How to increase organic online traffic to your business and website [Part 2 of 3]

Continuing on from the previous blog post about organic online traffic, we will now take a closer look at 12 things you can do to increase this for your own business and website.

SEO Strategy

1. Create content for users

We all get bombarded with content, such as social posts, emails, ads, and so on. A lot of the time, it is irrelevant to us, and may even annoy us. That is why it is so important to create content for users, that is actually valuable to them. This is done by focusing on their needs, rather than your needs. Before creating content, stop and think of who your audience is, what interests them, what drives them, and how you can help them.

For example, if someone is interested in buying a car, they will probably not search for “I want to buy a car now”. Rather, they may search for “how do I pick the right family car”, “which electric car should I choose”, or “should I lease or buy a car”. In this case, make sure you have content that helps answer their questions – such as “10 things to think about when buying a family car”, “The difference between electric and hybrid cars”, and “The difference between leasing and buying a car”. This increases the chances that these users will click on your content, and you can start connecting with them.

2. Start a blog

As discussed above, creating customer-centric content is key. Naturally, this means you need to host the content somewhere. Content that is meant to solve specific problems for specific audiences, may not be fitting for your website’s main pages, which is what makes a blog so great.

If you start a blog, it can be used to attract your target audience, by providing them with value without asking for anything in return. A blog can also be used to establish authority; to show that your company knows what you are doing and offer information to your audience. This way, you will build trust and credibility. When in need of the latest update on the subject, your blog can be a place your audience to turn to. In the long-term, building this connection will help warm up your audience, nurture them, and later have them convert.

3. Keyword Research – Find your organic traffic potential

We have covered the fact that you need to create content that speaks directly to the user, but how do you do that? Keyword research is a great place to start!

Keywords are what words users type into search engines to find what they are looking for. If someone searches for “best family car”, these are keywords. Some keyword searches are long, while others are short. Either way, keyword research identifies what keywords your audience uses. Therefore, this tells you what keywords you should include in your content. Without relevant keywords, search engines will not know what your business is about, or when to showcase your website. When you include relevant keywords in your content, you will appear higher on a search engine results page (SERP), and therefore increase organic traffic. This is what keyword research is all about!

Remember that keyword research is an ongoing process. Check your keywords and rankings frequently, to understand what your audience is interested in, and thereby, what content you should create.

There are several tools that can help you do keyword research, such as Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz.

4. Identify high potential keywords with low competition

On top of telling you what people search for, keyword research will also help you understand where you rank for keywords, which keywords are easy to rank for, and which keywords your competitors rank for. After you have mapped this out, you may feel unsure of where to start. In that case, try to identify high potential keywords with low competition. Why? They are low hanging fruit!

These keywords have a high search volume, but do not have that much relevant content that has been created around them. These are more likely long-tail keywords, such as “best family suv car to lease”, or specific questions such as “why is an suv a great car for families?”, rather than less specific keywords such as “best family car”.

5. On page optimization

To increase organic traffic, on page optimization is important. On page SEO refers to everything you do directly within your website to improve SEO. Here are a few tips on what you can do to implement on page optimization:

Title tags
Make sure the title tag, which appears in search results as a headline, includes important keywords and entices users to increase CTR.

Meta description
This is the short summary of the page and appears under the title in search results, meaning it should also provide relevant information, include keywords and create interest.

Headings
Headings structure your text, which is helpful for SEO as well as your reader. Each page has one H1 heading, which should be the overall description of the page. The H1 on this page is “How to increase your organic traffic”. Use H2 for sub headings, such as “5. On page optimization” and H3 for sub headings such as “Headings”.

Additionally, make sure your headings are informative. If your headings let users know what your text covers, they will help search engines understand your content, too.

Image optimization
Give your images descriptive file names and add image alt tags that include the appropriate keyword. Also, optimize the file size to ensure it loads quickly while maintaining quality, as a faster page load time improves your SEO, too.

6. Reoptimize old content

Content is key to increase organic traffic, but creating content can be very time-consuming. That is why updating your content is so efficient! It is a great idea to reoptimize old content that is not performing well.

Updated content will improve your SEO, as Google uses publishing date as one of the factors to determine the quality and freshness of a site. By reoptimizing old content, Google will view your content as new content. Also, updated content will improve the user experience for any website visitor. Make sure to add new links to better resources, fix broken links, add internal links, or adjust any information that may be wrong or has changed. This will also improve your click-through rate, which is yet another indication to search engines that your content should rank higher. Why? Imagine seeing an article published last year, compared to an article from 2015. Which one would you click? The newer one, of course!

