The sustenance of your website relies on the traffic it receives. Our main goal in SEO is to generate the highest amount of “organic traffic” possible. Ideally, the organic traffic consists of quality leads who are genuinely interested in your brand.
This article will explore effective strategies and provide tips to increase organic traffic in the upcoming year. Our aim is to provide the necessary tools to excel in SEO and stand out from the abundance of irrelevant and outdated advice.
Are you ready? Keep moving!
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to web traffic that comes from search engines. Search engines assess the usefulness and relevance of websites to users’ searches and rank them accordingly. Websites with high ratings generally receive more organic traffic compared to lower-ranked ones.
The main goal of SEO is to ensure that individuals can find what they are searching for quickly and effortlessly. For instance, it is more logical to type “shoe” rather than “buy shoes” in a search field if you wish to buy a pair of shoes.
When formulating an effective SEO strategy, it is crucial to prioritize the creation of top-notch content, the establishment of authority and trust, the optimization of your website, the utilization of social media, and the tracking of results.
Several tactics can be employed to boost organic traffic on your site.
Let’s examine in more detail the methods for increasing the organic traffic to your website.
7 Ways to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website
Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization occurs when you choose to target a repetitive key phrase on several pages of your website.
Keyword cannibalization refers to the situation wherein one of your pages consumes the traffic of another page. This occurs when multiple pages, including two or more, vie against each other by attempting to rank for a comparable search on a single page.
Tips to Fix Keyword Cannibalization
- Find out if any page is cannibalizing other traffic. You can do that by searching the “site:yourwebsite.com keyword” on Google. You can also use tools like Ahrefs for this.
- If you can, merge the content of both pages and delete the least performing one. Add 301 redirects while merging your content so you don’t lose any backlinks. If you can’t merge the pages, change the focus keyword, context, and anchor text.
- List all your website URLs and their focus keyword in a spreadsheet. Check for any duplicate values. If there are, act accordingly.
- You can also delete the page if you don’t need it on your website. If you want to keep the page but avoid cannibalization, you can de-index the pages. De-indexing will make sure that the pages will be on your site but won’t rank on SERPs.
- Use the rel = ”canonical” attribute to define a page as the main page if 2 of your pages have similar content. This will make sure that the main page will be indexed on the search engine.
Focus On Improving Page Speed
According to the report, it is an essential element in enhancing user experience.
- 40% of the users abandon the website that takes over 3 seconds to load, and 80% of visitors won’t return.
- Slow-loading websites cost retailers a loss of $2.6 billion every year in sales.
Google will penalize your website’s rank if it determines that users are spending less time on it, resulting in decreased visibility and ultimately impacting your organic traffic as users find it difficult to locate your site.
Tips to Improve Page Speed
- Enable browser caching for faster website loading on returning visits.
- Reduce server response time up to 200ms.
- Remove any script you’re using on the page. Compress images under 100KB to use on your page.
- Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to under 150KB. You can use Textfixer, and Gzip for this.
- Check and improve your page loading speed and server response time for both mobile and desktop to make sure no visitor leaves your site because of sluggish speed.
- Gtmetrix and Pingdom are some of the best tools you can use to test your page load time and site speed and improve it with these steps to boost organic traffic to your site.
Update Titles & Description Tags
Updating your titles and description tags is a straightforward and powerful method to enhance your website’s organic traffic. This is because these tags act as concise summaries of your page, assisting search engines and users in comprehending the content you offer. By doing this, your click-through rates improve, and user engagement is boosted, bringing interested users to your content.
To update the titles and description tags, adhere to the following step-by-step process:
- Use relevant keywords: Incorporate keywords that reflect your content into your titles and descriptions. This helps search engines and users identify what your page is about.
- Keep them concise: Make sure your titles and descriptions are brief and to the point. This can make them easier to read and understand, which is important for capturing users’ attention.
- Make them unique: Avoid using the same titles and descriptions across multiple pages. This can lead to confusion for search engines and users, as well as lower rankings for your website.
Analyze Your Keyword Gaps
To increase organic traffic to your website, a recommended approach is to analyze keywords associated with your business or industry that are not currently being targeted. After compiling a list of relevant keywords, it is beneficial to compare them with the keywords that your website currently ranks for.
Once you have recognized these gaps, generate content that is specially aimed at those keywords, like blog posts or landing pages. This will enhance your probability of achieving a higher ranking in search engine results for those keywords. However, remember to consistently monitor your progress and adapt your approach when necessary.
Create Quality Content
Creating quality content is another crucial method to increase website traffic. It plays a fundamental role in SEO by assisting your business to establish authority. Ways in which you can generate quality content consist of:
- Write Long-Form Content: Long-form content is often ranked higher by search engines, so try to write content that is 2,000 words or longer. However, it’s important to make sure the content is relevant, valuable, and engaging.
- Use Multimedia: Including multimedia, such as images, videos, and infographics, can make your content more engaging and shareable. This can help increase your organic traffic by encouraging social sharing.
- Stay Current: Keep your content up-to-date with the latest trends, news, and events in your industry. This shows that you’re actively engaged in your industry and can be a trustworthy source.
Publish Reviews & Testimonials
By providing reviews and testimonials, you can demonstrate to potential customers that your product or service is a worthwhile investment. This form of social proof establishes the credibility of your business and conveys customer satisfaction with your offerings.
When customers provide reviews and testimonials, it helps your search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines favor original and recent content, and user-generated reviews provide a valuable source of new content that can enhance your rankings. Additionally, they allow you to include specific keywords and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for businesses similar to yours.
In order to motivate customers to provide reviews and testimonials, you have the option to provide incentives such as discounts or complimentary items. Furthermore, you can simplify the process by automatically sending review requests once a purchase or service has been finalized. It is important to remember to keep track of your reviews and promptly address any negative feedback so as to demonstrate your concern for your customers’ experiences.
Use Backlinks
One alternative method of increasing organic traffic is through the utilization of backlinks. These backlinks, originating from external websites, serve as an essential aspect in evaluating the credibility and significance of your website to search engines. By incorporating backlinks, you are essentially informing search engines that other websites have confidence in your content and are willing to link it back, thus potentially enhancing your rankings on search engines.
There are various ways to enhance your website traffic using backlinks. An ordinary approach involves producing top-notch content that appeals to other websites, such as blog posts, articles, videos, or other informative, helpful, or entertaining types of content. Another method is to engage in online communities and forums that are relevant to your industry or niche. By sharing your expertise and actively participating in discussions, you can establish connections with other website owners who may be inclined to link back to your content.
Using anchor text is one way to improve search engine rankings by utilizing backlinks. Anchor text, the text within the link, helps search engines assess the connected content’s relevancy.
