10 Proven SEO Techniques To Solve Your Organic Traffic Problem

The primary objective of building a website for your business is to get more sales. Yes, you can build a website for free but you will still need to exert effort to design the layout and make it as captivating as possible. However, all the hard work does not stop there.

After you have developed your website, you’ll need to make it live so people can find you online. You’ll also need to promote your site to get more visitors. But to be able to grow your online audience steadily, you’ll need a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to drive more organic traffic to your site.

Organic traffic: what is it and why is it important?

Organic traffic is what inbound marketing is all about. It is the kind of traffic that comes from search engines, like Google and Bing, excluding paid ads. When a user clicks on any of the links on the search results pages, it is recorded in Google Analytics as organic search traffic.

Traffic that goes to your website does not only come from search engines. Your Analytics report will tell you that there are several types of traffic that your website can get:

• Paid traffic – comes from paid search ads including Google Ads
• Direct traffic – when a user visits your site by typing in the URL of your site
• Referral traffic – when a user clicks on your link on another website
• Social traffic – comes from social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms
• Display traffic – comes from paid ads from other sites
• Email traffic – generated from clicks on your email marketing

Organic traffic bears more weight than paid traffic or those from social media platforms. This is because organic traffic is targeted. Users who click on a link to a website listed on the search results pages have a very specific intent. When they go to your site and find the answer or solution to their query, those users will most likely be converted to new customers, which translates to more sales for your business.

Another reason why organic traffic is more valuable is that it helps increase your users’ trust in your brand and website. This is because people tend to have more trust in websites that rank in the top positions of search engine results pages. Needless to say, they are more likely to visit your site if you are positioned in the top three pages of SERPs.

Proven techniques to drive more organic traffic

Nowadays, there are many things that can distract users from clicking on organic search results. There are paid ads, scholarly articles, prominent knowledge panels, Google suggestions, and more. These distractions push organic listings on the SERPs, making things so much harder for a lot of marketers who rely greatly on organic search traffic.

So, what do you do to get a steady flow of organic traffic and more?

1. Investigate your site’s current search performance

Open Keyword Rank Checker to determine your page’s ranking based on a keyword search. This will help you determine which SEO techniques work and which do not. Also, it can keep you in the know about what your competitors are doing. This is especially useful if you’re trying to rank on competitive keywords. Additionally, checking your website performance will also provide you with context for assessing why your ranking is going down.

Identifying where your site ranks for certain keywords will also help you pinpoint problems with your click-through rates. If your CTR is below average, it could be an indication that your meta descriptions and page titles are not attracting more users to click on them.

Monitoring your site’s search performance can also help you see the volatility in search rankings so you can target better keywords. If you’re trying to rank a highly competitive keyword, it’s highly likely for your ranking to fluctuate. Sometimes, all you need to do is target a different keyword that has lesser volatility in ranking.

2. Improve user experience across your entire site

The role of search engines is to find the best possible results of every user’s query. If, for example, Google isn’t able to do this, it would be least likely for a user to use the search engine again. Can you imagine if millions of people choose other search engines over Google? It’s highly possible that their revenues will suffer. This is why the biggest search engine in the entire internet-verse is doing all they can – going the extra mile – to provide users with the best search engine results at all times.

Because of this, it’s important for your website to appease the Google gods by giving them a well-designed, optimized website that will offer useful, relevant, and factual information to users. This means that websites that are dodgy, load slow, and look amateurish are less likely to impress visitors and make them want to come back for more. This could also cost you a lot of potential customers and sales.

So, what do you need to do?

Enhance the user experience. How?

• Make all posts easy to read and of top-notch quality.
• Keep the flow by using a series of words that bridges one idea with another.
• Increase website speed.
• Use white space.
• Use high-quality images.
• Make calls to action visible.
• Make website pages consistent.
• Make website responsive and mobile-friendly.
• Use well-written headlines.
• Segment key information with bullet points.

3. Optimize your website for voice search

Nowadays, more and more people are using mobile phones with voice-activated speakers, which allow them to search for any information using voice. An estimated 65% of mobile phone users who own Google Home or Amazon Echo say they don’t want to go back to the days before they owned a smart speaker. Aside from that, two in five adults use voice search at least once a day. This is why should optimize your site for voice search.

