Improving your online traffic to your website or other written content is essential to your online success. The tips to improve your online presence will help you cut through the clutter online and set your brand apart from the competition.
Looking to drive more online organic traffic to your website? These proven strategies will bring you more online organic visitors without needing pricey ad campaigns.
9 Proven Techniques to Improve Organic Website Traffic
1. Targets Keywords Intelligently
Keyword targeting is crucial to how you show up on search engines. Just picking random keywords will not bring you the best results and the right traffic to your site. Search engines consider the searcher’s intent, so thorough research is necessary when picking the right keywords to focus on your content strategy.
You can vastly improve your website’s organic traffic by targeting related keywords around one main topic. Great places to start generating ideas and gain insights into keyword volume are free tools like Answer the Public, Moz Explorer, Semrush, Google Ad Planner.
Keep in mind that high-volume keywords might be difficult for you to rank for. Vary your keywords so you are not left to compete with other websites. You need to have a healthy mix of high-search and medium to low-search keywords to gain traction with SEO.
Your keywords strategy should contain short (1-2 word) and long-term (3-5 word) keywords to provide the best search results for your audience. Remember, the goal is for your content to be a valuable resource, not more online noise.
Be sure you go through comprehensive keyword research and that you’re picking keywords that are related to your topic. Just because something is popular or trending and seeing a lot of search volume doesn’t mean you should target it. If it’s irrelevant to your niche, it won’t give you the kind of traffic you want for your products or services.
2. Don’t Cannibalize Your Keywords
Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your site target the same keyword with the same intent. Competition in SEO is tough enough without competing with yourself. The focus must be on the keyword’s intention within a customer journey.
Both pages can work with the same keyword if the resource on the page provides different information that will provide value for an audience.
You can check for keyword cannibalization by searching for the targeted keyword on Google or by using a keyword research tool like the ones mentioned above.
If you find that you have two pages of content that are essentially targeting the same thing, figure out which one performs better and merge the content. If the intention of the keywords is different, the pages can work together.
3. Stay Focused on User Intent
User intent is supremely important when choosing your keywords, and you need to keep it at the forefront of your organic campaigns. User intent is simply understanding what someone is looking for when searching online.
If your content doesn’t provide what the user wants, Google will move you down the ranks. The best and most efficient way to move up the ranks is to be a valuable resource to users at various stages of their journey.
By providing substantial and valuable content, your content will become a resource that will keep users on your page longer and build backlinks to your website, which shows search engines your page is a credible authority and should rank high.
4. Perform Intelligent Link Building
Link building can impact your organic traffic significantly and is a major factor in ranking on search engines. Links tell the search engine that you are a resource and that your intention is to provide value to the audience. Three types of links help generate rankings: internal, external, and backlinks.
Internal links connect to other resources within your website that pertain to what your content is about or might be valuable to the reader. Internal links keep your audience on your website by moving them through to relevant information that might benefit them.
External links connect to websites or other resources outside your website that will be of value to the reader. The important aspect of including external links is that your goal is to provide value, and if another resource has credible information, you want your audience to be able to locate it from your source. An important tip is to ensure that the external link always opens in a new tab so your website is still available if your audience wants to refer back to your website as a source.
The third link type is backlinks. These links come from an outside source to the content on your website. Backlinks essentially see your resources as credible sources and lead their readers to your web pages. It is important to remember that not every backlink is valuable. Only sites with a high domain authority (sites that search engines find credible) will be of value to your website. In contrast, backlinks from sites that search engines do not find credible will create red flags to search engines on the credibility of your website.
That said, you can’t simply drop some links on your pages and expect them to work wonders. You need to perform smart link building by adding descriptive text to your links. Most importantly, you must analyze your content to ensure your links are working and monitor all backlinks to your website to remove the toxic backlinks.
5. Improve Your Website’s Performance
Your website’s performance, or how fast it loads for your visitors, greatly impacts your rankings. Google weighs page performance heavily as they want to provide users with the best possible user experience on the sites they drive them to. Not only that but a slow-loading site—even if it’s found through Google—increases the bounce rate (time a visitor spends on your page) of your visitors.
The goal should always be a great user experience, including design, content, and performance.
You can up your performance by ensuring you have adequate web hosting. Be sure to go with a host that’s reliable and has a focus on server performance. You can also do things like removing or minimizing scripts and files that your website needs. Optimizing the images your website uses to increase the site’s performance is a great idea.
6. Don’t Forget About Mobile Devices
Mobile devices are fast becoming the primary way that people access the internet and are a major aspect of user experience. Over half of all page visits are from a smartphone or tablet. In other words, if your website isn’t responsive and works well on mobile devices, you’re giving a poor user experience to over half of your potential visitors.
If your website isn’t already responsive—meaning it adapts to the screen size of whatever device is accessing it—you need to make this a main focus of adjusting your website to be user-friendly. This is important to remember in your email marketing as well.
7. Content is King
The fact remains that there is no better way to improve your website’s authority and ranking while keeping users engaged than by creating great content!
Whether it’s a blog post, social media content, website content, or regular videos depends on your business and what works with your resources, but it needs to be the main focus of your content marketing strategy. The point is to keep your site moving up in organic rankings. You should be producing regular, high-quality content. Otherwise, your competitors will drown you out with their own content.
New content is immensely important, but there’s an upside to your commitment to all that old content you produced that’s simply sitting on your website.
According to HubSpot, updating and republishing old content with new text and images increases organic traffic by up to 106 percent. In other words, if you have a lot of old content that hasn’t been touched in some time, you can potentially double your organic traffic by simply polishing it up and republishing it.
8. Off-Page Promotion
Once you have some content on your website, you need to focus on driving traffic to those pages. This is where social media comes into play. Use your social media channels to promote your content and drive engagement from your platforms to your website.
This is beneficial in two ways. One, it builds your following on social media, which helps build community and is another way for your business to connect with your audience. It is an avenue to put your expertise in front of your audience in a way that provides value and open communication. The second is that the more eyes you can get on your content, the more search engines see its value, thus increasing rankings.
9. Measure SEO Performance
Two of the most critical elements of good SEO are reporting and analytics. Effective reporting can tell you what content appealed to your visitors, which part of your site had the most user experience issues, and which pages on your site were least—and most—visited. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, to retrieve and understand these metrics and reports, you need good tools at your disposal. There are many tools available to truly take your SEO to the next level, such as Semrush, and tools to install on your website, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Hotjar, to name a few.
Properly using these tools will take you a long way in measuring your site’s performance and website credibility.
Keeping Up With SEO
Search engine results pages (SERPS) are the main goal of any content you create. Search engines like Google are constantly improving their algorithms and how websites are ranked. And this is undoubtedly a good thing, but it creates an onus of responsibility on business owners and marketers to keep up with the rapid changes.
Measuring your SEO and website performance, improving your content creation and user experience, and ensuring your technical website performance is crucial to succeeding in the ever-changing landscape.
There’s a lot to take in, but if you try to understand the basic principles of SEO and apply some of the techniques found here, it’ll make a profound difference in your engagement, click-through rates, and rankings.
For more tips to improve your online traffic and other resources on SEO, visit our SEO Marketing services.
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