What is Organic Traffic and a Fool-Proof Formula to Increase Website Traffic

Organic traffic is necessary for conversions and sales. But what is organic traffic? Building organic traffic isn’t easy. Here’s a fool-proof traffic building formula.

In 1994, there were 3,000 websites. In 2014, that number surpassed the 1 billion mark. Today, there are about 1.9 billion websites.

There’s a lot of competition out there when it comes to increasing your traffic. If it’s in your budget, you can pay for the competitive edge. But if you want sustainable results, your best bet is to take steps to drive organic traffic.

If you’re new to the online world of money-making, you’re probably wondering: what is organic traffic and how do you get more of it? The good news is, there are a number of cost-effective methods to increase organic traffic. Combining all of these gives you a foolproof formula to building a strong online presence.

Keep reading to learn more about organic traffic and what you should be doing to bring more of it to your website.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the best way to drive the number of views on your website. That, in turn, drives conversions (aka sales).

Organic traffic is any traffic that is generated without the use of paid advertising. It’s traffic that comes to your site from natural, editorial search results on any given search engine.

60% of all traffic comes from an organic search. A user that types what they’re looking for finds your site in the results and clicks in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an entire industry created for the sole purpose of increasing organic traffic. It uses an understanding of search engine ranking algorithms to help websites rank higher in search engine results.

What Are the Benefits of Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic benefits your business in the following ways.

• Bringing more traffic to your website means more conversions. The more people land on your site and read your content, the more sales you can expect.
• Organic traffic helps you rank higher on search engines. Higher ranking leads to even more traffic which, in turn, leads to more sales.
• Organic traffic builds trust and credibility with your clientele. The higher you rank, the more authority your page has. That lets people know they can trust your product or service.
• Organic traffic is inexpensive (in terms of money but not so much in terms of time spent). To increase organic traffic, you don’t have to invest advertising dollars. You also don’t have to buy any software or programs that analyze keywords or build links.
• In comparison to paid traffic campaigns, organic traffic is more sustainable. We’ll talk more about this below.

The Problems with Paying for Traffic

Paying for traffic is a tempting strategy for increasing your views and driving sales, but there are drawbacks to this approach.

Automated Clicks

When you pay for traffic, there’s a good chance you’ll get bots, crawlers and automated machines clicking into your page. Machines don’t purchase products or services, so these clicks don’t lead to sales.

Organic traffic brings real human traffic to your website. Real visitors can make purchases and increase your conversions.

Lack of Consistency

Facebook promoted posts, Google AdWords, and other paid traffic methods give you results immediately. You’re paying money to increase your traffic numbers.

The problem with this approach is that it’s unsustainable. When you stop paying money for the ads and other paid traffic, the traffic will stop coming.

On the other hand, organic traffic will continue to drive traffic for weeks, months and possibly even years. Once you’ve put in the effort to create organic traffic and get your website ranking higher, organic traffic drives itself. This also gives you a competitive edge on your competitors who aren’t doing the same work for organic traffic.

The Formula for Increasing Organic Traffic

Below are all the things you should be doing to increase organic traffic to your site as well as the actionable items for immediate implemtation.

Create Good Content

Forget about posting 20 pages per week. You can’t write that much content and maintain quality – and quality is key to organic traffic.

Having lots of low-quality pages won’t help your performance on search engine results pages. Instead, focus on publishing only high-quality content that provides value you to your customers.

Why? Because search engines are smart. They know when your content is valuable to your customer and when it isn’t. Publishing quality content is going to help you rank better and drive organic traffic.

In addition, if you’re content is good enough and provides enough value, your customers will want to share it. That will bring you even more organic traffic.

What To Do

Have a look through the pages on your site and all of your published content and take the following steps:

• Remove content that doesn’t have links, traffic or conversions. Remove any pages that are irrelevant to your niche.
• Improve published content if there is a chance it will help increase traffic. Add keys words and links, which we’ll talk more about later.
• Leave any content that already has a lot of traffic and conversions. Use these as examples when improving your content with less traffic and conversions.

Use Long Tail Key Phrases

A lot of people focus on using broad keywords to drive traffic. While these keywords get searched often, that means your competition is going to be using them too. You’d have to use them so efficiently and often that you rank among the thousands of other people using them and make sure your site is picked.

Instead, use long-tail key phrases. This will help you bring more targeted traffic to your site. The more targeted your audience is, the better chance you have at converting them.

What To Do

Be more specific with your keywords than just what you offer. Instead of “best pizza”, try including the geographic area that you offer that item. “Best pizza in Quietville Virginia” is going to bring a more specific audience to your site during an organic search.

You can also narrow down your customer base in your long-tail keyword phrases. “Best pizza for vegans in Quietville Virginia” will help you rank higher in an organic search when vegans from that geographic region are looking to order a pizza.

Post Consistently

Don’t worry about timing and days and just focus on consistently and regularly posting content. Search engines like websites that are updated frequently and they’ll rank you higher depending on how updated you are.

Users like it too. If they like that you’re posting, and you’re posting it regularly, they’ll keep coming back for more of the same. That makes them more likely to share your content, which will boost organic traffic even more.

What To Do

Aim to post content at least once a week. The more you post and the more updated you are, the better. But if you’re unable to post more than once a week while maintaining high quality, then stick to the minimum.

Guest Posting

Your website authority is important to your ranking. The higher you rank, the more likely a user is to click on your site.

Websites can gain authority based on how old they are. They can also gain authority when other authority websites mention and link to them.

Although the value of external links may go down because Google doesn’t like link building schemes, guest posting is still a valuable tool for driving organic traffic.

How? It brings your content to the attention of an entirely new audience.

What To Do

It’s not enough to have links to your website all over the internet from various other websites. The value of external links is in the quality of the site that’s linking back to you.

Look for opportunities to create external links with websites that have a high authority, high-quality content and good organic traffic. Low authority sites with low traffic aren’t going to do much for your own traffic and may not be worth the time and effort.

You should also look to guest post on sites that are within or related to your product or service. Exposure to an audience that falls outside of your niche risks the chance that they aren’t at all interested in what you have to offer. Even if they click through to your site, the likelihood that they’ll be coming back or sharing is small.

Another good practice is to promote your guest post in the same way you’d promote your own content. If you use social media trends for promotion, then promote your guest post there as well.

Use Ethical SEO Practices

To drive organic traffic and increase your rank, you have to comply with Google. Considering that Google dominates the search engine market, and has since 1997, you want to be sure that you’re complying with their standards and best practices.

If you don’t comply and you break the rules, Google will not only not rank your site well, they may even take your pages down.

What To Do

When aiming to increase your organic traffic with the aforementioned formula, keep these items in mind:

• Don’t ever pay for inbound links.
• Make sure your external links are of high quality. On the flip side, don’t post guest posts on your site that aren’t high quality.
• Don’t publish scraped or stolen content.
• Don’t use anchor texts that are an exact match to the site they’re linking to.
• Use an SEO report to check how much Google likes your site.

Ready to Increase Your Organic Traffic?

So, what is organic traffic? In a nutshell, it’s a cost-effective method for driving conversions.

If you’re ready to start selling more online, contact us to learn more about how we use SEO to drive organic traffic.