To increase organic traffic quickly, we need to use certain techniques that make our brand or business stand out from others.
The challenge for any business is to ensure that when people look for a product or service like yours, they find you and not a competitor. However, it is not about mindless SEO (search engine optimisation) or expensive pay-per-click advertising.
To increase organic traffic, you must use a variety of tools. They might take you time to implement but will help you grow your reach at no cost. If you are a business owner, then you may have people advising you to increase organic traffic. This is because websites that attract considerable amounts of traffic are the ones that make a profit.
Sigh, if only it was that simple!
What happens when you are a start-up that cannot compete against the market-leading pages on Google? It might feel like a fighting battle for years on end to get to the top spot. Sometimes, businesses take years to rank at number one and others give up before they even reap the rewards.
We do not want all your arduous work to go to waste, so we have come up with the top 16 tips to increase organic traffic.
Increase Organic Traffic And Stand Out
There are thousands of tips and tricks available on this subject matter and we are certain you have read every single one of them. However, instead of reiterating the same old information for you, we have found a handful of lesser-known techniques that will help you in your mission to the top of Google’s search engine.
What Does Organic Traffic Mean?
Organic traffic refers to the people who find and visit your website through a search engine, such as Google. People are often attracted to a page on your website that answers a search query or matches a keyword or phrase that they have searched for. The process of making content that is more likely to be found on the search is called search engine optimisation, or SEO.
Let’s talk about that.
When visitors stumble across a website thanks to a quick Google search, these results can either be paid or unpaid. Paid search results are the advertised pages that you see at the top of the Google results, and these are positioned better than unpaid alternatives.
Try searching for something on Google now and you will probably find the paid search results before the unpaid. Therefore, you will click on the ads instead of scrolling down to the organic search results.
However, it is expensive to run ads which is why we need organic search results. Organic visitors find the website straight from the search results on an engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
To increase organic search traffic, you need to use SEO best practices as it does not come from visitors that are referred to your website from another page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses primarily on marketing your website to new organic search traffic.
Increase Organic Traffic With SEO
Search engine optimisation is the process of creating and developing a website so that its visibility increases during searches relating to the site. As mentioned, the higher your website is on the search engine, the more traffic and revenue you will gain.
You need to optimise your website to increase organic traffic because bots are used by search engines to collect information about your website and rank it in an index. The algorithm uses this index to generate the order in which the websites should be ranked for each search.
Bots look out for the use of keywords and the quality of your content when indexing. By incorporating all these factors into your pages, you will have the best chance of ranking highly on the search engine.
Optimising your website will get you seen on the first page of the search engine your customers are using. Multiple studies have shown that only around 25% of potential visitors click through to the second page of Google results.
That is why your position on the first page is incredibly important for your website’s traffic. So, if you do not want to pay for the traffic, you must work even harder to increase organic traffic.
What Is The Difference Between Direct And Organic Traffic?
People often get the two confused, but direct traffic is not the same as organic traffic. Direct traffic requires the visitor to enter your URL into the search bar.
Moreover, direct traffic comes from partners or current customers. Once you have gained all your new customers from organic search traffic, direct traffic will be able to tell you the amount that has turned into recurring customers.
Still, to increase organic traffic you need to understand your direct traffic even if it is not the most important aspect. This type of traffic will show you the quality of your traffic and whether you are drawing your customers back for more.
15 Practical Tips For Increasing Organic Search Traffic
Now that you understand how it works and what it means, let us discuss how you can increase organic traffic to your website.
Below are 16 of the most effective tips to increase organic traffic to your website. Whilst you will see the best results by implementing everything, we understand how overwhelming it is. Rather than stressing out, we suggest attempting two or three of these tips to start. Once you have that done, then try another one to increase organic traffic. Take your time and see what works best for your website first.
1. An Amazing User Experience
UX (User Experience) is essential to building an appealing website and getting the search engine bots on your side. Google wants to offer its users the best websites to answer their questions, Therefore, the most user-friendly websites will rank highly on the search results.
