Organic traffic remains an important aspect of achieving sustainable growth for websites. Unlike paid advertisements that offer short-term boosts, organic traffic can provide long-lasting benefits without needing you to pay extra for it. On top of that, consistent organic traffic can also help build your brand’s presence and reputation over time.
Want to know what you can do to improve your site’s organic traffic in 2024? Keep on reading below!
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who arrive at a website through unpaid sources (as opposed to paid traffic). Organic traffic is driven by users' interest in the content or offerings on your website, rather than through paid advertising or promotions. Most times, these are the people who discover your site through search engines such as Google.
What Are The Benefits of Investing in Organic Traffic?
Relevance
Gaining organic traffic is highly relevant because it comes from users who are actively searching for information, products, or services related to your niche. This means that people who visit your site are more likely to be genuinely interested in your offerings, thus it can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Cost-Effective Solution
Investing in organic traffic is a cost-effective way to market your business. While you need to spend time and resources on SEO initially, it leads to long-term benefits. Unlike paid ads, which require ongoing costs, organic traffic keeps coming without additional expenses, giving you more value for your investment.
Strong Relationship with Customers
Organic traffic also plays a crucial role in helping you to build strong relationships with customers by fostering trust and credibility. By consistently providing valuable and relevant information, you strengthen your relationship with your audience, leading to higher loyalty, repeat visits, and positive word-of-mouth. This interaction will strengthen the bond between your brand and your audience, creating a loyal customer base.
12 Ways to Increase Your Organic Traffic
1. Create a Content and Publish Them Regularly
Creating high-quality content and publishing them regularly is the ultimate key strategy to increase the site's organic traffic. Regularly updating your blog is crucial for driving a continuous flow of organic traffic to your website.
To ensure you don’t get overwhelmed when managing your content, it is essential to develop a content schedule or calendar to maintain consistent publishing. A well-organized content calendar not only brings structure to your blog but also encourages visitors to return frequently for new content. This consistency helps in building a loyal readership and ensures a steady stream of organic traffic to your site.
If you want to know more about how to develop your content strategy, you can read here.
2. Optimize Content for Humans
One of the most significant mistakes companies make when attempting to boost organic web traffic is optimizing their sites solely for search engines. This approach is particularly critical to avoid in 2024!
While it's true that search engines determine your ranking, they heavily rely on user behavior to do so. Metrics such as dwell time, the number of pages visited, and overall engagement are key indicators of how much users value your site. If visitors spend a lot of time on your site and explore multiple pages, it signals search engines that your content is useful and relevant. On the other hand, if your site isn't tailored to meet your audience's needs, users are likely to leave quickly, leading to higher bounce rates, lower rankings, and decreased organic traffic.
3. Optimize Content for the Featured Snippet
If you want to increase organic traffic to your website, you should also aim to optimize your content to appear in the featured snippet. The featured snippet is a prominent box at the top of search results that provides direct answers to user queries. Securing the featured snippet can significantly boost your organic traffic. So, how do you attain this valuable featured snippet position?
While there’s no guaranteed method, several strategies can improve your chances, such as, directly answering queries with bulleted lists or delivering short and straightforward answers in your article. Additionally, you should also ensure to integrate your core keyword into the section you aim to optimize for the snippet.
4. Focus On Relevant Keywords
Keywords are essential for helping Google’s algorithm understand the topic of your blog post. To find suitable keywords for your niche, you can use tools like Google Search Console or Google Keyword Planner. Other great sources for keyword ideas include Answer The Public, WordStream, Ubersuggest, and paid tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or MOZ.
In the beginning, it is better if you focus on less competitive keywords to increase the chance of your content being discovered. If you start by immediately targeting a broad keyword, then it will be difficult for your content to rank high since you will be competing against high-authority sites like YouTube and Wikipedia. Once you have a list of potential keywords, you can proceed by creating a content strategy. Aim to target one main keyword per blog post to avoid keyword cannibalization. Use them strategically in the title, meta description, introduction, conclusion, and at least once in the body of the post.
5. Utilize “People Also Ask” and FAQ sections
You can also target the People Also Ask (PAA) and FAQ sections by directly addressing related questions to increase organic traffic. To utilize these two, you should first find the list of questions in the “People Also Ask” sections. You can answer them either directly on your content or create another section such as FAQ to answer those. Utilizing these two will add significant value to your page, providing quick answers to user questions and attracting more organic traffic to your site.