There are several differences between voice search and traditional text search. A text search, for example, would be “diaper bags”, whereas, for voice search, it would look something like “what are the best diaper bags for twins?”. Voice searches tend to be questions and are given one answer, which often comes from a featured snippet. This is why you should aim to write for featured snippets to optimize your content for voice search.

When optimizing for voice search, you need to use long-tail keywords in long-form blogs posts. Make sure you position those keywords properly throughout your articles. Your content should be readable by using subheadings, bullet points, and questions where appropriate.

4. Opt for longer content

An SEO study revealed that long-form content tends to accumulate more backlinks, which can help boost your rankings and increase traffic. However, you should remember that writing over 2,000 words for every blog post is not necessary. Not to mention, intensive and time-consuming.

Users may only be spending a few minutes reading a few sentences to get an answer to their queries. This means that you should take into account the user intent to know how long or how short your content should be. Take, for example, the keywords “drive organic traffic to your site”. This phrase is for users who are looking for a comprehensive guide that will help them increase organic traffic to their site. In other words, you will need to write a longer blog post to explain everything and provide users with the best answer.

Don’t have the time to regularly create long-form content? Consider engaging the help of an experienced digital marketing agency or refresh old content and add new information to it. This is a good way to bring in new traffic because old content will already have authority and link equity in it.

5. Prioritize mobile friendliness and responsiveness

Voice search is important nowadays but mobile friendliness and responsiveness are quintessential in driving more organic traffic to your site simply because a majority of the searches take place on mobile devices nowadays. Aside from that, a majority of smartphone users have made at least one purchase using their mobile devices. What’s more, even when buyers are already in a physical store, they still use their mobile phones to read product reviews, search for more information, compare prices, or find alternative shops.

Another major reason to make sure your site is mobile-friendly and responsive is that Google has announced in March 2020 that it will primarily use its mobile smartphone user-agent to crawl and index sites. In other words, search engine bots will crawl and index mobile versions of websites first. This emphasizes the need for every website to focus on improving users’ mobile experience.

6. Optimize YouTube videos for SEO

YouTube videos are commonly featured in the SERPs. With more than two billion active users every month, there’s a huge chance that your videos will get a lot of views.

How do you optimize your YouTube videos for SEO?

1. Make your videos SEO-friendly with a compelling title and well-written descriptions.

2. Make thumbnails more enticing to increase the chances of users clicking on your videos’ links.

3. Create video playlists in your channel to encourage users to stay longer and interact with your content.

7. Diversify your link profile

Backlinks are still quite important to the SEO gods simply because it’s how search engine bots crawl through the rest of your site and also other sites. However, keep in mind that Google puts a lot of weight on quality. Spammy links can hurt your site, which would only be a waste of precious time and resources. However, your site can still get flagged if it’s peppered with extremely high-quality links, which may not make your content look natural.

What you need to do to improve your site and drive lots of organic traffic is to diversify your link profile and employ link building best practices. You will need links from both big and small sites to make your content look more natural to search engines.

8. Don’t ever overlook technical SEO

Doing so will make your site underperform, making your ranking plummet. What you need to do is to optimize your site to make it technically sound.

1. The entire site should loan on HTTPS.

2. Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to ensure responsive and mobile-friendly content.

3. Check the technical health of your site by investing in crawling software, which works similarly with search engine bots.

4. Correct semantic markups or HTML tags that emphasize what your site is all about.

5. Fix 404 errors by redirecting URLs to re-engage your users.

9. Don’t neglect local SEO

Whether you have a physical store or not, it’s important that you optimize your site for local SEO and listings. A study showed that almost half of all searches are from users looking for information on local businesses.

To optimize your site for local SEO, here are the things you need to look into.

1. Check local directory listings and make sure that all data is correct.

2. Build and optimize local landing pages and target related keywords on your site.

3. Carry out technical SEO for local searches to make your business discoverable online.

10. Evaluate SEO performance

Monitoring and reporting your SEO performance once you’ve implemented the changes is an extremely important step to ensure the health of your website. You will need to determine which content appealed to your audience, which part of the site has the most user experience issues, which page is least visited, which on-page SEO improvements resulted in higher rankings, and which style of keyword should you focus on.

Conclusion

Digital marketing and SEO best practices is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. In order for businesses and website owners to stay afloat, they need to adapt to the numerous changes as quickly as they can.

There are many things to consider when looking to drive more organic traffic to your site. Be sure to follow the tips mentioned above to get a good start!