SEO tips to increase your organic traffic
Organic traffic to your website can help you reach the top rankings on Google and other search engines in 2023. It is relatively easy to attract organic traffic and very cost-effective.
Still, it’s important to keep in mind that organic traffic, unlike paid traffic sources, is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time for your organic traffic best practices to see results, but once you establish your strategies well, they work for you with minimal user input.
What are traffic sources?
Traffic is usually classified into a few main categories, including direct traffic, organic, paid search, social, email, and referral traffic, each of which works in a specific way.
direct traffic
Direct traffic sources, as their name suggests, are sources of traffic that do not come from website referrals. Instead, they come from unique and unknown sources that directly access your content.
Organic Traffic
Traffic coming to your website from unpaid search engine queries is typically considered organic traffic. It usually stems from your inbound marketing and SEO efforts.
paid search traffic
When you launch paid search campaigns on Google, Bing, or other online engines, the resulting traffic is known as paid search traffic.
Social Traffic
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and other social media platforms are great tools to grow your account. The type of traffic these sites produce is known as social traffic.
email traffic
Email traffic is produced when you correctly tag your email campaigns with email parameters.
referral traffic
When individuals click on hyperlinks on other websites, not including traffic from social media platforms or search engines, the resulting traffic is known as referral traffic.
Among all these traffic sources, direct and organic traffic are the two most important ones, but for this article, we are going to focus on organic traffic.
Importance of Organic Traffic
It is much more sustainable than other strategies and is one of the most competitive traffic generation methods on the market today.
Let’s take a look at each feature to understand why they are so valuable.
is directed
Organic traffic is significant for many reasons, but more than anything else, it’s invaluable because it’s targeted. Anyone who visits your site is likely to do so because they are looking for specific information and your site can provide the appropriate answers.
Organic traffic kicks in when users accessing your content enter specific queries into their search engines. The terms they use to define their query drive search engines like Google to look for articles that seem more relevant. The unpaid articles that appear first on your search results page are the ones that search engines determine are the best match for your needs, and that’s how your organic traffic is born.
It’s important to keep in mind that your search engine does not match a user’s query word for word. Instead, it takes into account the user’s search intent to present them with a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) that satisfies the intent of their query.
it is sustainable
Arguably, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic generators are more attractive because they tend to work faster than some SEO-driven organic strategies. But PPCs have a big pitfall: they are not sustainable. These generators require almost constant supervision, from investment to maintenance and handling. You could waste a lot of valuable time working with them in the long run. Also, they stop working for you when you stop spending your hard-earned money on ads or relevant content.
it’s competitive
To be an online ranking authority, you must engage in organic traffic generation strategies such as SEO.
Some top-ranking websites pay over $100,000 a month in SEO to hit their targeted keywords and beat the competition. Therefore, to have a chance of ranking with them, you must be involved in SEO strategies.
But the beauty of powerful SEO practices is that you don’t have to have a huge SEO budget to outperform your competitors. Because, as David Farkas, founder, and CEO of The Upper Ranks says, “If you dominate the search results, it will be easier to dominate your market”
When your content is on the first page of a Google, Bing, or Yahoo search results page, it’s an incredible advantage because there’s no way your competition can duplicate how you got your results. They can’t reverse engineer their content experience to benefit the way they can with PPC. So until other articles outperform you with keywords, relevancy, or search intent matching, you will continue to rank higher in the SERPs than competing sites.
Also, when an article ranks high on any search engine, it becomes much more challenging to get it off the first page because the more people click on it, the more relevant it will continue to be.
How to Get Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is generated by different things. Mainly, it comes through how your website ranks on any search engine results page. The better you rank for specific search terms, the more organic traffic will be driven to your website. That’s why most current inbound marketing tactics and strategies are focused on increasing your rankings more than any other strategy.
The more you optimize your site for specific search terms, the better your search engine rankings will be.
Let’s now discuss five actionable ways you can go about optimizing your organic traffic today.
5 ways to optimize organic traffic
You can optimize your website for organic traffic in many ways.
Mostly, you can do this by using effective headers and titles and optimizing your quality content for relevance and variety in the body of your articles. You can also use custom meta descriptions, well-developed backlink profiles, and increased site speed to ensure your pages are optimized for as much organic traffic as possible, thereby improving search engine visibility and individual page rankings.
Let’s dive into each of these systems to better understand how you can make them work for you.
#1: Use Effective Headings and Titles
Your headers and titles are crucial when it comes to increasing your organic traffic.
