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 organic traffic as well as paid traffic end up learning that leads from organic traffic have a cost per conversion that is many times lower than paid traffic.
In this article, I’m going to share 11 ways you can get more organic traffic to your website—most importantly, traffic that can potentially turn into leads.
If you’re looking into how to get more organic traffic to your website, the following can help you achieve your goals:
- 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 aren’t familiar with the term, organic traffic comes from website visitors who find your website’s content in any search engine results that are non-paid. Most organic traffic comes from Google search; according to statista, Google owns nearly 93% market share for search engines. Regardless of which search engine your users find you on, the same principles of SEO apply.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search results to attract more organic traffic from relevant users. Below, we discuss 11 ways to get more organic traffic to a website using SEO best practices.
If you’re interested in getting a hand with developing a strategy to drive more organic traffic to your website, schedule a call with us here.
1. If Customers Have Lots of Questions Related to the Services and Solutions You Offer, Have a Blog
A blog is an area of a website where informational content is published. Having a blog is helpful for nurturing prospects through the buyer’s journey by answering their questions along the way.
In other words, someone that performs a search such as “can my insurance company deny my claim if I was late with my last payment” very well may be in the market for an adjuster. An adjuster would be well served by having a blog post on their website that answers questions like this.
First, a blog is a prime opportunity to get in front of a client that may be in the market for your services. Second, and possibly more importantly, it’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise by diving deeply into creating content for a topic you know a lot about, highlighting your unique insights into your prospective customer’s problems and your ability to help them.
Blog posts can also attract inbound links (backlinks) and distribute PageRank to service or product pages through internal linking—we discuss more on internal and external links below.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/pillar-cluster-model-transform-blog
Another benefit of blog posts is creating topical authority, such as through a pillar-cluster model, that can help a website be competitive in a crowded niche.
Blog posts should be written with expertise—one of the concepts in Google’s E-A-T, or expertise, authority, and trust—and the writing should be clear for users and search engines alike.
It’s also important to use keyword data to identify blog topics that:
- Target the searches your target customers are performing
- Are of an appropriate competitiveness (you’ll often not be able to outrank websites like the New York Times)
- Have enough monthly search volume that it’s worth your time.
The last thing you want to do is spend time on something that no one is searching for or that is too competitive for your website.
2. Target Long-Tail Keywords
Keywords are queries that users type into a search engine to return organic and paid results. SEOs use keyword research data to understand search intent and provide relevant content for their target users. Keywords can be categorized based on their volume, competition, and specificity.
Head terms, or short-tail keywords, are higher-volume, more generic (and often more competitive) keywords that are usually targeted by service and product pages. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are lower-volume and more specific searches.
An example of a head term a company like ours may want to target could be “SEO services.” The monthly search volume (MSV) for this keyword is high and ranking for it is highly competitive. At the same time, a keyword such as “SEO services for plastic surgeons” has much lower volume and is less competitive, plus it has the added benefit of being more specific to what a searcher is looking for.
In other words, if our company were on page 1 for “SEO services,” odds are that we would receive lots of inquiries from businesses we may not be able to help. For example, we have no experience working with large ecommerce brands with websites spanning millions of pages. We do, however, have a lot of experience with SEO for plastic surgeons and would be uniquely qualified to help someone performing this search.
In some cases, long tail keywords can take the form of questions, such as “how to get more organic traffic to your website” (do you see how we targeted a long-tail keyword to get in front of you?).
In addition to writing high-quality content, including long-tail keyword phrases in the content, such as section headings or FAQs, increases the likelihood the content will be relevant to more searchers, and thus increase the amount of organic search traffic.
3. Target Keywords You Have a Chance to Rank For
Content that fails to get any visitors usually falls short in one of the following ways:
- It doesn’t target any keywords
- It doesn’t target high-enough volume keywords; if no one is searching for the topic, it’s unlikely the content will drive organic traffic and leads
- It targets a topic/keyword that is far too competitive. If your local business wants to outrank Healthline for “acne treatments,” it probably won’t be able to
Even if a potential piece of content meets all three of these criteria, not all keywords are appropriate to target for a website’s content. They should touch upon a topic that a prospective customer would Google—we don’t want traffic for traffic’s sake.
One source of guidance on which keywords to target can be SEO tool metrics. Ahrefs, for example, is a keyword research tool that provides a keyword difficulty score, or an estimate of how many backlinks will be needed to rank in the top 10:
However, it’s worth mentioning these metrics are often overstated by SEOs. In the case of this keyword, we have an article on a local plastic surgeon’s website outranking the NY Times and Insider:
Other tool metrics to pay attention to include the keyword’s volume and the domain authority of websites that rank for the keyword.
Tool metrics are not meant to be a checklist, as Googlers have explained. Rather, they provide a rough guide for keyword research. Above all, a keyword should be relevant to the target audience’s needs or questions.
It also comes down to content quality. A superior piece of content that covers a topic more thoroughly than the competition, and gets more engagement, can outrank an inferior piece of content, even if that website has better domain metrics.
4. Pay Attention to the Format of the Search Engine Results to Identify Content Opportunities
The SERP, or search engine results page, will deliver vastly different content types depending on the query a user enters. Early iterations of search engines showed just 10 blue links of results, but nowadays search engines like Google return a variety of SERP features, such as featured snippets, local packs, or people also ask.
If a SERP has a lot of YouTube or other video content, for example, that indicates the search intent is primarily for video, and a piece of written content may have trouble ranking—in this case, you should focus on producing video to target these keywords.
