This blog post, ‘The Power of Organic Traffic: Effective Strategies for Increasing Organic Reach,’ is crafted by experts at Fast Panda to provide clear insights into boosting organic website traffic. Everyone desires to boost the organic traffic to their website. However, with the proliferation of websites on the internet, establishing your authority with both readers and search engines is increasingly crucial.
What is Organic Traffic?
Organic Hit, or organic search traffic, encompasses visitors to a website who arrive via search engines like Google, Bing, or other search engines and do not click on paid advertisements. For most SEO and inbound marketing endeavors, organic traffic is the primary metric for measuring success in increasing top-of-funnel traffic and raising awareness. Website owners favor it because of its cumulative effects and high efficiency.
What are Effective Strategies for Boosting Organic Traffic?
1: Establish Your Organic Traffic Strategy and Detailed SEO Goals
For success in your SEO efforts and to ramp up your organic traffic, it’s essential to craft a clear, data-driven SEO blueprint. This plan should outline your objectives and the methods you’ll employ to achieve them. If you aim to drive up overall website traffic without emphasizing customer conversion, you have the freedom to make broader choices in your SEO campaigns and keyword targeting. However, if your goal is to bolster organic traffic to specific sections of your site, a more targeted SEO strategy is necessary. Begin by setting one primary and two secondary goals for your SEO initiatives. Then, break them down into three, six, and twelve-months milestones, all in line with your ultimate objective. This approach ensures every action you take is tied to a measurable goal, keeping your strategy focused and effective.
2: Evaluate Your Website’s Current Health and Performance
The most effective method to assess your website’s technical performance is utilizing Google Search Console. While you’ll need to verify ownership of your site by implementing a small code snippet into the DNS configuration, this grants you invaluable insights into your site’s technical structure and health. After running reports via Google Search Console and utilizing available free tools, identify potential actions and fixes. Categorize them into critical/urgent actions, alerts, and recommendations, prioritizing areas that require immediate attention. This targeted approach ensures efficient utilization of your resources.
3: Find Your Target Audience
It’s crucial to pinpoint your target audience and grasp how to draw them in to boost your rankings and get more organic traffic. Google Analytics offers valuable insights into your potential audience, allowing you to determine who visits your website, where they come from, and which pages they explore before exiting. You can examine demographic data in Google Analytics and identify common traits among visitors:
- Group visitors into demographic categories based on factors like age, location, gender, and interests.
- Evaluate whether these visitors are converting. While having an audience is beneficial, if they’re not actively making purchases, signing up, or engaging in desired actions, you may need to adjust your marketing strategies and present a more appealing offer or target a different audience.
- Obtain detailed information about the visitors you aim to attract. Once you understand who visits your site, their value, and whom you want to draw in, start gathering as much data as possible. This data should encompass their location, device preferences, interests, hobbies, and preferences.
- Create personas for these visitors. Developing visitor personas is an effective way to comprehend your target audience and identify whom you’re aiming to attract with your website content.
4: Identify Your Key Competitors
To kick start the process:
- Delve into your research on the top-ranking websites for the keywords you’re targeting. These sites represent your primary competition, the ones you must outperform to boost your rankings.
- Additionally, it’s worth exploring social media platforms to spot competitors who are garnering followers on Facebook, racking up video views on YouTube, and actively engaging with audiences on relevant forums or networks.
- Keep an eye out for any advertising strategies your competitors employ. Are they leveraging PPC, retargeting, or banner ads? What other promotional methods do they utilize? Do they have partnerships with industry publications, Instagram influencers, or magazines?
5: Research Your Competitors’ SEO and Content Approaches
Once you’ve pinpointed your competitors, it’s time to delve into their SEO and content strategies to grasp how they’re achieving. When exploring your competitor’s website, ask yourself these key questions:
- What sets this website apart from mine?
- Does their website offer more appeal, usefulness, or visual allure compared to mine? Is their website perceived as more authoritative?
- Utilize a free domain checker to estimate the age of their domain and assess if it has been established for a longer duration (since websites naturally accrue authority over time, which is pivotal for Google’s website valuation).
- Use the insights from your previous website assessments to evaluate your competitors’ website performance using the same free tools.
- Pinpoint areas where they excel and lag compared to your own. Pay special attention to their website’s linking structure, content quality, and how they market their core offerings.
6: Explore Your Competitors’ Backlinks for Inspiration
- Leverage SEO tools like Semrush to conduct backlink analysis and uncover the origins of your competitors’ links. If they boast numerous links from reputable sources spanning diverse sectors, such as government, education, health, and lifestyle, this signifies to Google that they are a credible source. Consequently, they garner more visibility in search results. Analyzing backlinks also sheds light on the most successful landing pages on your competitor’s website. Examine these pages closely. Are they sales-driven, or do they offer practical tools or user guides?
- Harness this knowledge to ascertain the content preferences of your target audience and industry. Allow it to inform your content strategy and serve as a foundation for potential content campaigns and collaborations. While catching up to your competitors and establishing a robust backlink profile may seem daunting, it’s feasible with consistent effort on your part.
7: Develop On-Site Content and SEO Strategy
Now that you’ve set your SEO objectives and identified your target audience, competitors, and competitive tactics, it’s time to craft your on-site content and SEO strategy.