Outdated websites or untrustworthy pages are likely to lower your ranking. Even if you do generate some click-throughs, the visitor might decide against using your page and click back to another one. This means that user experience will not only increase organic search traffic but also your direct traffic as well.
You want to have a low bounce rate so that Google rewards you with higher rankings. The bounce rate refers to how many people click on your page only to leave without any additional interaction. The amount of time spent on the page offers no correlation to your bounce rate.
User experience will help to lower the bounce rate and therefore heighten your rating. You can improve your user experience with high-quality, interesting content and images along with the next tips we mention below.
2. Seek High-Quality Backlinks
A backlink is a link that points to a website from another one, like a recommendation or an upvote. Backlinks are taken seriously on Google and are one of the top three ranking factors, so they are unbelievably valuable if you want to increase organic traffic.
Backlinks do take time and effort to attain, but they are not impossible to get. Google bots believe that the more backlinks a website has, the more popular and trusted they are. Whether or not this is true, having more backlinks than your competitor significantly helps.
To check your backlinks, you can use SEMrush or our SEO experts to help you get to the top. However, it is imperative you only seek quality backlinks. Google bots recognise bad links and ignore them, so ensure you only choose high-quality links to help your position.
3. Effective Keyword Research
Think of keywords as signposts for search engine bots. Conducting keyword research helps you to see who is searching for what you want to talk about. Keywords help to increase organic traffic because they help you understand what people want to know about the topic you are writing about.
There are a variety of keyword search tools like Moz, Ahrefs, Google Keywords, and SEMrush. All of which help you to find competitors’ keywords, click-through rates, search volume, and the difficulty of a keyword.
4. Use High Potential Keywords With Low Competition
You might be under the impression that nobody will visit your website if you are not using popular keywords. However, to increase organic traffic it is best to find keywords that have a higher search volume and a lower competition difficulty score.
Using common keywords can rank you lower and hinder your opportunity to be in the top spot.
Keywords that generate a lower search volume offer you a better chance of grabbing one of the top spots. Compare your potential traffic from this top spot of a keyword that generates 1,000 searches a month compared to being on the second page of a keyword that generates one million searches per month.
You will probably increase organic traffic quicker by slowly working your way through less popular keywords to the biggest keywords. Taking on too much too soon can hurt your website, so leave it as a slow-burning process.
5. A Fast Website
Google wants to provide its users with the best experience possible, so they remain popular, which is why website speed is super important. To increase organic traffic, you want to have a speedy website because the higher the speed the higher the ranking. The main reason for slow speed is a poor-quality host, so be sure to use the best. You can check your website speed with ByteCheck which will tell you the TTFB (time to the first byte).
This shows you how long it takes the server to respond. Using one of these tools will allow you to see what Google sees when they are measuring your website. Just ensure that the result is no higher than 500ms.
To speed up your website, switch to another hosting company, use only the necessary plugins, or compress your images.
6. SEO-Friendly Content
You need SEO-optimised content to increase organic traffic so that bots rank your pages high due to excellent quality standards. This is simple to do but might take time if you have loads of pages that need rectifying. To start, ensure you content is top-notch and engaging. Even if you complete every other step, if the content is not good, then your pages are not going to rank highly.
We suggest using our Creative Copywriting and SEO experts to help you create short, attention-grabbing content that will entice visitors and keep them on your page.
Keeping it sweet, short, and simple will work best as people do not want to spend hours sifting through information.
Use:
- subheadings,
- bulleted lists,
- images and,
- white space.
7. Stop Keyword Cannibalisation
You are probably already imagining cannibals in your mind. However, we are talking about the act of competing for one keyword on multiple pages on the same website. This is not a clever idea if your goal is to increase organic traffic. Even if you think it offers you a chance of ranking one of your pages higher on Google, it does the complete opposite!
Google will see you have multiple pages using one keyword and will struggle to decide which page deserves to be in the running for the high rank. Google bots are notorious for giving up when the going gets tough. Another issue with overusing a keyword is that the links and shares that the pages have accumulated will be split between one another, causing the site to have less overall authority and backlinks. Less authority will also lower your ranking.
