organic-traffic

Having a good flow of organic traffic to your website can truly be marketing gold. Why?

Well for one, organic traffic is free, but organic traffic can also help improve your SEO rankings and  boost your conversion rates.

Organic traffic can also teach you more about your site and how users are interacting with it.

When you run a paid campaign, your audience is most likely funnelled to a specific landing page. However, when they find your website organically and have the freedom to move through your pages, you can more accurately determine whether your site is optimised to convert or optimised to fail.

The benefits of organic traffic are truly endless, which is why many companies from B2B’s, B2C’s and startups all want to know- How do I get more?

Growing organic traffic is vital for any business so we are going to take you through step by step, on how you can grow your organic traffic.

Before we begin however, it is important to understand the key elements that will help lead to organic traffic growth and make your growth sustainable.

These elements include-

  • Analytics and Analysis
  • Observation
  • Building

Analysis of your analytics is crucial if you want to grow your organic traffic. By understanding where your audience is coming from, who your audience is, the average number of pages visited etc. etc, it will help you to know where to begin your journey to organic traffic domination.

Observation and building is also important, as these help you to understand what type of content is doing well and how you can build upon it. When you observe how your existing traffic reacts to your content, you are given a clear insight into what type of content is going to do well and what you need to build more of.

For example, say you post an article about “The Best Jeans for Your Body Type” and this article receives a lot of positive feedback, shares on social media and many comments, you would know that building more content around this topic may help you to receive more engagement and therefore more traffic.

Once you have a basic understanding of who is visiting your site and what they are interested in, you can begin driving more organic traffic. Here are the steps-

Conduct a “Keyword Audit”

Keywords not only help you to build organic traffic but they also help your websites SEO ranking. The good news is that you can work on finding the best keywords for your brand by taking a look at what your competitors are doing. This is particularly helpful if you have a new website or you are trying to grow your business.

To start, make a list of all the keywords you want your site to rank for. For example, your marketing company may want to rank for “Best Marketing Companies” or “Marketing Companies in Melbourne”.

Once you have chosen your favourite keywords, work out which websites are ranking for these keywords first in a Google search. These websites are now going to become your number one competitors and teachers. By looking at what they are doing, you are going to learn how to compete for that number one spot.

After you have made a list of the webpages ranking for your keywords, take a visit to “Alexa.com”. This website will be able to show you your competitors’ best performing keywords that are ranking in Google’s top 10 results.

These keywords can then become part of your blog posts, headlines and social media posts in order to help you drive more organic traffic to your site.

Alexa is not 100% accurate, however it will give you detailed information about your competitors audience, where they came from and how engaged they are on the competitors website. This will help you to understand what they are doing and how you can do it better.

For more information on your competitors keywords, you may also want to visit SEMrush.com. This website will also help you to get information on what keywords your competitors are ranking for and will guide you to your next step.

When you know more about your market and your competitors, it will help you to not only outsmart them but also boost your flow of organic traffic.

Bonus Tip: You may also want to write a guest post for a competitors site that is ranking for one of your keywords. Since Google has already identified your competitors site, your guest article will likely rank in the top ten search results which means more organic traffic for you.

How to Learn from Competitors Without Copying Them 

While you never want to plagiarise or copy your competitors exactly, you can use their high ranking content to stimulate ideas for your own brand.

This involves taking the headings and subjects that your competitors are writing about and adding more value for your readers.

For example, say you want to rank for the keywords- “Email List Monetisation” and the top ranking article in Google reads- “4 Effective Ways to Monetise your Email List”. 

You can take this article headline and expand on it by making it better. For example you could write an article on- “10 Effective Ways to Monetise Your Email List” or you could add “power words” to your headline such as- “The Ultimate Guide to Monetising your Email List”. 

Other strategies you may want to implement when it comes to writing compelling content that is going to get read by your visitors and increase your organic traffic includes-

  • Creating headlines using power words
  • Writing a bold introduction
  • Showing examples or reviews through your post
  • Using images, charts, images etc.
  • Referencing authorities or thought leaders in your industry
  • Promoting the post on social media

After you have published your post it is important to monitor its performance to see how your audience is resonating with it. If the post does really well, or you notice a topic consistently performing better than others, experiment with writing about that topic frequently.

But what happens if you are getting little or no engagement on your blog posts?