6. Perform Regular Technical SEO Audit
Performing a regular technical audit helps increase organic traffic by identifying issues that could hinder your site's performance in search engines. After conducting a thorough technical audit, you can implement some technical SEO best practices to enhance your site. Optimizing the technical aspects of your site will make it more accessible and attractive to search engines, leading to higher rankings and more organic traffic.
7. Target Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords
Targeting low-hanging fruit keywords—those with lower competition and moderate search volume—can quickly boost organic traffic. By focusing on these easier-to-rank-for terms, you can achieve higher rankings in search results faster, driving more relevant traffic to your site. This strategy helps build authority and visibility, leading to incremental gains in traffic that can compound over time as you target more competitive keywords
8. Earn Backlinks
Backlinks play a crucial role in establishing your site's credibility and authority in the eyes of Google. By acquiring quality backlinks, you can elevate your site's ranking in organic search results and attract a greater number of organic traffic. While the process of building backlinks can be challenging, cultivating a stellar backlink portfolio is an effective strategy for boosting your authority and driving more visitors to your site.
9. Optimize Title Tag and Meta Description
When users search and see your site through the search engine, the title tag and meta description are the first things they notice. If these components don't capture their attention, you're missing a crucial chance to increase organic traffic to your website.
The title tag and meta description can significantly influence whether someone clicks on your listing. By optimizing these elements, you can attract more clicks, boosting your organic traffic. To optimize your meta tag, here are the ultimate two things you should do:
- Title Tag: Keep it within 60 characters and place your core keyword at the beginning to signal relevance to both search engines and users. Make the title tag engaging and enticing to encourage clicks.
- Meta Description: Limit it to 160 characters and include your core keyword. The meta description should give a clear idea of what to expect on your page.
Optimizing these components can significantly improve your click-through rate, leading to more organic traffic.
10. Refresh Pages with Outdated Information
If you have some blog posts that have been neglected for over a year, they could still be valuable assets for driving organic traffic, as long as you update them with new information.
Begin by conducting keyword research to identify which older posts have the potential to rank. Do keep in mind that keyword trends are always evolving, so you should ensure the keywords you target are still relevant. Next, you should analyze top-ranking posts in search results related to your topic. Look for opportunities to enhance your old posts by adding missing information or offering unique insights.Finally, give your old posts a makeover by rewriting and updating them with fresh content.
Once revised, republish them with an updated date to signal their relevance to both readers and search engines. This strategy can breathe new life into your old content and attract more organic traffic to your site.
11. Redirect Dead Pages with Backlinks
Redirecting dead pages (pages that no longer exist or are no longer relevant) that have backlinks pointing to them is crucial for maintaining your website's SEO health. To identify dead pages, you can use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs. After getting your dead pages list, you should then determine the appropriate redirect response. You can use 301 redirects for a permanent move of your dead page URL to another URL, or 302 redirects for a temporary move to another URL.When performing redirects, ensure that you are moving the page to another page that closely matches the content of the dead page to maintain relevance for users and search engines.
12. Utilize Social Media
Leveraging social media is also a great strategy to gain organic traffic. However, utilizing social media is more than just sharing links. You should create content that resonates with your audience and encourages sharing. To make your content more impactful, you should tailor your content to fit each social media platform. There are lots of popular social media platforms available nowadays, but each platform has its own audience with distinct preferences on how content should be presented. For example, Twitter thrives on concise and short posts, while Instagram is all about eye-catching visuals.
By customizing content to suit these different styles, you'll better engage your audience and boost overall reach.Social media can expose your content to a wider audience and help to drive more traffic to your site. Thus why, this is one of the best strategies you can implement to increase organic traffic in 2024.
Increase Site Organic Traffic with Cardinal Digital!
If you want to achieve sustainable success for your site and business, it is important to aim for getting a high number of organic traffic. This way, you don’t have to spend extra money to ensure your site is always on top of people's minds. Want to increase your website's organic traffic but don’t want to be bothered with the aspects that we’ve mentioned above? Worry not, and let Cardinal Digital help you out on your SEO journey to attract organic traffic!
