Wondering how to increase website traffic organically? Website traffic can be one of the hardest things to attain organically. With paid marketing, you can simply turn on traffic like a tap! But this isn’t great if you don’t have the budget to play with and see how your campaign performs. If you’re on a tight budget, but have the time to create content, organic traffic might be the answer. Or you can spend some time on organic traffic, while also running paid adverts.
The niche you are in, and the topic you create content for will have a large part to play in your organic traffic. In a competitive niche such as affiliate marketing, you can spend a lot longer creating organic traffic than in a less competitive niche. Organic traffic is typically created through content. You can either build a blog and post regular articles, or upload videos to YouTube and create content that way. A combination of the two can also be a good idea.
How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Blogging
Blogging on a website is a strategy used for organic traffic, but it can take some time. There’s lots of competition on Google and according to your topic and your desire for success, this can take months or even years to accomplish. Finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty can help. This strategy allows the blogger to target specific keywords which offer lower competition than most. If successful, these blog posts will reach the first page of Google, or other search engines and attract free organic traffic.
You can use plugins like Yoast SEO to help you write your content with SEO in mind. See best free plugins for WordPress. This plugin will help you write content based around your chosen keyword. There’s no guarantee of ranking at the top of Google for your main keyword though. Some will do better than others. The key is to create good quality content and outperform the competition by writing better content that those which already rank on Google.
Back linking is a major factor to organic traffic. Most high ranking websites on Google will have many backlinks and a high domain authority. You can build back links by writing quality content, reaching out to other bloggers and asking to do guest posts and sharing content throughout your social media profiles. Backlinks are built up over time and should be natural. Google will spot an unnatural back link profile and you could be penalised for attempting to “gear” the system by building links too quickly. Where your links come from is an important factor too. Spammy sites won’t fair as well as high quality websites within your niche.
Make blogging on a regular basis a habit as one means of attracting organic search traffic.
How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Promotion
Just creating blogs on a regular basis might not be enough though to attract the traffic you really want. You also need to promote your content as much as possible. A blog post will largely be invisible unless you promote it. Do this through your social media websites and other sites.
Link back from YouTube from videos you create and upload. Place share buttons on your website to encourage others to share on social media. You can also use a clever plugin called Revive Old Posts which will syndicate your older content through your social media platforms. See best free plugins for WordPress.
You should also build an email list from your website. Each post you publish can be shared with your list of email subscribers. Use newly published posts you write to link back to older posts. using deep linking. Deep linking tells Google (and other search engines) the keyword/s you want to rank each page for. It helps with your SEO (search engine optimisation).
Content Is King
Content is king. Google uses multiple indicators to determine how to rank your website. Content is pretty important because Google can see how people react to it in several ways: whether people naturally link to it, how long they stay on your page, if they take any action on your site and click on any of your links. So writing quality content should be a priority if you want organic traffic to your website.
Don’t write only for SEO. Use an SEO plugin to help you, but write content for your readers not for the search bots! Ideally write at least 1000 words per article, ideally more. Much of the highest ranking content will be over 1000 words long. If you find content ranking for your chosen keywords, have a look at it and create content which is better than the best performing article.
Multiple Traffic Strategies
Once you’ve published your content don’t expect Google to place your content at the top of the search engines, even if you’ve done everything right! It might not or it might take months before it recognises it. To give your content the best possible chance, assume it won’t get ranked and share and promote it as much as possible.
Use the plugins I’ve shared in this article to help: social share plugins, Revive Old Posts etc. Push Engage is another great plugin which will help you get more people to your blog posts. It allows visitors to opt in to updates. They’ll get automatic notifications when you publish new content.
Quora.com is another great source for organic traffic if you use it correctly. With Quora you can answer questions relevant to your content and post your website content underneath. Be careful not to spam your links without first providing some good answers and content. See also affiliate marketing on Quora. There’ definitely quite a bit of work in building organic traffic. But if you take steps every day and keep doing it for long enough, you’ll build up organic traffic over time.
Using YouTube With Your Website
It’s well worth getting a YouTube account and using it to upload videos too. Create videos which are relevant to your website content and link back to your articles. This will have a two-fold benefit. You’ll be building back links yourself which will help with SEO, and you’ll find visitors will also come from your YouTube videos to your website too. The will find your videos according to the keywords you have put in your video title and descriptions.
So before uploading your videos, it’s well worth doing some keyword research to see which keywords give you the best chance for success. A short title might not give you the best opportunity to get your videos found. Type your keywords into the YouTube search bar and see what comes up. Then look at the competition to determine the best keywords to use. See also long tail keyword benefits.
How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Paid Ads
You can also consider running some paid advertising to your website. Although this doesn’t fall into the definition of “organic marketing”, over the longer term, more visitors to your website means more data for Google, and potentially more shares on social media sites and more back links. If your content is good, remember content is king, this is more likely. Therefore a stint of paid marketing will pay you back in good will!
One strategy I use for my blogs is Google Adwords Dynamic ads. With dynamic ads, you can take a generic advert and apply it to all your content throughout your website/blog. Search queries are automatically directed to the most relevant content from your advert. You can also set a very small budget and give your website traffic an instant boost using this strategy.
Facebook can be a great source for organic traffic. I’ve already shared how important sharing content throughout social media is. But with Facebook you can also create a business page to connect with your website.
This again shows the search engines that you’re relevant on social media and not just a spammy lone website! Connect your Facebook business page with your website so that updates are automatically shown on your website. I’m using Smash Balloon customer Facebook feed on this website.
A good idea before you create your business page is to research carefully the name you choose. A good name for a business page can show up on the Google search results and through a Facebook search, so you can pick up passing traffic through using one. Share content through your page and interact with people on Facebook to encourage interaction and over time this can be a source of organic traffic too.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a free service which definitely deserves a mention here. Although this service is mostly for physical businesses (based in a physical location), depending on your specific niche it can help you with another organic trickle of traffic.
Using your home address for an internet based business can work with Google My Business. All you need is a verifiable address to work from and you can have a free listing.
Again, find keywords which are most appropriate for your business. Verify your listing when Google sends out the code and you’ll get a listing. Other free listings are available too with companies like Bing and Yell.com. Search for “free business listing”.