Building organic traffic is hard work. Going the organic route is not for you if you want a quick fix for driving traffic to your website. It requires patience and hard work to see results.
That said, focusing on organic traffic strategies may be the most valuable investment you can make for long-term growth and sustainability.
You essentially have two options for driving traffic –
- search engine optimization (SEO) to rank higher in organic results, or
- pay-per-click (PPC) ads placed before organic listings.
With paid ads, you see immediate results but you must pay every time someone clicks. This can bring temporary or low-quality traffic. Building organic search traffic is free but takes time and effort.
Unlike paid ads that vanish when you stop spending, the organic traffic you earn will keep driving engaged visitors to your site month after month. So if you’re willing to put in the time and effort day in and day out, organic search needs to be a cornerstone of your strategy.
If you want to know exactly how to consistently drive more organic traffic to your website, keep reading. We will explore proven 15 ways on how to increase website traffic organically.
Why is It Important to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website?
Growing organic traffic to your website is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, visitors from organic search are more likely to convert into paying customers, as they are actively searching for your products or services. Higher organic traffic also indicates to search engines that your website has authority and relevance in your niche, which can improve your rankings over time.
Increasing organic traffic allows you to rely less on expensive paid ads and other marketing channels. And since organic visitors land on highly relevant pages, you can learn about the topics and products your audience is most interested in, and optimize your content accordingly. More organic traffic also leads to increased word-of-mouth exposure and backlinks as influencers and websites link back to your useful content.
15 Ways to Increase Traffic To Your Website
1. Post Reviews and Testimonials
Customer testimonials and reviews can be very persuasive for potential buyers who are still evaluating your business. Displaying positive experiences from satisfied customers can establish credibility and trust with new visitors to your site. When potential customers see detailed reviews highlighting what real people liked about your product or service, they are more inclined to make a purchase decision themselves.
Try to get reviews that provide clear specifics on what the customer appreciated, rather than generic praise. Also ensure testimonials are prominently visible on key product and service pages, rather than buried at the bottom of the page or in small text. Moderate all reviews to filter out any that seem fake or don’t align with your brand voice. The more authentic and relevant the peer experiences you showcase are, the more they will influence new visitors.
2. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with industry leaders, experts, bloggers, and influencers to promote your brand to their engaged follower base. The influencer essentially becomes a spokesperson to their audience on your behalf. This could include sponsored posts, social media shoutouts, reviews, guest articles with backlinks to your site, giveaways promoting your product, etc.
Since influencers have already built responsive audiences and trust in your niche, they can drive massive amounts of qualified traffic and exposure to your website through their promotional efforts. Even a single mention on a popular influencer’s social media channel can bring thousands of new visitors. The key is to identify influencers with an audience demographic that aligns closely with your ideal customer. Reach out to them about partnering on custom branded content, social takeovers, or other creative promotions that resonate with their followers. Track referral traffic and sales from influencer marketing campaigns to quantify the impact.
3. Publish Thought Leadership Content
Establishing your brand as an industry thought leader and subject matter expert is a powerful way to organically attract new visitors. This involves publishing in-depth, educational guides, ebooks, how-tos, and unique insights related to your niche.
For example, a marketing agency could publish an in-depth guide on “Improving Your Customer Retention Strategies”, while a catering business could create an ebook on “How to Plan Your Wedding Menu”. Offer value-driven content that answers questions your target audience may have.
Publishing quality educational content not only engages visitors and boosts time on your website, but also gets organically shared across digital platforms like social media. Readers will link to and reference your guides when writing their own content, expanding your reach. Position your brand as the trusted go-to resource on your industry.
Aim to create 1-2 thought leadership content pieces per month. Promote them heavily across your marketing channels and monitor which topics gain the most traction. Repurpose the content into different formats like blog snippets, social posts, and video summaries.
4. Do Competitor Research and Write About What Your Target Audience Needs
One effective way to create content that attracts organic traffic is to analyze what your competitors are publishing and identify gaps or opportunities to do something different.
Start by researching competitors and high authority websites in your industry. Look at what blog topics and content formats they are investing in. Track which of their posts seem to generate the most social sharing, backlinks and engagement.
Then brainstorm angles and topics that your audience might be interested in but competitors have not yet covered. For example, if they have thoroughly covered basic introductions to the topic, you could go more in-depth or focus on more specific use cases.
Look at questions people are asking online about your industry and tailor content to providing solutions. Rise above simple product pitches and provide truly useful information the audience needs.
Publishing content that fills informational gaps demonstrates your expertise and can pull in website visitors doing related searches. It differentiates your brand while still targeting relevant keywords.