7. Internal linking

Without links, neither search engines nor users will find your content, which is why internal linking is essential to increase organic traffic. There are several types of internal links; links on your homepage, menu, and so on, but also links within your content. These links point users as well as search engines to interesting and related content, and help search engines understand how valuable a page is. When a page receives a lot of links, that indicates it is an important page. This can be referred to as link value.

Usually, a website’s homepage has the greatest link value, since it has the most links to it. That link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage, and the link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on. Therefore, you can increase the link value of new content by linking to them from your homepage, which means search engines will find that content quicker.

All in all, search engines consider pages that get a lot of valuable links important. Therefore, internal linking will guide users and search engines to your most important pages and can increase page ranking.

8. SEO friendly URLs

SEO-friendly URLs are URLs that are designed to meet the needs of users and searchers. Specifically, URLs optimized for SEO tend to be short and keyword-rich. About 10 years ago, keywords in URLs and in the domain name was an important ranking factor. Although, according to Google:

“Keywords in URLs are overrated for Google SEO. Make URLs for users. Also, on mobile, you usually don’t even see them.”

Just because a website has a keyword in its domain name, does not mean that it is more relevant than other websites for that specific keyword.

This means, you don’t need to put keywords in the domain name. Instead, keep URLs short, with a keyword that is relevant to your content and structure for a better user experience. Avoid numbers and letters that only appear in your own language. Although, if you have very vague URLs, such as:

domain.com/7103_98_6/HJ_12KL/product__/

it could be worth updating the URL.

If you are an E-commerce website with over a thousand products, having article numbers or product numbers in your URL is totally fine. In that case, your updated URL could look like this:

domain.com/black-sneakers/nike-air-jordan/product-11

9. Link building

Link building, or backlinks, are links from one website to another. You can look at backlinks as votes; the more votes you get from credible sources, the higher the trust. As trust helps better your website’s Domain Rating, which in turn improves search engine ranking, backlinks play an important role for SEO.

The more backlinks you have from unique domains, the more trustworthy and valuable you are for a search engine. This is especially true if the backlinks come from high quality domains, as a single quality backlink is more powerful than lots of low-quality backlinks. A quality backlinks comes from a trusted, authoritative website, preferably includes your target keyword in their anchor text, and comes from a website that relates to your content. For example, if you publish an article on cars, search engines will rely more on backlinks that come from websites that focus on cars, vehicles, gas, and such.

In summary, there is a clear positive correlation between the amount of backlinks from unique websites and the effect on organic traffic growth.

10. Mobile first

Designing responsive websites is key to making your website user friendly across devices and browsers. Previously, this has been enough to satisfy mobile users, but that is no longer the case. To take it one step further, many websites are now mobile first, meaning they are designed first and foremost to work great on mobile rather than desktop.

Think about it – mobile is not a passing trend, but a lifestyle. According to CNBC, over two billion people are accessing the internet only through their mobile devices. This equals 51% of the total mobile phone users globally. By 2025, this number is expected to reach 72.5%. With this in mind, designing mobile first websites makes sense. Not only will it satisfy users, but also search engines, as they favour mobile first websites.

11. Page Speed & Core Web Vitals

In 2021, Google started to include page experience as one of the factors to determine ranking. This means that page experience has become more important than ever to get a good ranking.

Google has a set of specific factors that are important to determine a website’s overall user experience. These are called Core Web Vitals, and consist of specific page speed and user interaction measurements: largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay, and cumulative layout shift.

Three things you can do to improve your site for Core Web vitals:

• Remove any unnecessarily third-party scripts
• Upgrade your web host
• Remove large page elements

Click here to learn more about Core Web Vitals

12. Send your website (sitemap) to Google

When creating a new website, it will definitely be found by search engines at some point, as they constantly search through the web. With that being said, to speed up that process, there are a few things you can do. The first step is to let Google know that you exist, by actually submitting your website to Google. You can do this by submitting your Sitemap to Google Search Console.

How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console in 4 easy steps:

1. Sign in to Google Search Console.
   In the sidebar, select your website.
2. Click on ‘Sitemaps’.
   The ‘Sitemaps’ menu is under the ‘Index’ section. If you do not see ‘Sitemaps’, click on ‘Index’ to expand the section.
3. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps (if any) like sitemap.xml
   Enter ‘sitemap_index.xml’ in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field to complete the sitemap URL.
4. Click Submit.

In our next post, we'll take a closer look at whether there are shortcuts to improve organic rankings and how you can measure your own Organic Traffic. 

If you are interested to learn more, please email me at rene.ngadi@mynewsdesk.com.

René Ngadi
Newsroom & Media Contact Executive
Mobile: +46766078987
Email: rene.ngadi@mynewsdesk.com
Mynewsdesk