In the 21st century, every business understands that a key component to their success is driving traffic to their website – the place that tells their story, provides valuable information, highlights their products, and gives prospects the opportunity to buy something.
Our clients freely acknowledge this and often ask, “How do I get more traffic on my website?” The two ways to accomplish increased traffic are “paid” and “organic.” Today we will explore how to get more organic traffic to your website. In a future blog, we’ll address the paid route.
What is Organic Traffic?
Before jumping into how to do it let’s take a moment and define what organic traffic is.
Organic traffic refers to those visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources – essentially free traffic. Organic sources include search engines like Google, Firefox, or Bing. Usually, they are drawn to a page on your website that answers a search query or matches a keyword or phrase that they have searched for.
The type of digital marketing that focuses on improving organic traffic is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Organic traffic increases website trust and tends to have better conversion rates than paid traffic because there is a better intent for organic searches. The ROI for organic traffic is very high since it is semi-permanent in nature compared to paid ads.
The Goals of SEO
The basic goal of SEO is to boost your presence in relevant online search results, so you can earn more leads, sales, and revenue. In other words, the endgame of SEO is to grow your business online.
SEO has a number of goals. A quick summary of the primary SEO goals looks like this:
- Increase traffic to your site
- Generate more organic leads
- Improve your branding
- Providing better customer service
- Going head-to-head with competitors
Now we’re ready to take a closer look at some of the things you can do that will take advantage of SEO, push you up in search rankings, and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Focus Content on Your Audience
Before you can create content your audience will be searching for it’s imperative to know who they are. Taking the time to research and develop your brand’s buyer persona enables you to understand who they are and what they will find helpful.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience. You might also hear it called a customer persona, audience persona, marketing persona, or ideal client. Here are some tips on how to do it.
By creating quality content that resonates with your ideal buyers, you’ll naturally improve your SEO. When you please your buyer personas, you’ll automatically please the search engines.
Blog More
One of the best ways to gain organic traffic is to blog on a regular basis. Remember who you are creating content for and blog about topics that your buyer persona told you would be of interest to your ideal audience.
Blogging is one of the most effective ways to multiply organic traffic to your website. It lets you go into more depth than your website allows and creates a large catalog of helpful, persona-optimized content focused on your market niche. The more quality content you have on your website, the greater your chances of increasing organic traffic to your site.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are search queries that get a small number of searches per month. They tend to be longer and more specific and, consequently, often have a higher conversion rate.
Writing high-quality content is only half the battle if you want to learn how to drive traffic to your website. You can increase organic traffic to a large extent if you focus on long-tail keywords in your keyword research. Long-tail keywords are a combination of three or four words, such as “best WordPress security plugins” or “realtors in Providence.”
Using long-tail keywords allows you to rank for a specific topic and since they have less competition it makes it easier for readers to find your content.
Use Internal Links
Once you’ve built up a decent back catalog of content, you can link to it in blogs and on your website, guiding visitors to more relevant content. This can keep visitors on your website for longer, which helps boost your search rankings. HubSpot calls this process Topic Clustering.
The benefit of this is that it can also increase the time readers spend on your site which is a great way to tell Google and other search engines that your website offers quality content. Consequently, your rankings improve.
Leverage Social Media
It is imperative for your business to have a presence on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. Social media offers an excellent way for you to drive organic traffic to your site. Make sure to focus on using the platforms that your audience uses.
To take full advantage of using social media in promoting your site, you might want to increase the number of followers you have. This can be done fairly easily and with minimal financial investment on your part.
While using social media to increase traffic to your website is important it helps to post at the right time. Recently, CoSchedule analyzed the best times and days to post on a wide range of social media networks. This will be a valuable resource to help you leverage social media
Create an Active YouTube Channel
If you want to drive more traffic to your website, YouTube must be on your radar screen.
This is because YouTube has become the 2nd most popular website – only behind Google – on the planet.
That being said, getting views on your YouTube videos and your channel can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Brian Dean of backlinko.com has created an excellent guide that can teach you all you need to know about ranking your videos on YouTube and Google.
Go On Podcasts
As you look around it’s clear that Podcasts are blowing up. In fact, a recent survey found that 78% of Americans are familiar with podcasting, 57% have listened to a podcast, and 41% regularly listen to podcasts.
Does that mean that you should grab the nearest microphone and start a podcast? No. We recommend going on other people’s podcasts as a guest. This will take some time and research on your part to find the podcasters who would be interested in what you have to say and fit what your audience likes to listen to (which you identified when creating your Buyer persona).
Some Final Thoughts
Gaining more organic traffic to your website doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. With a few tips and tricks, you can increase traffic to your site which will translate to more conversions. Just make sure that you are always messaging to your ideal audience with high-quality content that addresses their needs, concerns, or problems.
Also, organic traffic takes time for SEO to generate search engine results. So, be patient because it will inevitably bring the right traffic to your website that will support the growth and sustainability of your business.
Let’s connect if you’d like to learn more about increasing your website’s organic traffic.
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