5. Write Guest Posts to Increase Backlinks
Getting published on popular industry websites helps drive referral traffic to your site while also boosting your overall SEO authority through backlinks. Identify websites that your target audience reads and see if they accept guest contributions.
Start by compiling a list of high authority websites, influencer blogs, magazines, and news outlets related to your niche. For outreach emails, first emphasize how you can craft custom content that provides value for their audience. Mention your relevant expertise and ideas for topics that would resonate with readers.
For the guest posts themselves, focus on creating truly useful, informational content rather than direct promotions. Include links back to your website organically within the content, such as linking to a related guide for further reading.
Many websites will publish your bio and a callout about your company as the author. This helps establish awareness. Follow up with the site to ensure your guest post goes live and the backlink gets indexed on search engines.
Over time, earned placements on authority industry sites will drive referral visitors and lift your own site’s domain authority for better SEO rankings.
6. Target Long-Tail Keywords
Most people only optimize their content for high-volume head keywords like “marketing services” or “weight loss tips”. While these generic terms attract search volume, they also face immense competition. Instead, complement your core keywords with specific long-tail keyword variations.
Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific, such as “influencer marketing case studies” or “mediterranean diet meal plan for diabetics”. These ultra-targeted phrases have lower monthly search volume individually but drastically less competition.
Your overall traffic across multiple long-tail terms can surpass what you get from just generic keywords. Targeting long-tail queries also attracts users who are further down the conversion funnel and ready to buy or sign up.
Research what long-tail variations and phrases are relevant for each of your products, services and content topics. Optimize pages and content around these laser-focused keywords. Include them naturally in meta descriptions and content rather than over-stuffing.
Prioritizing long-tail keywords makes it easier to rank for more search terms and draw in qualified organic traffic.
7. Optimize Your Pages With Internal Links and Fresh Content
Internal linking between pages on your site and regularly publishing fresh content are on-page optimization best practices that can boost organic traffic.
Internal links allow visitors to easily navigate between related content on your site. They also help search engine bots crawl and index all your pages more efficiently. Include relevant internal links within blog posts and product/service pages. For example, link from a post about “content marketing strategies” back to services related to content creation.
Refreshing and updating older content pages also signals to search engines that your site is active and a trusted resource worthy of traffic. Make small edits, add new examples or data, inject fresh keywords – without changing the core content.
Creating new, useful content frequently also expands the amount of keywords and topics your site ranks for. Search engines favor websites with more robust, regularly updated inventories of content.
Smart internal linking and consistent content creation enhance on-page SEO and the visitor experience. Monitor traffic growth across optimized pages.
8. Create Content on Social Media to Get More Views
Having an active social media presence gives you more opportunities to engage visitors and get content in front of targeted audiences. Driving traffic from social platforms back to your website is a major opportunity.
Rather than only posting sales promotions and announcements, focus on creating and curating educational, entertaining content optimized for social platforms. For example, share short excerpts from a new blog post, create Twitter threads around an industry discussion, or post an Instagram Reel how-to video.
Observe what types of content perform best across your social profiles in terms of engagement, clicks, hashtags, etc. Then produce more content aligned to those preferences. Stay on top of trends and leverage what is resonating most with each platform’s unique user base.
Social content allows you to repeatedly re-promote and repurpose your best performing website content as well, bringing new visitors. Integrate your website URL prominently. Getting traction on social and driving conversions is about consistently providing value.
9. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Do Keyword Research to Get More Organic Traffic
At its core, driving organic traffic depends on doing key SEO best practices, starting with thorough keyword research.
Identify a core set of high-volume keywords that represent topics, products and services your ideal customers are searching for. Look beyond the most generic phrases and find very specific long-tail variations as well. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and Semrush can help generate keyword ideas grouped by search volume and difficulty to rank for.
Once you have target keywords, optimize your website pages around them. Incorporate keywords naturally into page titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt text, URLs, and content body. Ensure your site’s architecture and internal linking facilitate easy crawling by search bots. Produce content around keyword themes.
Other technical elements like site speed, mobile optimization, schema markup, and SSL security influence rankings as well. Most importantly, publish valuable content that genuinely serves the user intent behind each keyword.
Monitor your search rankings and traffic regularly. SEO takes patience, but the right efforts will gradually increase organic visitors.
10. Answer Queries on Google’s People Also Ask
Most Google search results pages now include a sidebar box with related questions titled “People Also Ask”. These feature questions that searchers frequently ask around your broader topic.
