Best Guide to Increase Organic Traffic
Driving organic traffic to your website is crucial for long-term business success, yet it remains one of the biggest challenges bloggers and site owners face. Populating your site with high-quality, keyword-focused content is hard enough. Convincing Google to rank that content during highly competitive SERP fights feels like a losing battle.
Still, cracking the organic growth puzzle is imperative – paid search and Facebook ads simply aren’t sustainable. You need real visitors that come back again and again. How can you make this happen?
It boils down to eight essential ingredients. Follow this secret traffic-driving recipe, and you’ll watch your organic search rankings and visitors surge. Let’s dive in and explore what shifts the traffic dial.
Create Next-Level Cornerstone Content
Google rewards websites that offer exceptional “cornerstone content,” such as explainers, how-tos, ultimate guides, listicles, and comparisons. These evergreen pillars cover high-volume topics and provide elevated value versus competitors.
Yet despite the associated opportunity, too few brands publish next-level cornerstone content. Developing guide-style posts and list posts with 5,000+ words of top-notch advice is tough. The ROI seems fuzzy. Technical SEO optimizations are required. Promotions can be demanding.
Still, failing to provide cornerstone content is the ultimate organic traffic mistake. 75% of websites lack the long-form content users and Google want. Don’t join the losing crowd – commit now to delivering best-in-class cornerstone content around your top terms.
The impact on organic search visibility and clicks is undeniable. Consider Copyblogger, a content marketing blog. In 2017, Copyblogger posted a mammoth, 10,000-word piece covering keyword research. Three years later, despite skyrocketing keyword competition, this single cornerstone post still drives 150,000+ visits a month.
What “ultimate guide” topics could you explore around your products, services and niche? Brainstorm ideas, then start crafting the content competitors lack today.
Optimize Sites for Engagement
Google cares about visitor engagement and experience. The search engine wants to satisfy user intent by connecting people to sites they’ll actually enjoy. After all, unhappy visitors hit the back button and bounce – they won’t convert or come back again.
Therefore, websites succeeding in organic search offer enjoyable experiences post-click. They load quickly. They look professional. They make navigation intuitive via menus and site search to aid exploration. Educational resources help inform visitors during research phases.
Most importantly, high-ranking sites publish content focused solely on providing value to readers – not plugging products. They answer the questions people have around keywords via advice-led articles. Audiences feel their needs are addressed.
Compare your site against the engagement and experience leaders in your space. How can you better cater to visitors? Every enhancement, from speed optimizations to content improvements, drives lower bounce rates. Google notices sites better satisfying users, leading to higher rankings and conversions.
Refresh Stale Content
Here’s an overlooked SEO tactic with big traffic payoffs — refreshing your dated content.
Over time, many website posts become outdated and irrelevant. Statistics get old. Featured examples feel unrelatable. Advice may improve. These staleness issues confuse and frustrate visitors that find aged pages via search engines.
Traffic and conversions decline as a result. Still, most brands neglect their old content, focusing only on publishing new posts. This failure to refresh past material enables competitors to leapfrog your rankings by providing more current, authoritative options optimized around your target keywords.
Fix this issue by auditing old content and identifying outdated or subpar pages. Revise these pieces by updating stats, adding new examples and sections, and generally boosting quality. The improved relevance, accuracy and thoroughness will increase dwell time and reduces bounce rates. Score the associated organic visibility gains.
Deploy an Editorial Content Calendar
Many websites lack consistent content production. They publish sporadically – going days or weeks without new material before hurriedly pumping out posts to catch up. Such unpredictable strategies confuse both visitors and Google bots.
Smart brands instead deploy detailed editorial calendars mapping out content plans weeks or months in advance. These content roadmaps set publishing minimums across different categories and formats while assigning topics, deadlines and owners.
The result? Search engines start expecting and trusting your frequent content improvements. Visitors also benefit via dependable info flows around desired subjects.
Build similar calendars for your site. Audit your categories and determine ideal output by types – e.g. two blog articles a week, one ebook per quarter. Use keyword research to map upcoming themes around seasonality and product launches. Also set reminders to refresh evergreen content on schedule.
Such organized systems drive immense organic rewards in the months ahead.
Unleash Long-Tail Keywords
Most websites focus SEO and content on high-traffic “head” terms people frequently search for — e.g. “web hosting,” “dog toys.” Prevailing wisdom says ranking for these popular phrases will drive the most search clicks as they have huge volumes.
