Gaining online traffic seems to be core for online presence. Although there are paid ways to grow traffic, it can be done organically as well. The question here is how? Before that let’s understand what is organic traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the traffic which comes or visits a website led by search results. For this the website content needs to be based on the principles of SEO or search engine optimisation such that the visitors get their query result on top and visit the website or page.
Website traffic can be increased organically by optimising content following different techniques. Let us take a look at them one by one.
- Check where your website stands: Before you start measuring your efforts to grow organic traffic, it is essential to know where your website presently stands. So, start with your current search engine ranking, number of viewers on your site each month, source of traffic, average time spent, bounce rate, page views among other matrices.
- Analyse your competitors’ success: Along with assessing your website’s present status, it is important to analyse your competitors as well. The better you understand your competitors’ SEO strategy, you will be able to figure out your website’s strategy to compete with them. One way to find out is analysing your competitors’ best performance pages such that you know the source of their traffic and what is driving it. Analysing the top pages can help you to figure out content or keyword gap, improvisation of content, link gap among others.
- Keyword strategy- It is human nature to click on the top results of a search query. Here, keywords play a crucial role when it comes to ranking your content in response to a search engine query. It is important to have proper keyword strategy such as using the right set of keywords as per your content and place them in the article headlines, website’s architecture, URLs, and throughout the content wisely, rather than stuffing the content with keywords. Use of long tail keywords help to narrow down traffic to prospective leads. Furthermore, applying keywords in the article headlines, URL and website architecture can also change the game.
- On-page SEO- Imagine that you have published high-quality content but still not able to gain traffic. So, here comes on-page SEO to your rescue. On-page SEO is all about optimising your content as much as possible. The process of on-page SEO includes interlinking your content with other relevant pages which guide readers to dig deeper into the website and keep them stay longer. This improves average time spent on your website while reducing the bounce rate. Backlinks are another great way to grow website traffic organically. Backlinks are also among the top-ranking factors by Google. Anchor text further refers to hyperlink clickable or visible words to internal and external URLs, as a result of which search engines reward your website for linking to related and high-ranking content.
- Optimise Titles, Alt tags and Meta descriptions- Titles, alt tags and meta descriptions play a crucial role in growing traffic organically. The titles of the blog should be clear and concise, consisting of the required keywords phrase to be on the top of search engine rankings. The tiles should be written to the point such that it does not confuse the audience. Alt tags which refer to descriptions added to an image should be natural and not keyword stuffed. Furthermore, meta descriptions that show up below the link of search engine result pages should be descriptive enough to convince your viewers as well as search engines about your page link. If the meta description is not written properly then users might avoid clicking it.
- Look after your bounce rate: Your website’s bounce rate depicts the percentage of people who clicked on to your website’s link but immediately left within seconds. This implies that the users did not find anything relevant or had a bad experience or the page has a lengthy load time, or the website is not mobile responsive. Therefore, bounce rate is an essential factor to consider while making a strategy to grow your website’s traffic organically. Furthermore, Google also does not show pages with high bounce rate in its search results as a low bounce rate shows that the content on your website is not valuable to users and do not need to be shown frequently.
- Human-first approach- While working on the website content it is important to remember that you are writing for a human and not a machine. Use of keywords in the content is inevitable but writing poor quality content, stuffed with keywords can no way get traffic on your website. The information given should be unique, informative, and relevant to the theme chosen. Hence, to rank on top in the search engines your content should appeal to the readers. If readers do not find your content relevant even search engines cannot help you.
- Work re-work on your content- Blogs build online presence and establish subject authority. This form of content creates a catalogue of your domain knowledge and drives people to your website organically. Re-work on the older blogs can also help to increase traffic. This is because readers are always on a look out of something or the other; hence, the topic written two years might not suffice today’s context and answers questions of the readers. Moreover, refurbishing your old content not only can increase traffic but will further show that your website content is regularly updated as per the current trends and provide relevant information. Also, while working on the content, it is important to write quality and informative ones along with the keywords.
- Organised and structured content- Search engines comprise of crawlers which index your website based on the structure of the website and its content. Imagine your blog has all the information but in a scattered way, readers will not come to your site and will impact the search engine result. Hence, you should use categories or tags for your content properly, and provide information in an organised flow such that the search engines can index it correctly and readers also enjoy reading it.