Optimizing your content to directly answer these common user queries can help drive organic traffic. The People Also Ask boxes are essentially a ready-made list of popular long-tail keywords around a subject.
Research what specific questions come up for your industry niche or product categories. Then create dedicated content, like blog posts or FAQ pages, that provide helpful answers.
For example, a mattress brand can create content around “Do memory foam mattresses sleep hot?”, while a pizza company can answer “What is the healthiest pizza to order?”
Including the exact question as the page title and focusing the content around comprehensively answering it will help that page rank in search for the query. Answering user questions demonstrates your expertise.
11. Go After Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are special search results that Google displays at the top of results pages for certain searches. They include a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, along with a link to the source.
Getting your content to trigger the featured snippet for relevant searches is a huge organic traffic opportunity. Analyze what featured snippets typically show up for keywords related to your business.
Then optimize your existing content to be as comprehensive and insightful as possible around answering those user questions. Make sure to include memorable statistics, visuals, comparisons, and structure content clearly around subheadings.
You can also create new, dedicated pages specifically optimized to capture featured snippets around popular questions or searches in your niche. The key is providing a concise snippet-worthy answer.
Appearing in featured snippets allows you to gain prime real estate in search results above the traditional organic rankings. Drive tons of clicks by answering queries better than competitors.
12. Translate Your Top Performing Content
If your website content is only in one language, consider translating your top performing blog posts, guides, and resources into other languages to expand your audience. This allows you to tap into non-English speaking search traffic.
First, identify which additional languages make sense for your business and industry. Look for languages with high search volumes for your content topics and commercial opportunity.
Focus first on translating your absolute best content – popular posts that already attract high organic traffic and engagement. Partner with human translators skilled in the language to ensure accuracy.
Publish the translated content on your site, either by adding language category pages or subdirectories like example.com/es for Spanish pages. Link back to the original English version and vice versa for better search performance.
Localize the content by adjusting any culture-specific references, dates, idioms etc. Promote the content in communities and social channels popular in the translated language.
Offering your most useful content in multiple tongues is a smart way to increase organic visitors, tap into new regions and diversify your readership.
13. Use Schema Markup For More Visibility
Implementing schema markup on your website pages helps search engines better understand, index, and display your content in results. This can enhance your visibility and clickthrough rate for relevant searches.
Schema is code you add to your site’s HTML that identifies key data like page title, description, author, images, videos, reviews, event details, etc. Google supports schema standards like JSON-LD that provide more cues via structured data.
Some key places to use schema include:
- Blog posts (Article schema)
- Service pages (Service schema)
- Product pages (Product schema)
- Contact page (LocalBusiness schema)
- Events pages (Event schema)
There are hundreds of specific schema types. run site audits using Google Search Console to detect gaps or improvements. Proper implementation can get your site featured in rich search result snippets.
Schema helps search bots parse your content and drives more traffic when users see relevant snippets, breadcrumbs, images, reviews and more from your site in results.
14. Promote Your Content in Local Directories and Listings
If you are a local business who serves customers in specific geographic regions, then leveraging local directories, listings and citation sources can drive more nearby website traffic.
Begin by registering your business on prominent directories like Google My Business, Yelp, Mapquest, Yellowpages.com and industry-specific sites. Create robust profiles with images, descriptions and accurate location/contact info.
Also build citations on other sites that aggregate local data, like Citysearch, Manta, Localeze and more. The more you can get your business name, address and phone number mentioned online, the better.
Promote your website and recent content across your local listings. Encourage customer reviews. This helps build visibility and reputation in the community.
Being comprehensively listed across local data sources helps searchers find you for location-based queries. It also builds trust indicators when users see your consistent business information show up multiple places online
15. Create Awesome Visuals and Incorporate Videos in Your Blogs
When creating blog posts and other website content, don’t rely solely on blocks of text. Enhance your content with engaging visuals and videos to increase traffic and engagement.
Use images generously to break up long sections of text and draw in readers. Include relevant photos, infographics, charts, illustrations or screenshots to help convey information visually. Ensure images are high-quality, optimised, have descriptive alt text, and are easy to view on both desktop and mobile.
Incorporate short videos where relevant, such as a 1-2 minute explainer video for a complex topic or product tutorials and demos. Videos significantly boost engagement as visitors consume information more readily through visual storytelling.
Tools like Canva, Venngage and Visme make it easy to create infographics and other visual assets, even without design skills. For videos, turn to options like Animoto, InVideo and Biteable to produce professional clips using templates.
Vibrant visuals and videos break up dense text and keep visitors engaged as they consume content. Multimedia content also tends to get more amplification on social media.
