When we think of organic, we usually think of plants and nature – this is pretty much spot on for organic search traffic. Organic search traffic refers to visitors coming to your website from a natural web search.
That means someone has spotted your website on a search engine and clicked on your site. They’ve not clicked on a paid or promoted ad; they’ve just spotted your website because of your hard-won natural efforts to get your company up the search engine rankings.
Simply put: organic web traffic is a visitor to your website you haven’t had to pay to get. Organic click traffic is another similar term that refers to the number of people that click through to your site without paid advertising.
How Do I Increase Organic Traffic?
Increase visitors to my website for free? Sounds great, you say. However, it still requires some work to gain momentum and get your website at the top of Google. You’re playing a longer game with organic search traffic, but one much more affordable than paying for ads.
1. Analyse Your Customer
Getting concrete data on who your customer is is the first step – through surveys, questionnaires, and any metrics from your social media platforms. You should be able to grasp the granular details of their lives, from whether they’re stressed out by travelling to whether they eat toast for breakfast.
Start by gathering the following data:
- How old are they?
- What’s their economic background?
- What’s their job?
- Where do they live?
2. Create A Buyer Persona
You can use your customer data and build up what is known as a buyer persona. This takes your customer’s data and fleshes it out into a concrete person. Say your customer was a 30-year-old Product Manager from Manchester called Lucy. Your buyer persona should tell you that Lucy is stressed out by the concept of returning to the office full-time. They like to work remotely and enjoy reading tech-related blogs on their commute to work.
Your buyer persona can inform what direction you take your business in, the content you create for Lucy, and even what products and services you can offer them.
3. Decide What Content To Write
Blogging regularly is a great way to improve organic traffic. But you need to optimise your content to tailor it to your customers from your buyer persona.
People Also Ask
A great place to start is to use the ‘People also ask’ sections of Google. These are the questions that appear directly under your search box. They come with snippets from other websites and a website link.
As an example, take Lucy from Manchester. She wants to understand a good product marketing strategy better:
The ‘People also ask’ sections can give you ideas and a framework for your content. The more accurate the questions are to these sections, the higher your content should rank and the better your organic search traffic will be.
Search Suggestions
You can also take ideas directly from suggestions beneath the search box itself:
This is a great idea for generating blog topics around an area that your buyer persona wants to know about. For Lucy, you could share advice on how to put together a product marketing plan, examples of successful marketing campaigns, and the different types of product marketing strategies you could consider.
Research Your Competitors
Researching your competitors is easier than it sounds. Simply type in your type of business and see which competitors appear at the top of the Google search. Get some inspiration from their blogs and content. Remember not to copy exactly – no one wants to hear badly reworded content.
4. Leverage Keywords & Headers
Now you’ve got an idea of your content; it’s time to bring in the big guns – your keywords and headers. You’ll want to make your subheadings similar to your ‘People also ask’ search results and pop in some keywords your customers are searching for.
Finding Keywords
The next question is – how do you find keywords? Ahrefs is a great resource with a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account where you can help identify how your content ranks for keywords, or SEMrush, which has an initial free trial. SEMrush is particularly useful as it has a missing keywords section for suggestions on what to add to your website. They also offer a handy organic search traffic checklist:
Google Search
A Google search of a primary keyword is also helpful for researching other common topics. Type in a generic search, like ‘learn coding’, and you’ll get lots of other keywords to pop in related content:
Lower Ranking Search Content
One thing to consider is low-ranking search content. Low-ranking search content refers to content that is still tied to a particular topic but has fewer searches per month. These keywords also tend to be less saturated than other search terms. If you build in low-ranking content with well-structured headings, you will still be able to increase your organic traffic.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Remember that you want to make content valuable for your customer – stuffing in keywords just comes across as spammy. If you’ve ever read something and thought… “why does this paragraph repeat the same phrase over and over again?!” this is why. It is an old tactic that search engines now know about.
Try to write keywords into your text naturally and focus on creating content that is useful and reads well. The Google algorithm punishes people that stuff content with keywords, leaving them behind in the search engine rankings.
5. Update Old Content
As well as generating ideas for new content, you should use this as an opportunity to review what’s already on your site. Updating tired material with shiny new headers and keywords can make your whole site easier to find on Google. It will also be consistent with your new blog posts and allow you to create a coherent and well-researched website.
Final Thoughts
How to increase organic search traffic is not an exact science. The aim is simple, though: get your content on the first page of Google to increase traffic to your site. Initial research into your customer and what they care about is the first place to start. Learning about what they care about and are searching for will give you ideas for content, headers and keywords. Refresh your whole website along with new content, and you’ll be surprised at the improvement you’ll see in your organic search traffic.