Looking for ways to start getting more organic traffic?
Ready to learn the secrets of SEO traffic generation?
If you’re trying to increase organic traffic, it’s important that you know how to do it right. If you’re not careful, it can be easy to waste your time on the things that don’t really matter.
Knowing the right search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can allow you to build your traffic effectively and for the long-term, ensuring you never run out of website visitors.
Below we’ll give you the ultimate guide to increasing organic traffic using SEO.
What Is Organic Traffic?
Before we get going let’s just make sure that we understand the term organic traffic.
Organic traffic is traffic that finds your website through unpaid search results. The traffic comes from the search engines such as Bing, Yahoo and most importantly Google. This is the main goal of search engine optimization.
The content you write and publish today may appear in search results and drive traffic for several months or even years. So it’s worth putting in the effort!
1. Create Amazing Content
The cornerstone of getting quality organic traffic is to make sure you have amazing content on your site. High-quality unique content is what makes everything else possible.
While you may already understand that you need content, remember that not all content is the same. Don’t just post anything on your site. It’s important to always create relevant and informative content that truly helps and gives value to your chosen customers and ideal visitors.
A great content strategy is at the center of a great SEO strategy, so be ready to start making some great content and get your blog up as soon as possible.
To be a successful blogger you need to boost your search engine rankings and increase your organic traffic. This means you need awesome content on your website or blog.
If you need some tips for building a Wordpress blog successfully, you may want to click here.
2. Choose the Right Keywords
When you create content for your site whether for your blog or for service pages, it’s important to be targeting the right keywords at all times.
While you may like to appear on Google results for simple search terms such as “doctor” or “attorney” these short one-word keywords are very hard to rank for.
You need to understand the importance of longtail keywords. These keywords may not be as popular as shorter ones. However, they can allow your site to rank much more quickly.
Longtail keywords also have the added benefit of ensuring you’re not just getting a lot of traffic, but also the most relevant traffic.
3. Add Content Consistently
You also shouldn’t be adding content only every once in a while but on a consistent and regular basis.
The problem is, creating content is hard! Especially if you’re creating high-quality original content, which should be your goal.
I’m in admiration of the bloggers that are putting out great content several times a week. You need to have the same commitment to post every day or every week. Make writing a habit!
You need to be motivated to share your knowledge and help your readers. Money might be a motivation but I think a personal motivation like improving your writing is perhaps stronger.
Whether you add several pieces of content a week or just one, it is important that whatever you do you do it consistently. Your visitors need to have something to look forward to on a regular basis. Google also favors sites that get updated regularly.
It’s also good to have as much quality content on your site as possible. Each piece of content will add additional keywords and opportunities for users to find you with a search engine.
4. Do Your Research
It’s best not to leave a content strategy or SEO strategy to chance. Don’t neglect the importance of good data and analytics or the process of performing research while forming your SEO strategy.
Knowledge is power. Take the time to perform research before you spend too much time creating content. If you do, you’ll be much more effective in everything that you do.
Make sure that you take the time to research the best keywords and to find out about what potential visitors would be interested in. You should also look at the performance of past content and posts to see what type of article performs best with your audience.
Once you have your keywords check out the websites that rank for them. Look at the titles and meta descriptions to see if you can come up with something better.
Your goal is to write content that is better than the content that is already ranked for your keywords. Draw inspiration from the best articles.
5. Check Out Competitors
As part of performing adequate research for SEO, it’s a great idea to scope out your competitors when forming your SEO strategy.
Look at what types of content they’re posting and what types of content are performing the best with their customers and visitors. You should also consider using some special tools to analyze their site and see what types of keywords they’re using and targeting with their website and blog.
Performing a bit of spy work and checking out what your competitors are doing can be a big help when working on your own SEO and traffic generation.
6. Start Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is an important practice that has long been a part of good SEO. It’s important to look for opportunities to contribute guest blog posts to authority sites in your niche or field.
Reach out to sites that you follow and ask if they accept guest pitches and try to get something posted. With any luck, they’ll let you add a link back to your site along with your content.
Guest blogging is very important as a traffic generation strategy and can allow new and targeted visitors to find your site. However, you may just get a Google SEO boost as a result as well.
Brian Dean of backlinko.com has an excellent guide on guest blogging that covers subjects like finding guest post targets, reaching out, writing your guest posts and more!
7. Remember to Use Internal Linking
In addition to using guest blogging to get some natural external backlinks, you should be remembering to build internal links across your site as well.
An internal link connects one page of your website to another page of your website.
Don’t become so focused on getting external links that you forget internal links. Getting your on-page SEO factors, which include internal links, right before trying to get any external links.
