Never believe someone who tells you that building organic traffic easy. There is no quick fix to get organic traffic on your website.
Building organic traffic is one of the toughest tasks that you put on a website. However, it is also the greatest investment of your time and effort to get organic traffic for your website.
These days, people are ready to spend few bucks to get traffic on their website whether by Facebook Ads or Google AdWords. It surely is highly appealing and will provide you the traffic that you are aiming for.
But what happens when you stop paying? Will you be able to retain that traffic? Will people be able to see your content ever again?
Organic traffic means the traffic that you get without making any extra efforts or paid marketing. Organic traffic is usually generated by the content that you have on your website.
It can take a today or two, or months, or years to have the good amount of organic traffic on your website, that is why it is worth the effort. The ROI from organic traffic will be better than that from paid traffic.
There are some good ways and some better ways to get more organic traffic. Then there are some awful ways as well that you must avoid completely.
If you are ready to walk through the lane to increase your organic traffic, here are some ways that you must start implementing.
1. Create the Best Content possible
You probably have heard that publishing regular articles is good for SEO and it will get you a good rank on Google.
But creating the content just for the sake of creating content won’t get you very far. Possibly, it may cause a lot of damage to your reputation in the long run.
Your website is a digital representation of your business. For many of your potential customers, your website may be the first impression they get of your business.
Just as you would not like to deliver a bush-league product or service, you must not publish low-quality blogs. It is advised to write and publish the best content you possibly can.
You may ask how this will help you increase organic traffic. Well, it will happen because alike people, search engines are becoming smarter enough to tell when you are phoning in your content.
Quality content ranks better on SERPs, which in turn drives more organic traffic. It is also the type of content that will make the readers say “Yes! That’s what I wanted to read!” and share with other people.
So give writing content your best shot, before you publish it.
2. Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit
Due to high search, everybody wants to rank for the broad key phrases. But what people tend to ignore that broad key phrases are highly competitive, you may not even stand a chance of ranking for them unless you spend months of your time into it.
Instead of chasing something that may be unattainable, it’s better to go after the low-hanging fruit of long-tail key phrases.
For instance, if you are an SEO expert you should avoid trying to rank for the term “SEO expert”. Probability is that you will not be able to outshine the big-league who are already ranking for that term.
Try to narrow it down to something more specific, like including the area you serve. For example: “SEO expert in “SEO expert in San Diego CA”.
You can further narrow it down by including the customer base if you are targeting any specific group of clients. For example: “SEO expert for non-profits in San Diego CA”.
You are more likely to rank for such specific long-tail key phrases than a broad key phrase like “SEO expert”. Plus it will also get you more targeted organic traffic.
Long-tail key phrases resemble what exactly a user would search. The general trend is that user type in a phrase into search box like they are asking a question.
It was found that long-tail key phrases are more relevant and less competitive and hence they drive better results.
3. Write Consistently
There are no best days and times to publish a blog post. If you are keen to get more organic traffic, just try to be consistent.
Ideally the more you publish the better result you get. But it’s quite difficult if you are running a business at the same time. So unless you hire writers, try to post at least once a week.
Websites that are updated frequently are preferred by the search engines and much more by the users.
A consistently updated site gives users the impression that you are serious about providing quality content, and hence they take a keen interest in investing their time to read your blogs.
Regular updates keep people coming back for more. They also tend to share more of your content, link your blogs, and tell others to read it, signaling that your organic traffic is on its way to take a huge leap forward.
4. Guest Blogging, but for Traffic, not SEO
As more and more people are going for guest blogging, the value of the inbound links is rapidly going down. However, guest blogging to get more traffic is still a feasible strategy.
The inbound link you get at the end of a guest post may not possess much value in terms of SEO as it used to, but it surely exposes your content to a new audient.
Publishing your guest post on a high authority site surely helps you build an organic traffic. Some of the best tips for guest posting are:
- Don’t post on every other website. Keep the quality of your content high, and aim for the major websites that generate a decent amount of traffic.
- Guest blogging on websites that are in the same business industry. Remember that you are trying to reach your ideal audience.
- Promote your guest posts as if they are your own. This displays your seriousness and gratitude towards the other website where you posted the guest blog.
Just posting isn’t enough. Check your guest post regularly and respond to the comments. You want their visitors to be your visitors, responding to the readers is a great way to build a relationship.
5. Don’t make Google Angry
When it comes to organic traffic, Google is the hand that feeds you. Unfortunately, some SEOs always try to look for the workarounds to bypass the Google algorithms of ranking the websites.
Google recommends that you increase your organic traffic ethically, or be ready to get penalized sooner or later.
Some tips to avoid those penalties:
- Avoid building cheap links
- Avoid paying for inbound links completely
- Avoid using exact-match anchor text
- Avoid publishing low quality, scrapped or stolen content
- Make sure that the content you publish is unique, relevant and helpful to users
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, building organic traffic is tough and a slow process. Anything that claims to rapidly increase the traffic, may lead you to incur a Google penalty.
Conclusion
The web is no exception to the phrase “hard work always pays off”. If you are looking for more of organic traffic, you have to work hard for it.
Creating great content that is relevant and helpful to the users and provides them the exact solution that they are looking for will generate more organic traffic than any shortcut ever will.
That means going to the extra mile every time, chasing the opportunities that your competitors may miss, being consistent, making strategic use of guest blogging, and remaining good in Google’s view.