In addition to SERP features, the results themselves can offer guidance on what type of content to create. A query with transactional intent, for example, may return shopping results and product and category pages. Meanwhile, a query with informational intent may return blog posts or guides.
Creating the right type of content to match the SERP results, and thus the user intent of most searchers, will help ensure your content has the best chance to drive organic traffic.
5. Write Evergreen Content
Evergreen content refers to content that is always up-to-date because it covers topics that aren’t tied to current events or trends. For example, this article from Healthline is evergreen content because the information has been and will remain relevant to its topic:
On the other hand, a law firm that decided to write content such as the article below may see an initial spike in traffic, but it is unlikely to continue to drive traffic for years the way an article that answers questions about getting assaulted in a bar might.
While writing about a breaking event or trending topic can drive organic traffic in the short time, then fizzle out, evergreen content will remain relevant over time. When content is evergreen, it has a better chance of generating organic traffic for the long term because the page can continue to rank for months or years — as long as it’s not displaced by newer, more relevant content from competitors.
Even when content is evergreen, it still may need to be refreshed periodically. We discuss this more below.
6. Follow On-Page SEO Basics
Even the best content should be optimized for search engines when the goal is to drive organic traffic.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to a group of tactics meant to improve a page’s visibility in search by addressing fundamentals such as image alt text, URLs, title tags and meta descriptions, and headings, in addition to optimizing the content itself for keywords and readability.
For example, URLs should ideally be easily readable to a human visitor so they can predict what type of content will be shown on a page. The same can be said about title tags and meta descriptions.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags can have a significant impact on search rank and often are the first exposure users have to a page in the search results, thus impacting clickthrough rates. Meta descriptions, while not a ranking factor, can likewise contribute to improved clickthrough rates by advertising a page’s contents in the SERPs.
Alt Text
Alt text is not only important for accessibility and users with screen readers, but it can also provide the search engine with more information about an image and its context on a page. Images can not only contribute to engagement – such as more time on page – but they can also be returned in image search, another potential source of traffic.
Header Tags
Lastly, headings are important for dividing a page’s content into logical sections. Following the inverted pyramid, the most important information should be presented first, followed by supporting information. Headings can help search engines make sense of a page’s content as well as allow readers to skim for the most relevant information.
7. Audit or Refresh Existing Content
There’s a good chance that you have content on your website that just needs a little work to drive traffic. There’s also a good chance that you have content that is holding your website back.
Low-quality content can affect a search engine’s perception of overall site quality. Additionally, once high-performing content can lose rankings (and thus clicks) due to new competition or changes to search engine algorithms that impact search results.
Regular content audits can yield opportunities to increase organic traffic. One such audit is content pruning, an exercise where low-quality pages are noindexed, deleted, or redirected to and merged with other relevant content.
Additionally, even high-performing evergreen content may need to be refreshed every few months (or years) when the pages lose rankings. In many cases, lost rankings aren’t a penalty to a website but rather a sign of new competition or that search intent has shifted and the content is no longer as relevant as it was before.
By reworking existing content on your website and deleting “unsalvageable” content, you can find opportunities to get more organic traffic to your website.
8. Create Custom Visuals
Custom images can help increase organic traffic by generating more engagement with pages (such as higher time on page) or even driving traffic from image search. The advent of MuM and multi-modal search is also worth paying attention to, as search behavior may become more dependent on visual content in the future.
For ecommerce retailers in particular, custom images of products can provide a way to stand apart from the competition. It’s a best practice to show a product from multiple angles to give the visitor a better idea of how it looks or functions, and all images should be high-quality yet also optimized for web speed, such as 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 guide users (and search engine bots) to related content and keep users engaged on the site longer without returning to the search results. Internal links can help increase organic traffic by distributing PageRank throughout a website, as well as help Google understand the importance of specific pages and what they’re about.
For example, if a popular blog post attracts backlinks from authoritative sites, an internal link to a product page can help distribute the value (PageRank) from those backlinks to a page that otherwise might not receive many inbound links.
It’s a best practice to use optimized anchor text for internal links. This means linking to another page using anchor text that accurately describes that page’s topic. In many cases the anchor text can be a keyword, although it’s important to focus on naturally linking more than keyword insertion.
10. Earn Backlinks from Other Websites
Backlinks are inbound links from one website to another. Search engines consider a website’s backlink profile for ranking purposes, so building the right type of backlinks is one way to potentially increase organic traffic.
Many SEO tools will point out potentially problematic or “toxic” links, but unless these were built using blackhat tactics, which could put a site at risk for a manual penalty, they are generally ignored or heavily discounted.
Instead, quality backlinks are those that come from relevant, high-authority websites. One way to build backlinks organically is by writing great content and distributing it, such as over social media, to increase visibility. There are other acceptable ways to actively build backlinks, as well.
11. Use Schema Markup for Rich Results
Structured data is a standardized format used to provide search engines with more information about a page and its content. Google’s preferred form of structured data is JSON-LD.
While using structured data itself won’t increase organic traffic, certain types of structured data can generate search feature enhancements, such as 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 are many ways to drive more organic traffic to a website, but no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, it takes a comprehensive SEO strategy to address various aspects of a website’s content, web performance, and links to produce the best results. Whether your website needs new blog content, fresh keyword research, or a content audit, it’s best to work with experienced SEOs who can guide you through optimizations.
Looking to increase the organic traffic to your website? Contact Sagapixel today. Our team of SEO professionals are ready to help you.