However, an overlooked source of organic traffic riches lives in the long-tail – hyper-specific keywords with lower, but more targeted monthly volumes. Examples include “fastest small business web hosting in Atlanta” or “tough plush squeaky dog toys.”
These long phrases demonstrate clear user intent, enabling your content and product offerings to match their needs perfectly. Your articles can then dominate against niche rivals. Long-tail visitors also boast exceptionally strong conversion potential thanks to existing interest in your exact solutions.
Therefore, expand your keyword targeting to include long-tail variations that perfectly fit your products and location while driving quality traffic. Study your niche – what specifics would you add to popular searches to deliver maximum relevance? Match the endless variations in search to tailored content addressing each version.
Double Down on Answer Box Wins
The search results page remains the holy grail of organic traffic. Ranking atop the standard blue link list attracts streams of visitors to your site. Yet as voice search, featured snippets and Google Discover gain adoption, conventional 10 blue link results lose share.
Instead, Google spots more direct-answer boxes atop standard results. Triggering inclusion inside these Answer Boxes involves getting your relevant content to rank #1 while also providing a succinct solution to a featured user question. Successfully optimized pages see their traffic skyrocket thanks to enhanced visibility and clicks.
Review your top pages and identify those optimizable to win these premium placements. Ensure your page headlines or subheads feature commonly asked questions by searchers. Craft a short, templated answer summarizing the key response. Finally, double down on strengthening overall page quality and authority around terms getting answer box visibility to lock in wins.
Let Guest Posts Fuel New Foundations
Most brands focus guest posting efforts around placements on existing sites with large, related audiences. For example, a SaaS company may work to get contributed articles on leading marketing blogs. Such brand media presences raise awareness among target customers.
Yet for SEO, high domain authority publication opportunities are fading as big sites close submissions while Google discounts over-optimized contributor content. Instead, an emerging guest post gold lies in fueling expansion to new sites and properties you fully own and control.
Rather than chase declining placements of contributor pages on known industry media, use writers to launch and grow new company sites around adjacent topics with their original articles. Build these new sites under appropriate extensions (.org, .co, etc) and domain names speaking to their niche focus (e.g marketinginsiders.com).
Seed initial site content through guest pieces before fleshing out libraries with expanded expert-driven material. Let multiple new domains drive traffic growth through tailored content fueling your owned media web. Review options for credible experts to launch recurring columns under your brand banner. Each site efficiently becomes its own traffic machine.
Go Visual with Video, Graphics
Text articles dominated old-school content marketing plans. Yet today’s audiences increasingly demand visually compelling resources that educate through sights alongside words. Videos and graphics now represent the future of engaging website visitors.
Audit your content across categories and identify areas to add videos illustrating served tips and tactics. Embed attractive, easy-to-digest charts and graphs demonstrating key data points around topics. Infographics also artfully showcase complex advice.
Each visual asset published makes your content stand out as visitors scan pages and keeps their eyes locked in thanks to appealing imagery support. Videos also thrive on external distribution channels – seed your YouTube channel while embedding visuals at social media for view-driving clicks back to your site. Let visuals shift more organic searchers into site visitors.
Track Your Progress
Implementing the above seven tactics requires immense effort across code changes, content creation and keyword targeting. How can you confirm your organic search optimization work results in measurable traffic gains?
Simple – set up tracking so you can monitor key metrics around organic performance week-to-week and month-to-month. Key indicators like ranking improvements, overall organic sessions and keyword-specific visitor volumes reveal what’s working.
Tie changes to site factors like page load speed improvements or publishing more visual content assets. If the needle doesn’t shift within estimated timeframes, rework approaches. Let hard metrics guide your focus toward high-impact areas so time stays invested in what returns site growth.
The Power of Great Organic SEO
Ranking well organically remains challenging as ever. But brands willing to stay laser focused on value-driven content, stellar site experiences, constant publishing and long-tail keyword matching can still thrive.
Patience and persistence are required – sustainable SEO gains don’t happen overnight. But brands investing months into organic growth always separate from the competition still chasing ephemeral social and paid breakthroughs.
Commit today to mastering search traffic, then watch qualified visitors multiply week after week. Your organic approach determines if you win or lose customers over the long run – no other channel matters more. Follow the above recipe to unlock the flights of free search visitors your biz deserves.