once you’ve identified the topics that resonate with your audience, you should consider different content types and channels for your content.
For example, with more comprehensive blog posts, you can pull out key pieces and create multiple social media posts. You also want to consider making video shorts (60 seconds or less) that you can use as social posts or include on your YouTube channel.
I use a content calendar for clients and my own work to stay organized about what I’m posting and when.
#4. Conduct keyword research and utilize long-tail keywords.
By incorporating less popular long-tail keywords relevant to your business, you can increase your chances of appearing on the top search engine results pages for those searches.
With smaller sites, it’s not about choosing the most popular keywords with a high search volume. Usually, you’ll never win on those terms. Instead, it’s about choosing the long-tail keywords with low difficulty, the right search intent, and incorporating relevant keywords based on your topic.
You can take free courses from Semrush and Ahref’s today to learn more about keyword research.
#5. Include SEO blogs on your website.
The biggest mistake is just writing about what you love. Of course, you can do it, but if you ignore your audience and SEO, you can’t expect to see much organic traffic.
SEO blogs are optimized for search engines.
The best SEO blogs address pain points your audience resonates with and are structured to promote more organic traffic based on all the factors I listed in the above SEO checklist.
Writing different content based on search intent is essential for where your reader is in their content journey
TOFU = Top of Funnel Content
Your audience is at the beginning of their research or awareness stage. With this content, you can attract and retain attention from a broad audience. It should be valuable, shareable, and easy to understand.
MOFU = Middle of Funnel Content
At this stage, you want to nurture the existing audience who knows you. Most of the time, they explore different possible solutions to their problem. Content should be clear, address their pain points, and help build trust.
BOFU = Bottom of Funnel Content
BOFU content is for users who are ready to make a purchase. You want to give your consumers all they need (or even an incentive) to commit and buy. Reviews, testimonials, and product usage content can be very important here.
Include internal links to other relevant blog posts. Also, external links should be added to content related to trusted sites. (Ideally, link to articles on websites with a higher domain ranking.)
#6. Update old blog content that’s evergreen and still relevant.
If you already have a library of blogs, look at the content one year or older. What’s an evergreen topic that will continue to be relevant for years? That’s the content you want to look at first to update.
You can also look at Google Search Console to help prioritize.
If an old blog still gets healthy impressions, I recommend starting there first. Capitalize on updating the content already drawing people in to attract even more people.
Look at competing articles to see what you’re missing, then update with your unique twist. Also, note where you can add an infographic to make something easier to understand, and see where there are FAQs you can add.
Follow all the best SEO practices to improve older content.
#7. Get into a consistent cadence of how often you publish blog content.
Publishing regularly helps a lot with increasing organic traffic.
Get on some cadence where you can post blog articles on a schedule. For example, you could post a blog post every week on Thursdays. You could then use this build-up to tease in newsletters and follow up with a social media post on Fridays to drive more traffic.
Even if you start out publishing one blog post per month, that’s 12 blog posts at the end of the year you didn’t have before. That can start to help you get more attention to your website and what you do.
#8.Guest post on other sites with a relevant audience to earn backlinks.
Guest posting is when you agree to write a blog post for another website.
The benefit is exposure to another relevant audience while providing helpful and valuable content for someone else. The other big benefit is that you can include links in your blog post that point back to your website (backlinks), which helps with SEO.
#9. Share links to your website and your blog on social media.
Your social media channels are also a great place to share a link to your blog articles.
I like to take parts of a blog post and turn them into a social post. I did this the other day with this LinkedIn social post.
From one of my other blog articles about 15 Free Ways to Develop Better Content Ideas for Your Blog, I picked 7 of them to highlight.
Then, when someone commented on how helpful it was, I shared the full link to my blog post in case they would like to read more.
You could link to the blog post directly in your social post. But at least on LinkedIn right now, doing so may limit your reach. LinkedIn (like many social platforms) doesn’t want you directing traffic away from their space. So, instead, I tend to share these links in the comments when I think they can be helpful to someone.
#10. Go on podcasts and provide your URL to increase traffic to your website.
Agreeing to go on a podcast is great for several reasons.
It gets you exposure to a new audience.
You get to be seen on camera (this helps others envision what it would be like working or partnering with you).
Depending on the host, you get to meet another cool person!
This tends to be great content you can repurpose into social posts or host on your YouTube channel. Typically, the host asks you to provide a link to where you want to drive traffic. (This can be back to your services page, newsletter, etc.)
There are so many wins all around…and podcasts are typically pretty fun!
#11. Explore integrating video content throughout your website & blog.
Video content is becoming increasingly popular. I’ve been creating several short videos for LinkedIn, and I’m at the point of thinking I need my own YouTube channel to host them all.
Video gives your users a very engaging form of content to digest information, and it can also increase the time users spend hanging out on your website.
As a result, this dwell time signals to Google that your site is valuable and trusted, increasing search rankings.
When your search rankings increase, you move further up the Google page, which can drive organic search traffic as people click.
#12. Set up a Google business profile account if relevant.
Setting up a Google business profile allows others to find your services and help increase organic traffic.
So think about all those “near me” Google searches you’ve done for restaurants or stores. If you set up a Google business profile, you can also start showing up in those searches for what you do.
This Google help page, clarifies eligibility and guidelines.
How do you grow organic search traffic?
It’s important to keep an eye on the data and remember your audience.
Continue to monitor Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
The analytics are your factual clues. In Google Analytics, you need to know organic traffic stats before you publish blogs or optimize web pages. Know the data BEFORE you start going live.
Then, use Google Search Console to understand what target keywords or phrases generate the most traffic. Once you know this, you can track the pages of the blog posts that are performing well and those that can be improved.
Write for your target audience while not ignoring search engine optimization.
Organic search results improve when you begin creating helpful content that resonates strongly with your audience while incorporating an SEO strategy—or what I like to call audience-obsessed SEO content.
There are ways to write engaging topics infused with your brand personality while still utilizing SEO to improve your visibility and ranking in Google searches.