Titles tagged with the “<title> HTML” tag work to define your article. They serve as the most concise description of your page’s content and are one of the first things search engines like Google look at when determining which articles should rank higher on a SERP.
It’s essential to be strategic when it comes to your titles to make them appealing not just to search engines but to individual users as well. Some important things to keep in mind when writing your page title include:
- Do not use more than 70 characters. Anything beyond that will be cut off from the Google search results page, preventing users from reading the full title.
- Always include the main keyword you want your page to rank for.
- Make your headlines catchy with words and phrases that will draw readers in.
- Try heading your articles with numbered lists or “How To’s” to draw readers in
If you have space, add your business name at the end of the title header to increase brand awareness.
While titles concisely reveal the content of your article, titles do the same with their structure. They work to break up bulky content so your readers aren’t exhausted with blocks of unbroken text on your page. In addition, they give Google more clues about the content of your article and the types of searches that might benefit from seeing it.
Titles should be divided into primary sub-titles marked with <h2> with your secondary keywords written in the title to improve ranking. Then you can use subheadings <h3> , <h4> , <h5> and <h6> to further break up your content.
#2: Optimize Your Content for Search
Optimizing your content for search involves different steps that might seem daunting at first. Fortunately, the more you work with them, the easier they become to use until they soon become second-nature automatic practices.
Optimizing your content starts with ensuring you have compelling headlines and headlines because those are the two-page elements that Google and other search engines will pay the most attention to at first. Next, you want to develop high-quality, original content with the most relevant information and present it in many different content types.
- Create high-quality original content
Unique content is the number one reason users return to a site over and over again. Your website visitors are more likely to return if you offer unique content in your style.
It’s important to remember that while it’s good to produce lots of blog posts and articles, it’s even more vital that everything you do is of the highest quality possible. More than anything else, quality determines your authority on a subject and can decide whether a user revisits your site.
- check for spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors;
- divide your text into manageable sections;
- include images, graphics, and other relevant visual content;
- appropriate baseline statistics.
Also, you must submit 100% original content. This helps set your site apart from others and gives you a competitive advantage in terms of SEO and your online visibility with SERP rankings.
- Relevant resource content
One way to ensure that your content consistently ranks on the first page of Google and search engines alike is to ensure that your content is fresh.
If you only write content on outdated and irrelevant topics, users will have no reason to come to your site, and search engines will have no motivation to promote your articles among the top-ranked results. Likewise, suppose you draft content that gets outdated over time. In that case, it will also fall under ranked recommendations if you don’t update it regularly to reflect appropriate changes in technology, news, or whatever.
Remember: search engines prefer new, shiny articles much more than older, potentially outdated ones. Maintain a high ranking in the SERPs by regularly updating and repurposing your content.
- Play with different types of content
Once you’ve got your titles, headings, quality, and relevance in place, take the time to play around with different types of content and expand your repertoire beyond what you’re most familiar with.
Several variations are available, and each one has many benefits that can help boost your rankings to the top of your SERPs, and the better your content match, the more your audience will come back to read what you have to say.
Some important content types include:
- product review;
- buyer’s guides;
- newsletters;
- commercial galleries;
- how to make;
- case studies;
- e-books;
- blogs;
- white papers;
- infographics.
#3: Create Meta Descriptions That Drive Clicks
A meta description summarizes the content of an article, usually found below the job title on a search results page. Essentially, it’s a quick pitch to help readers understand your article and convince them it’s worth their time, so they’re a crucial factor in increasing your click-through rate.
It’s important to note that meta descriptions aren’t as important to Google’s ranking algorithm as other page elements like the title and headers. Still, they are vital to your audience, serving as a preview of your content.
By writing compelling and descriptive meta descriptions, you increase your chances of attracting new readers by 5.8%, so let’s look at some essential tips you can follow to write the best meta descriptions for your content and click-through rates.
- keep it casual
While some articles and blog posts require more technical jargon and professional language, your meta description is not suited to this. That way, it makes it easier for readers to understand the article and increase your click-through rate.
- be concise
Your meta description is no place to be verbose. You’ll want to keep the text you put in the description as clear and concise as possible so your audience can scan it and you don’t get garbled.
Keep in mind that meta descriptions have a character limit of 120 words before your search engine cuts off the rest of the text, so make the most of that
use keywords
One of the best ways to increase your article’s visibility through the meta description is to include your main keyword as early in the text as possible. That way you increase your visibility and avoid the possibility of getting truncated.
