While digital advertising likely has a recurring portion of your budget, not all website traffic has to be paid for.
It is possible to increase your web traffic organically.
Keep in mind that 51 percent of website traffic is organic, while internet browsers opt to use organic search results (versus paid results) about 94 percent of the time.
There is power in optimizing for an increase in your organic traffic, as well as a payoff when prioritized regularly.
The following are eight tips to help you boost the organic traffic to your website.
Think about humans over search engines
It’s easy to dive head-first into all things search engine optimization (SEO), but don’t forget who you’re trying to reach and engage with. Humans.
Yes, search engines determine your ranking, but search engines are paying more attention to user behavior and activity on your website than you might realize, such as time spent on pages and the pages visited.
For example, if visitors are spending a lot of time on your website and browsing several pages, that’s a positive signal to search engines.
When you forget about humans in the design and content of your website, you risk a high bounce rate, shorter amounts of time spent on your site and/or few pages visited within a session (if the visitor hasn’t already bounced).
That all leads to lower rankings on search engine result pages.
Create a blog
You might have noticed more blogs on business websites lately. This is because content serves as the gravity to pull more visitors into your website (like a planet).
In addition to increasing organic traffic over time, a consistent blog can help boost your website’s authority on the topics that are important to your audience and within your industry.
Always think about a question or pain point that your audience might have and use that to decide topics for your blog posts. Doing so helps keep your content relevant and effective.
It’s important that once you begin to publish a blog, you’ll want to keep posting consistently. Determine a schedule in advance that works for your time and available resources.
Check out our seven tips to help level up your content marketing specifically.
Refresh and update old content
The older your blog gets, the more opportunities you’ll have to refresh out-of-date content.
It’s important to set a schedule to regularly review older content for updating. Consider:
- Any dates
- Statistics used
- Other outdated information
- The structure of your page (considering user intent)
Beyond the updating, you can consider repurposing existing content as well to increase your website’s relevancy and draw. Check out our 13 tips for repurposing content like a rockstar.
Keywords still matter
In terms of SEO, keywords might feel played out at this point, but they still matter.
Consider your target audience. When they’re searching in a search engine, what would you want to appear for? Stick with the most relevant keywords, and remember to always think of the user experience on your website. Don’t overstuff keywords on your pages.
Take a look at these 11 free SEO keyword search tools, which can help.
Optimize for the featured snippet
A newer feature, especially on Google, is the featured snippet. This is the breakout box that appear at the top of your search results to provide you with direct answers to your search query.
Appearing in that can’t-miss spot at the top of the search results will generate more organic traffic.
How can your website get selected for the featured snippet? Some suggested best practices include (but are not limited to):
- Using lists to answer a particular search query directly, whether it’s bulleted or numbered.
- Offering short, to-the-point answers.
- Including your core keyword in your content.
In other words, it’s about having clear, direct information that answers specific questions. Think skimmable content.
Don’t forget about your title tag and meta description
Think about the results you see when you enter a query into any search engine. What do you do with the results?
Commonly, internet users skim the headlines and descriptions of each result until they find what they think satisfies their search the best.
Therefore, it’s not hard to underscore the importance of title tags (search result headlines) and meta descriptions (the paragraph below each headline).
This pair can make or break the organic traffic to your website. You should think of them as the “advertisement” to browsing internet users, trying to convince them to go to your website instead of all others.
For the title tag, try to keep it at 60 characters or less, with the core keyword up front and an engaging angle as much as possible.
For the meta description, strive for 160 characters or less, with both your core keyword and a reason why users should click on your website. This is an opportunity to offer insight into the value of your search result.
Dive deeper into the difference between on-page and off-page SEO.
Quality backlinks are worthwhile
Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. Quality backlinks boost your site’s authority from the perspective of both search engines and internet users.
They can boost organic traffic by:
- Sending website visitors from other sites to your website directly.
- Increasing your SEO and thus your search ranking on results pages.
Check out these seven tips to grow quality backlinks to your website.
Embrace social media
Successful websites don’t rely solely on just a blog and SEO to maintain strong organic traffic. Think multi-faceted content marketing and multi-platform.
Enter social media.
Depending on who your target audience is and what your goals are, your business might be on a limited number of social media platforms.
That’s fine. It’s definitely best to do one or two things well than to overextend and not do anything particularly well.
Resist the temptation to cross-post the exact same content across platforms without at least some tweaking to each post to better reflect the platform it will appear on (to better engage the intended audience on that platform). In fact, if you can curate unique posts per platform, even better.
What works well on Twitter wouldn’t necessarily work on Instagram, and so on. Be mindful of what you’re sharing and how you’re sharing it on each platform.
But ultimately, success on social media is like extending the gravitational pull of your content beyond what your SEO is doing for you.
Dive deeper into the seven ways your social media can influence your SEO.
As you’re working to increase your organic traffic, be sure to review the 13 most common SEO mistakes you could be making right now. The last thing you want is anything to be working against your website.
Looking to level up your digital marketing process? Consider DailyStory, which offers automation, audience segmentation and more to help your business be more efficient and successful. Schedule a free demo with us today.
