Business on the internet relies a great deal on web traffic.
Marketers invest billions of dollars every year for content marketing practices which boost traffic.
While there is a number of sources that a website can receive traffic from, search engines continue to top the list.
Reason?
Think for yourself. Search engines are the most reliable and most used websites on the web.
When a search engine shows your website in the search results, it means that your brand reputation is being backed by that search engine. It leaves a positive impact on users.
Also, the quality of organic traffic is better than the traffic received through paid mediums. It’s one of the purest forms of web traffic. As good as it can get.
This makes organic traffic an important factor to depict your brand’s online success.
The question now arises, how good is your website doing with organic traffic? What are the shortcomings? And above all, how can you eradicate those to boost your organic traffic?
Well, in this blog post we try to answer all those answers.
Everything You Need to Know About Increasing Organic Traffic
Working on increasing your website’s organic traffic will mean facing some challenges.
While it is about placing a website at a certain position in the SERPs, search engines take everything into consideration- content, design, interlinking, backlinks, social presence and more…
So, let us see how you can optimize your website considering all these factors to improve search rankings and boost organic traffic.
1. Design is Important
Your website’s SEO journey starts with the website itself.
Eradicating websites with poor design and poor on-page performance out of the SERPs, search engines have proven that on-page SEO is real.
Here is a checklist of what makes design acceptable for search ranking:
- Ease of access: A website that is easy to use for your users will be easy to crawl for search engine crawlers. Result? Better indexing rate and better search rankings.
- Good navigation: A navigation menu is one of the most crucial elements that you must add to your website.It enhances user experience. Also, it will allow your users to view more of your content.
- Simple yet efficient layout: Keeping your website design simple yet appealing is a challenge. But, at the same time it is important too.The role it plays in improving your search rankings and organic traffic might surprise you.It’s a lot about the user experience itself. (Obviously, website design is half about user experience and half about how your design performs in the search results).A good web design will not only please search engines but engage your users for a longer span of time. Search engines take this as an attribute of a good website. It simply means that your website is so good that your users are sticking instead of bouncing.
When we are talking SEO and organic traffic, website design really matters.
Although, it might be hard to come up with a flawless design, keeping the above mentioned points will help you on the way.
2. Killer Content Takes You Places
For any website looking for success on the internet, content is really important.
No matter your traffic source, good content is always crucial.
But what is the definition of good content?
Some might talk about grammar. Others might sing songs about context. Some will tell you that there has to be a flow, your content has to be persuasive and useful.
Turns out, it all matters.
A good piece of content will be one written for the users and not the search engine crawlers.
Also, creating content for the sake of creating content won’t get you very far.
But how should you do it?
Although it might appear tough to some, creating content is easy. It’s just about understanding three things.
- Be clear: The worst thing you can do with your users is make them think.Thinking is work. And to be honest, work is the last thing anyone wants on their desk.So, what to do?It’s simple. Be clear with your words. Don’t play around too much. Beating around the bush might seem appealing. Turns out, it can turn your users off.The right thing to do is keep your content as easy to comprehend as possible.
- Keep it concise: The next thing to keep in mind is the importance of being concise.While hundreds of printed pages in a book might appeal users, the purpose of the internet is entirely different. People use the internet to find information at their ease.The best you can do here is keep your content concise. Shorten your paragraphs. Cut down on sentences. Make it more readable.Transforming passive voice sentences to active voice will also help your purpose.
- Try to be compelling: Do you remember reading a compelling piece of content?Did you ever come across something that completely persuaded you?Well, if you have, then that is exactly what you need to do. It’s not tough. The solution lies in the way you think.Typing text with a keyboard is easy. Making sense with every word isn’t.You’ll need to think through each sentence. Ensure that it makes sense. And keep in mind that it has to be both useful and compelling at the same time.Huh! Seems like a lot of hard work, right?
Well, it is equally important but with practice, you’ll keep improving.
The point is, it’s highly important to strategize your content.
3. Start with Low-Competition Keywords
While everyone is impatient for growth, internet success doesn’t happen quickly.
Content on a website might go viral on day 1 or 2 in the best of the cases. SEO takes time. Always.
Marketers at times fail to accept this. As a result they start with highly competitive keywords.
There is one advantage of that. These keywords generally have a good search volume. This means that people usually use these keywords as a search term.
So, if you rank for a keyword like this, you get a decent amount of traffic.
But is it easy to rank for these keywords? Well, these keywords are labelled as ‘highly competitive’ for a reason, right?
It might be a good idea to focus on these once your website has some authority, but until that happens, your focus should be on keywords that have low-competition. That is, keywords that are being targeted by fewer websites and still have decent search volume..
A good low budget keyword research tool is Rankwatch Keyword Tool.
4. Improve Your Site Speed
Another important thing that comes to my mind while SEO is a concern is site speed.
You have to be really fast to compete and outperform your competition in the search results.
But how fast is fast enough? (I love this question.)
Fifty percent of web users lose interest in a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
And the same thing happens when a search engine crawler is crawling through your website. It takes longer to load and hence it doesn’t rank as per your desires.
What you can do to improve site speed is take a speed test (Google Pagespeed Insights or GT Metrix website speed test).
These tests will tell you about the shortcomings that are making your website slow.
Simply resolve one issue at a time and your site speed will improve.
Apart from this there is a whole bunch of things you can do to optimise site speed.
5. Guest Blog for Traffic, Not SEO
We all know that guest posting is a great way of building quality backlinks.
But is it all about that?
Maybe we took the whole thing wrong. The purpose of guest posting shouldn’t be building backlinks.
It is one of the benefits you will get from guest posting. If backlinks are the sole purpose of you publishing guest posts, maybe you should rethink your priorities.
Apart from backlinks, guest posts are good for gaining your website some quality readers and increasing your brand’s credibility.
This just means that while publishing a guest post, you need to look beyond the shallow approach of gaining a backlink.
If you still have doubts, the pointers below might help you:
- Don’t pick guest posting websites on the basis of availability. There would be websites with a really low amount of web traffic, low authority and thin content.Adding a great piece of your well written content to such a site will do more harm than good.First of all, it will waste the hard work invested into writing that guest post.Secondly, it will add your website’s link on a website who’s own SEO is poor.
- Be niche specific. While there will be many websites which you can publish a guest post on, being limited to your niche will be a better idea.It’s about creating relevant content and backlinks.
- Ensure distribution. Even for your guest posts, treat the guest posts as your own blog’s posts.You can even link to your older guest posts in new guest posts. This will strengthen your backlink profile.
- Be as active as you would be on your own blog. Look out for comments and queries that readers have.Whenever you find a user facing problems, reach out for help. Reply to comments. Be a good blogger.
6. Know That You Can’t Fool Google
SEO in 2013 was so different from today.
What has changed?
Well, the search engines have become way smarter.
While there used to be times when keyword stuffed articles with paid spammy backlinks could rank on the first page of Google, now you need to actually work hard on creating content and quality backlinks.
And if you still choose to try out ‘black-hat’ techniques, your site might attract a penalty.
So, how can that be avoided?
Here are some tips for avoiding those penalties:
- Publish awesome content that’s helpful to users.
- Don’t build/buy cheap/spammy links.
- Never use exact-match anchor text.
- Don’t publish low quality, rewritten, or pirated content.
Final words
In the early days of web development and internet marketing, SEO used to be a game. Search engines could be tricked with a few tweaks here and there.
Now is the time when intelligence of content and marketing is highly valued both by search engines and users.
While everything combined makes SEO challenging, we hope that this article helps you understand organic traffic and search rankings better.
If you feel the need to add or update anything in this blog post, drop a comment below.