We believe that one more tool will be useful for you – Keyword Trends. This is a new tool that shows the most popular queries for a selected city and country in real time. So this is how you can identify the most popular keywords and use them on a website, increasing traffic.
- Include a CTA
A CTA (Call to Action) is an invaluable technique for encouraging your audience to take a specific action. By including one in your meta description, you can lead readers to “Read more”, “Learn more”, “Read to find out” and more.
- Do not copy
When writing a new article, keeping track of all the various elements involved in optimizing for SEO can be quite a task. It can be tempting to save time by copying meta descriptions you’ve written for other similar articles and reusing the copy.
But by creating new meta descriptions, you increase your chances of long-term SERP visibility.
#4: Develop a Diverse Backlink Profile
Backlinks, also known as external or inbound links, appear on external websites and point to your page. Essentially, they work to show search engines and the public that your website content is worthwhile. The more external sites that refer to your site with backlinks, the more credibility you will have with search engines, allowing you to rank higher in the SERPs.
But developing a diverse backlink profile is not the easiest task. To do this right, you’ll need to have backlinks on many different pages on a wide variety of external sites, including reference pages, directories, news sites, and blogs.
There are some key strategies you can implement right now to build your backlink profile:
- Use your site’s main referral sources.
- Form partnerships with sites to which you submit external links.
- Use Google Search Console’s Top Linking Sites report to see what content you already have
backlinks to and use it to develop similar content. - Work with SEO tools to find out where your competitors have backlinks and use your sources
to develop backlinks to your site. - Create backlinks from your competitor’s broken links.
PRO Tip: You can also use internal links to increase your organic traffic by linking to your article content. This can help your readers navigate your site more efficiently and increase the time people spend on your pages.
#5: Increase your website speed
Nobody likes slow-loading websites. They are frustrating and a huge waste of your reader’s time. Nearly half of all Internet users expect their pages to load in two seconds or less.
What’s more, Google and other search engines also find them annoying and don’t rank them as well on search result pages to give users a better online experience. So even if you follow all the other tips in this article, if your page is loading slowly, Google won’t rank you well.
There are a few different reasons why your website might be slow, including:
- Low-quality website hosting platforms.
- Too many HTTP requests.
- Higher code density.
- Large image sizes and media resolution.
- Excessive amounts of advertisements.
- Outdated CMS Tools.
- Lack of a proper CDN.
Fortunately, some easy fixes can get you up and running faster than before with a minimal amount of work.
Checking your site’s loading speed would be a much easier task if you used Google’s Page Speed tool. In addition, the platform will show all existing technical problems on the site, as well as possible ways to fix them.
- Reduce image resolution
Perhaps the fastest way to decrease your site’s load time is to reduce the size of your high-resolution images. Images are essential for websites and can play a significant role in attracting audiences, but the larger the file size, the longer it takes to load. By compressing these images, you ensure that your website will run faster.
Image compression tools are readily available online through resources such as Adobe Photoshop.
- Reduce your presence of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
While images can be reduced in size and resolution to help your website load faster
, the same can work for your website code.
Web developers can do this by cutting out lines of code, spaces, punctuation marks, and other unnecessary characters that clutter up their pages. They can then compress the remaining information if the files exceed 150 bytes in size to make webpage load times faster.
- Use an appropriate CDN
A CDN, also known as a Content Delivery Network or Content Delivery Network, is a collection of geographically distributed servers that website owners use to host their websites around the world. They deliver content related to your website, including HTML files, images, and videos, to your audience based on location.
So, if you have a website based in America with a strong presence of users in England, you can use a CDN to host your website in the appropriate European region to reduce your page load time in England.
Conclusions on how to increase your organic traffic
Organic traffic has many steps and elements that you should keep in mind when creating content. Creating your best organic traffic stream from keyword-stuffed headers, titles, and meta descriptions to a mature backlink portfolio takes a lot of upfront work.
But the good news is that once you start implementing these strategies, following through with them becomes second nature and they will work for you much longer than you work on them.
Organic traffic strategies are a long game when it comes to traffic collection. Still, when they start working for you, you will have saved a lot of time and money. You’ll have a well-developed audience of targeted users who are more likely to engage with your content, increase your click-through rates, and boost your SERPs.
The more comfortable you feel with each one, the sooner you can move on to the next one, and pretty soon, you’re sure to have one of the highest-ranking pages on your favorite search engines.