If you are guilty of keyword cannibalisation, do not worry because we can help you determine which keywords your website is ranking for most successfully. We can also merge or delete pages that are using the same keyword. However, it is best to only delete the page with no backlinks or traffic.
8. Use Long-Tail Keywords
It is more likely to increase organic traffic and rank on Google when you use fewer common keywords called, long-tail keyword variations. They do not get searched for as often monthly, but they are likely to be converted later down the line. A keyword like ‘weight loss’ will be highly searched and used, but a long-tail keyword like ‘how to lose weight quickly’ will have a lower volume with a likelihood of converting.
Long-tail keywords will help to increase organic traffic the most.
9. Try Latent Semantic Indexing
Google is in control of your success because you must follow their rules and if they find something they do not like, they will punish you by affecting your ratings.
However, to increase organic traffic you need to use Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI is a tool that Google uses to identify patterns and gauge the value of the keywords you use. Using a keyword too many times in your content will lower your rating.
We suggest using synonyms that relate to your keyword, without using too many long-tail keyword variations to increase organic traffic. Having a Creative Copywriter will help avoid a creative block and ensure that the Google bots do not lower your ranking due to keyword saturation.
10. Social Media
Building a digital presence will increase organic traffic. Social media is a powerful marketing tool. You can link to your blog posts on social media and promote them. This will increase your direct traffic and click-through data. Also, you will get more authority doing this which Google loves.
Social media campaigns will build more signals to your website and Google bots will notice these signals and boost your rankings. Therefore, the more signals you gain the more likely you are to increase organic traffic.
11. Repair Anything Broken
Technical errors on your website will be detected by the search engine’s bots which will affect your rankings. These errors can also stop visitors from staying on your page or visiting again. We suggest repairing everything from broken links to buttons and pages.
If you do not think there is anything wrong – then we would recommend contacting us for a site audit to notice any technical or SEO errors.
12. Create A Secure Website (HTTPS)
Google is only interested in promoting secure websites on the first page of search results. If you want to increase organic traffic but you are not HTTPS certified, you need to be. There is nothing stopping you since most hosting companies offer free certificates.
Ensuring you have a secure website will boost your rankings and reduce your bounce rate since visitors will feel more comfortable on your website. Google will also send out warnings to visitors that your website is not safe, which will undoubtedly affect rankings.
13. Write Beautiful Content
The best way to increase organic traffic is to create a blog filled with high-quality, compelling content. You can upload anything you like on a blog, without any word count limitations. We suggest filling your blog up with relevant content like news, infographic, and reviews.
The main purpose of a blog is to make the visitor want to click through to your other pages. This will affect your bounce rate and therefore your ratings to increase organic traffic.
14. Update Content Often
An amazing way to increase organic traffic is to update your content regularly. Bots recognise updated content and push it to higher rankings. Therefore, it is best to update content with current information to improve your credibility with bots indexing. You do not need to update pages every week, but every couple of months will allow you to take advantage of new keywords without having to write completely new material.
If a page has existing authority, spruce it up a bit to increase organic traffic without creating fresh content.
15. Google Notices
With all these efforts, you need to keep checking to see how Google is treating your website. You can do this by using a keyword rank checker. This tool will help you see where your pages are being ranked based on the keyword searches. You can use the keyword rank checker repeatedly to increase organic traffic and see how your pages are doing.
This will show you how bots are viewing your website and whether or not you must make changes. Often, it is encouraging to see improvements and when you do not – you must just keep working as it has a slow burn effect.
16. Optimise For The Feature Snippet
This is a new feature on Google that can help increase organic traffic. It is the breakout box that appears at the top of your search results to provide you with direct answers to your search query. Since the box appears in the can’t-miss spot at the top of the search results it will increase organic traffic.
Here Is How To Get Selected:
- Use lists to answer a particular search query directly, whether it’s bulleted or numbered.
- Offer short, to-the-point answers.
- Include your core keyword in your content.
To increase organic traffic with this feature, you need clear, direct information that answers specific questions.
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