You may have to reconsider your target audience and who you are reaching out to. You may also want to consider changing the format that your content is delivered. This includes experimenting with infographics, video content, webinars and podcasts. Using long tail keywords may also to increase your flow of traffic.

Using Long-Tail Keywords 

Long tail keywords can help you to increase your flow of organic traffic by up to 90 percent. That’s huge and worth paying attention to.

In fact, it was reported that just a few years ago Amazon made 57 percent of their sales from long tail keyword product searches and this number is continuing to rise.

So, what exactly is a long-tail keyword?

This is a keyword that contains around 6 words. For example “new homes for sale in east richmond victoria.”

The reason why long tail keywords are so effective is that over time you will end up ranking for other keywords in relation to your long tail keyword. For example, even though your keyword may be “new homes for sale in east richmond victoria” you may also start ranking for “homes for sale in victoria”.

This is known as Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI which is very technically defined by Google as-

“An indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.”

In order to find the best long tail keywords for your site, use a tool like Google’s keyword tool to help you. Their program includes a “keyword ideas” tan that will help you to select high volume long-tail keywords.

Of course, be sure to integrate your long tail keywords into the heading and body of your posts so you can be sure to rank for keyword. If you are having trouble integrating your long tail keywords into your post, you may want to use punctuation to help you.

Remember, when using LSI you don’t have to repeatedly mention your long tail keyword as this may get you penalised by Google. Simply including it in your title and various synonyms in the  body of text will work just fine and will help to increase your organic traffic in no time.

More Content and Link Building

When you create more content you are giving search engines like Google more opportunities to rank your site. What is interesting as well, is that the average web page that ranks on the first page of Google’s search results contains over 2,000 words- 2032 to be exact.

Now of course, there are exceptions to this however the sites that ranked in the top three position on Google’s search results were on average over 2,400 words.

This just goes to show that writing epic content that is detailed, well thought out and that provides lot of juicy information can help to increase the flow of organic traffic. It also helps your site to rank for more keywords.

Writing content more frequently can also help you to increase your traffic. Try to publish content at least every 2-3 days of the best results, however don’t get caught in the trap of writing just for the sake of writing.

Google is very good at recognising quality content, so don’t keyword stuff, don’t copy and paste and don’t write unthoughtful content.

Once you have your super awesome, thoughtful content published you may also want to consider using link building strategies to help increase your organic traffic.

Link building involves –

“Actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website.”

Some link building strategies that you may want to test out include:

  • Writing guest posts on competitors websites
  • Reaching out to the press or well established sites for a mention such as – BBC, SBS, CNN, Wikipedia, Mashable, New York Times etc.
  • Using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
  • Getting an RSS feed
  • Utilise sites like Quora, Issuu and Slideshare
  • Create infographics
  • Submit to directories

Link building is a whole beast of its own, however by getting your links out to as many reputable sources as possible, it will help to increase the flow of traffic to your webpage.

Google is also very sensitive towards link building so be sure not to abuse it and never pay for inbound links.

Get Reviews and Boost Your Reputation

88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, meaning that having glowing reviews about your business, products and services can help to drive sales, but can it help to drive traffic?

Yes.

Why? Reviews often rank high up in Google’s search results.

For example, say you are searching for a restaurant in your local neighbourhood. You may type in ‘pizza restaurants near me” and guaranteed, in the top 10 search results there will be some sort of review based site.

For the restaurant and hospitality industry, Google also provides their own rating system, proving that people want to read online reviews before they make their decision.

In fact, a study conducted on the popular review site “Yelp” found that just a one star increase on a businesses’ rating improved their sales by up to 9 percent.

No matter what business your brand falls under, having reviews can speak volumes for your business and can help you rank for a whole new search category.

To achieve this, ask your customers to leave reviews or testimonials and then work on ranking that page under a keyword such as “marketing companies in melbourne reviews”.

Building a blog can also help you to boost your digital reputation, as can being present on numerous social media sites.

Build Awareness in Your Community

Visiting conferences, networking events and expo’s in your industry is a great way to build your brands exposure and help the flow of organic traffic to your website.

Being a speaker at these event can also be extremely beneficial as those who resonate with your message are likely to also follow you online.

If you can’t get a huge speaking engagement to begin with, start small. This may include doing a local event in your community or guest speaking at a school or office event. Get creative with your options and work on building your brand along the way.