- Start by identifying which content should have priority, taking into account your existing content framework and SEO goals. Your content and SEO strategy combine technical enhancements with on-page content optimization simultaneously. By approaching page improvements comprehensively, you can ensure that the entire page is optimized. Once you made all the modifications, you can resubmit the sitemap to Google to maximize the chances of boosting rankings and organic traffic.
- Next, identify the topics that hold significant importance for your business and categorize the keywords you aim to rank for within these topics. Look for keywords with substantial search volumes that are likely to drive conversions or hold high value for your business.
- Lastly, align topics and keywords with target pages. Determine which pages should be prioritized based on their potential business impact. Once finalized, make detailed notes on existing on-page content and technical SEO setup of these pages, allowing you to identify the necessary tasks to enhance results.
8: Enhance and Upgrade Your Website Content
Ready to take action and elevate your content? Begin by enhancing your current website content. You might wonder why! Since this content has been around longer, it naturally carries more authority than any new content you introduce to the site. You can restructure your existing content to align with key phrases and topics identified in your strategy. Consider these factors when enhancing existing content:
- Is the metadata optimized? Metadata provides search engines with information about your pages’ context and content, including the page title and meta description. These elements are displayed to users when they search on Google or other search engines.
- Is the content engaging and valuable? If your content doesn’t serve the needs of your target audience, it won’t rank well.
- Does the page contain sufficient content? Short descriptions should have at least 300 words; a standard page should aim for around 600 words, while FAQs or help guides benefit from around 900 words. Anything over 1,800 words is considered an in-depth guide or article and typically carries more authority.
- Is the content visually appealing? High-ranking content often includes images, videos, infographics, and interactive elements like quizzes and surveys.
- Is the content user-friendly? Your content must be accessible across all devices and easy for users to engage with to achieve their goals without endless scrolling.
- Are there enough internal links? Ensure your content includes links to other valuable and relevant pages within your site.
- Does the content link to relevant external resources? Don’t hesitate to link to reputable websites providing relevant information, but avoid link exchanges, as search engines may not view this favorably.
- Has the content received external backlinks? To establish authority on a topic, your page should receive links from high-quality external websites. Your content marketing plan can help with this.
- Will the content be easily found via internal search and the website footer? Important pages should be accessible via your website’s search function (if available) and linked from the footer.
- Can you update existing blog content to keep it relevant? Refreshing and republishing old content with new ideas is an effective way to enhance your website’s content.
9: Increase Website Content
When you’re adding new content to your website, remember that even if it’s relevant, helpful, and engaging, it won’t instantly rank for your target keywords or bring in loads of organic traffic. It takes time for new content to climb the ranks. Often, it can be several months before you see significant results because top-ranking content tends to be linked to reputable websites. Here’s a checklist for creating new website content that’s both search engine and user-friendly:
- Address customer queries: Use your internal search data and keyword tools to uncover unanswered customer questions. You can also engage directly with customers through email or social media to gather insights into what they’re curious about regarding your company.
- Improve upon existing ranking content: Analyze what content performs well on your competitors’ websites for the keywords you’re targeting. Aim to create content that surpasses theirs by at least threefold. By doing this, you increase your chances of future ranking improvements.
- Generate backlink-worthy content: Identify the type of content on your competitors’ sites that attract the backlinks you desire. Reach out to these sites, propose your content ideas, and gauge their interest in featuring your content.
- Diversify your content formats: Traditional text-only guides are outdated. Experiment with various content formats, including:
- White papers or e-books: Showcase your expertise while providing valuable, in-depth information that your audience actively seeks. Many authoritative websites are willing to link to free downloadable e-books if they offer genuine value to readers.
- Informative videos: Instead of merely explaining how to do something, demonstrate it through tutorials presented in different formats such as text, infographics, and videos.
- Utilize email marketing and social media campaigns: Accelerate the indexing and ranking process by directing traffic from email and social media to new or revamped pages on your site that you want Google to notice. For instance, run contests or special offers that require subscribers to engage with specific pages on your site.
10: Enhance Your Website’s Usability
The usability of your website concerns how user-friendly and easy to navigate it is. Google and other search engines favor websites that are fast, accessible, and well-organized. They tend to overlook those that are slow to load, confusing to navigate, or troublesome for users. Consequently, it’s crucial to ensure your website offers a positive user experience, facilitating action-taking for visitors.
- Ensure your site is optimized for all screen sizes.
- Decrease page load times.
- Identify and resolve 404 pages.
- Fix 301 redirects.
- Enhance your internal linking structure.
- Refine your metadata.
- Incorporate schema data markup into your content.
11: Boost Your Website’s Visibility
Having a well-optimized website with high-quality content and solid technical SEO is just the beginning of increasing organic traffic. To truly increase your website’s traffic and visibility, you need to allocate a budget for promotion. This budget should cover a variety of online advertising tactics such as Facebook advertising, PPC ads, and retargeting that aim to effectively reach and engage your target audience.
- Start by crafting compelling social media ads that are visually appealing and resonate with your audience. Adhere to guidelines regarding character limits for titles and descriptions, and prioritize images over text in your ads. Experiment with different combinations of text and images using small budgets to determine what yields the best results.
- Now, onto PPC…
PPC plays a crucial role in any SEO strategy. It’s a paid advertising method that drives traffic to new pages even before they gain organic visibility in search engines. Directing paid traffic to new pages may not seem a part of organic traffic strategy, but it’s essential. Without visitors, search engines like Google won’t recognize the relevance of your new pages to your target topics, thus failing to assign them any authority.