Generating organic traffic can be a slow and tedious process. Sometimes you see yourself creating a lot of content or looking for SEO strategies but you don’t know exactly how to optimize these activities to improve your performance.
For this reason, in today’s article we’ll talk about how to drive organic traffic to your website. But first of all, what is organic traffic?
We can find the definition below:
“Organic traffic is the term used to describe visits to a website coming from a search engine’s organic results and not paid ads.”
Reliablesoft
This means that organic traffic is that kind of traffic that is generated as a result of Inbound marketing and SEO.
Difference between organic and direct traffic
There are sometimes misunderstandings between organic and direct traffic. While organic traffic comes from search engines and other referring sources, direct traffic has a completely different definition.
In simple words, direct traffic refers to any traffic that comes directly to your site and not from referring websites. This can mean that it’s traffic generated when someone types the URL directly in the web browser.
However, sometimes, traffic that comes from unknown sources can get miscategorized as direct as well.
Why make this distinction? While the definitions above are pretty basic, Google’s decision to prioritize HTTPS over HTTP has made that all traffic coming from non-secure HTTPS websites gets categorized as direct, as Analytics doesn’t consider those websites as referring sources.
For this reason, the lines between organic and direct traffic can sometimes be blurry.
Now that we’ve got this out of the way, what’s the best way to improve your organic traffic strategy? Here are some tips you can use to improve your performance.
7 tips to increase organic traffic
1. Promote your content on social media channels
Social media can be a great way to reach new people in your audience and promote your articles and content from your site organically. For this, you need a custom social media strategy for each of the channels you want to focus on, understand how the algorithm for each social media platform works and create content specifically for each channel.
It’s important to ask your social media audience to visit your website for more content and information, driving them to your website and, therefore, increasing your organic traffic.
It seems like a lot of work, and it is. So if it feels overwhelming, you can always try with one platform and, once you get the hang of it, expand to other social media channels and build your social media strategy.
2. Use long tail keywords
Targeting short-tail and general keywords can make you gain some search volume, but it’s not enough if you want to boost your positioning in search engines. That’s where long-tail keywords come into place.
These keywords are more specific but less competitive, which means that the CTR will be lower, but the conversion rate will be higher.
Make sure to include the long-tail keywords into your content, like the title, subheadings, in the first paragraph of your articles or in the alternate texts of your images.
3. Improve page speed
Having a good user experience is crucial to increase organic traffic. Among the most important aspects of UX design, page speed is probably the one you should focus on the most.
With people becoming more impatient and having lower attention spans, they won’t like it if your website takes too long to load and will leave your site not to come back again.
We talk more about user experience in one of our latest articles. Check it out here!
4. Remove non-performing content
If you have content that is not performing at all on search engines, maybe it’s time to let it go.
While people think that the more content, the better, the content that you’ve created can sometimes be in competition with some of our posts, and this can affect the positioning and performance of both articles. That’s why, by removing non-performing content, you’re allowing your other content to rank higher on search engines, increasing your organic traffic along the way.
5. Update old content
But removing content is not the only solution. You can also update and re-do old content that is not getting as much traffic as expected.
Other reasons to rewrite your content is to add up -to-date information, replace broken links or add engaging media elements.
Also, make sure to update your title, snippets and tags, use shorter sentences in your content body and add headings and subheadings to make your content more organized.
6. Optimize for mobile
Over half of the global population uses mobile devices to surf the net. That’s why, if your site is not optimized properly for mobile phones and tablet devices, you’re going to lose a big chunk of your audience.
7. Link building
As we’ve stated earlier in this article, organic traffic includes traffic from referral sources, including other websites. For this reason, if your site is not on the top search results, link building is extremely important.
With link building, you allow visitors from other sites to find your content, driving organic traffic to your site. However, it’s a process that needs to be done carefully. The rule of “the more, the better” doesn’t work here, so make sure that you build links taking into account Google and other search engines’ rules.
Organic search is the most important kind of traffic you should invest in. So, if you’re looking to improve your organic results, remember all these tips when working on your publishing strategy!
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is any traffic that comes from search engine results and other referral traffic sources, but not from any kind of paid ads.
Is organic traffic better than paid ads?
Yes, organic traffic is the most important kind of traffic in any digital marketing strategy. This traffic will drive quality leads and engaged visitors to your site and will bring long term results.