Internal linking is crucial to help Google understand how each piece of content matters and how it may be related.
Look for ways in each blog post to link to other content and send readers to another resource on your site that they may find useful. The primary purpose of your internal links should provide value to the reader.
Doing this can help them stay on your site longer and decrease your bounce rate, helping to improve the results of your site on search engines as well.
8. Encourage Incoming Links
After the search engines have crawled your post they have to decide where it should rank in the search results for your keyword phrase.
To do this the search engines will look at your content, as you would expect. But they also take into consideration the number of links to your page from different websites.
At one time it was the number of links that was important. The more links a website had pointing to it the better the quality of the site. At least that was the theory!
But Google found that webmasters manipulated the search results by buying links, submitting to low-quality directories and getting a link in exchange or by exchanging links with other websites.
After the recent Google algorithm updates, now it’s not only the number of links that counts but also the quality of those links. In general, the more high-quality websites that link to your website the higher you will rank in the search results.
Having high-quality links could give your website higher rankings than other sites if all other ranking factors are equal. Inversely a lot of low-quality links could harm your ranking.
As a high ranking is essential for organic traffic generation incoming links are still very important.
This post from smartbugmedia.com will give you some great ideas on how to get more inbound links.
9. Aim to Improve CTR on SERPs
In addition to adding great content consistently, you should make sure the technical aspects of your site are set up well. This can include a number of different things.
Optimizing your titles and meta descriptions is one technical aspect that can make a big difference. These can allow you to rank better on search engine results pages (SERPs) and can allow you to improve the click-through rate (CTR) on your pages.
It’s important to pay attention to small details. Use a tool such as the Google Search Console to see what the CTR is for each post or keyword that shows up in search engine results pages.
If one page or keyword isn’t faring well, you may want to consider tweaking the title tag and meta description.
The title tag needs to give an idea of what the post is about in the first few words. The meta description should be used to write an engaging explanation of what the page is about with the goal of trying to get searchers to click on your post. With both tags, you should include your target keywords.
Increasing the CTR may improve your rankings as you prove to Google your post provides one of the best replies to a search query.
10. Improve Your Site Speed
Another technical thing you need to do is to make sure your website is loading quickly and everything is running smoothly.
A fast site will be favored by Google and other search engines if there is a similar piece of content or website that offers the same information.
You may want to look for ways to improve the speed of your site. This may require looking for a better web host. It may also require some tweaking of your overall design.
When you build your website, you should choose a responsive web design that works well for users no matter what the device being used is. You may also need to optimize images, simplify scripts on your site, or improve your caching method.
11. Remember That Mobile Comes First
These days, many people are using mobile devices all of the time. They’re likely to come across your website while they’re just about anywhere and on many different types of devices.
If you want to build your traffic, it’s important that you make sure that your site is optimized for mobile users. They need to always have a fast and seamless experience when they’re on your site.
Google has even said that mobile comes first with indexing these days, so it’s important that you’re aware of this. You should adjust accordingly.
If you make sure that mobile users have a great experience on your site, you’ll ensure that Google keeps sending quality traffic your way.
12. Get Your Redirects Right
When you remove old content from your site or make any big changes to your website, sometimes you’ll end up with URLs that don’t go anywhere. The page may have been removed.
In these cases, it’s important to have a good redirect in place for your website.
You need to make sure you set up 404 redirects. In the case that someone tries to visit the page they’ll have a notice that a page is missing. 404 redirects can also let Google know that your content is gone.
However, if you have external backlinks for one of these missing pages, you may want to set up a 301 redirect instead. Doing this, you can start sending visitors to a relevant piece of content that fulfills the same purpose of the missing page instead.
13. Play Nice With Google
When it comes to SEO traffic generation, there’s no denying one thing: Google is king. Because of this, it’s always important that you follow the rules and guidelines from the search engine.
It’s important not to engage in underhanded and outdated black hat SEO tactics. You should never buy backlinks for example.
Also, make sure any backlinks you get are from reputable sources. Gone are the days of using seedy directories and poor quality websites to get backlinks.
You should also make sure everything you post is original and high-quality. Also, avoid posting any copied or duplicate content to your site.
It’s pretty simple to stay on Google’s good side, but you should put a bit of effort in to make sure you’re not doing anything they frown upon.
Making the Most of Your Website With SEO Traffic Generation
SEO traffic generation doesn’t have to be difficult but it does take time. By following the tips above you’ll start getting plenty of traffic for your own website soon enough.
Just make sure you’re putting in the work and also being smart about your overall SEO and organic traffic generation strategy.
Have questions or comments? Need more tips or advice? Leave a comment below, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