Another great strategy is to get an interview or interview others on podcasts or YouTube channels, so people can start to learn more about you and your brand.

Having a photo of you on your website can also help users to build brand awareness and can increase the level of trust that your audience feels towards you.

Don’t Ignore Bing and Yahoo

It’s always- Google, Google, Google! But what about Bing and Yahoo?

Especially in the Australian market, Bing and Yahoo are definitely worth paying attention to. In fact, according to SEMrush.com, they “drove 193,000 organic visitors to a clients site from Bing in the Australian market.”

Bing is also the second most popular search engine and has around 20 percent of the search engine market share. Together, Bing and Yahoo hold around 30 percent of the search engine market share.

To put this in perspective however, Yahoo and Bing has around 149 million unique users every month who search for over 5.2 million things every month.

Of these users, majority were found to be-

  • College graduates
  • Mature age (35+)
  • More women than men
  • Households with children
  • Households with income over $75,000

Industries that perform well on the Bing Yahoo Network also include- Education, Telecommunications, Travel and Business and Finance.

That is a huge potential right there for your brand and your business, no matter what industry you may be in, however it is worth noting that Bing and Yahoo have slightly different ranking rules.

These include-

  1. Bing places an emphasis on websites that have been around for a while, this means newer websites may not rank as high. A way around this could be to purchase an existing domain name.
  2. Bing tends to favour domains that end in .edu or .gov as they are more official
  3. Get your site indexed- according to bing, the first step is to submit your site to Bing’s index and wait for it to be updated.
  4. Focus on technical requirements such as: a fast page load time, making sure all your URL’s work and using canonical tags.
  5. Bing places an emphasis on title tags so be sure to optimise your titles and display URL’s for your users.
  6. Use simple keywords- Bing recommends no more than two target keywords per page.
  7. Like Google, Bing gives preference to back links however Bing also takes into consideration the number of no follow links and the presence of stopwords in the anchor text.
  8. Bing loves content that is clear, deep, and easy to find. Bing does not favour sites with lots of ads and affiliate links.
  9. Social Media plays an important part in SEO for Bing and helps to rank your page higher in search results.
  10. Websites with flash media also tend to do well on Bing search results, however Google is not fond of this.

Many of the protocols for Bing and Google are similar, so work on finding the middle ground and see if it helps to increase your traffic.

Grow Your Email List

Your email followers can turn into some of your most loved and loyal fans if you play your cards right.

Whenever you get the opportunity, work on collecting emails and building your lists, and those who do open your emails are likely to be highly engaged and more willing to click on your content.

When they click your content and are redirected to your webpage, email users are also more likely to click on other content and visit many pages within your site.

Email users are statistically also more likely to share your content on their social media pages and with their friends.

Building an email list also helps to grow your organic traffic by keeping your brand fresh in your readers mind. This means next time they are searching for something in your niche they are more likely to go to your webpage first.

In order to get readers engaged in your email list, you have to offer them something of value. This includes offering special content, discounts and promotions. You may also want to experiment by offering your email readers incentives such as first look access to your products and services or whitepapers.

Conclusion

Growing your organic traffic can help increase the flow of engaged and interested visitors to your webpage which in-turn can help increase your sales and revenue.

Growing your organic traffic starts with understanding who your target audience is and what their needs are. From here you can do some competitive research to see what leaders in your industry are doing and how you can learn from them.

By narrowing down your keywords and then looking to see what others sites are doing to rank for those keywords, you can also be well on your way to boosting your organic traffic.

Even though we explored many tactics in this article, to keep it simple here is a bullet list of the strategies summarised-

  • Do some keyword research to see what is ranking for your keywords
  • Work on creating content that is tailored for those keywords that offers more than your competitors
  • Use long tail keywords to help to rank for more keywords and to reach a wider audience
  • Make sure your content is over 2,000 words, updated regularly and offers lots of value to the reader
  • Study your content and write more of what is doing well
  • Share your content on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+
  • Create other content types such as infographics, images, slides and podcasts to increase traffic
  • Get active on sites such as Quora, Yahoo Questions and Reddit in order to attract more readers
  • Write Guest posts for top ranking sites in your industry and network at events

Growing your organic traffic requires consistent action and strategy, however the benefits are well worth the effort.

Are you going to start growing your organic traffic today?