How to Increase Website Traffic Organically using SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving sustainable organic traffic to your website through search engines like Google. Here are some key steps:
- Conduct keyword research to identify high-volume, low-competition queries that prospects search for. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush and Google Keyword Planner help.
- Optimise your site architecture and URLs for SEO. Make sure pages are easily crawlable.
- Create targeted content like blog posts that incorporate focus keywords naturally. Optimise pages for specific keywords.
- Include keywords in metadata like page titles and meta descriptions. Use keywords in image alt text as well.
- Build high-quality backlinks from other relevant websites to boost authority. Guest posting and partnerships help.
- Create more content more often. Search engines favour websites with an extensive content library.
- Check technical SEO elements like site speed, responsive mobile optimization, structured data markup.
- Analyse your search rankings and traffic in Google Analytics. Refine your keywords and strategy over time.
With foundational SEO, you can build organic search traffic, leads and sales. It requires patience and consistency, but results compound over time.
How to Increase Website Traffic Organically using Social Media
Promoting your content and website on social media platforms is a major opportunity to drive organic visits. Here are some tips:
- Identify which social platforms your target audience uses and focus efforts there. Stay active with engaging posts regularly.
- Include links to your newest and most useful website content in social posts. Shortened posts can link to full articles.
- Use relevant hashtags, tag influencers, and optimize visual social content for discovery. This expands reach.
- Run social media giveaways and contests to incentivize followers to visit your site. Collect emails with lead gen landing pages.
- Promote your social accounts everywhere – website, email signatures, packaging, paid ads etc. Make it easy to find and follow you.
- Partner with aligned social media influencers in your niche to collaborate on contests, content, and takeovers.
- Analyse performance to see which types of content drive the most website clicks on each platform. Then create more of that high-performing content.
Executing a strategic social media marketing plan tailored to your brand will amplify website traffic while growing your overall following.
More Ways to Increase Organic Traffic To Your Website
Host Webinars
Hosting live webinars is an excellent way to position your business as a thought leader while generating website traffic. Webinars allow you to share your expertise on a topic and engage directly with your audience.
Promote the webinar and registration page across your website, email lists, and social media. Offer an appealing title and overview showcasing the value attendees will get.
During the webinar, provide truly useful info the audience couldn’t easily find elsewhere. Actively engage attendees with polls, Q&A, follow-up resources.
Record the webinar and publish on your site as evergreen content. Repurpose excerpts into blog posts, smaller videos, and social posts.
Webinars build awareness, establish credibility, generate leads when people register, and the replay drives ongoing traffic back to your site as a gated resource.
Start an Online Community or Group
Launching an online community like a forum or Facebook group around your brand/industry creates a dedicated space to engage with your audience.
Use the group to share content previews, crowdsource ideas, and educate through discussions. Make it a valuable networking and interaction channel between you and your customers.
Promote the group across your website and social channels. Reward members with exclusive content, discounts, early access, and more.
An active branded community strengthens loyalty and gives members incentive to regularly check back and participate, driving recurring website traffic.
Create Listings for Your Website
Ensure your website gets indexed on key online listings and citation directories related to your business niche and location.
For local businesses, create/claim listings on Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yellowpages and more.
Those in professions can list on directories like GoodTherapy, Thumbtack, Manta, etc.
E-commerce retailers should be listed on PriceGrabber, ShopStyle, etc.
Completing and optimizing these listings helps improve local SEO and online visibility. When potential customers browse related listings you show up.
Start an Email Newsletter
Email is one of the most direct ways to regularly engage with your audience and drive website traffic. Start a monthly or weekly newsletter focused on your niche.
Offer exclusive deals, early access to content, special offers just for subscribers. Share insider tips and stories between blog posts and social updates.
Promote the chance to sign up for your newsletter across your website, social channels, and email signatures. Run a lead gen popup or banner.
Well-crafted, valuable newsletters establish ongoing communication and give loyal followers reason to keep returning to consume your latest content.
Offer Free Tools on Your Website
Visitors are drawn to websites that provide free tools, calculators, assessments or other resources they find useful.
Think about what tools related to your industry could help solve pain points and provide value for your audience.
For example, an HVAC company could provide a calculator for sizing air conditioning units. A parenting site can offer milestone trackers.
Promote your free tools across your site navigation, blog, email lists and social channels. The tool page can collect emails and leads in exchange for access.
Useful free tools engage visitors, demonstrate your expertise, and drive recurring traffic through word-of-mouth referrals. People return to access and share the resources.
How to Check Organic Traffic to Your Website
If you are a website owner, you can view organic traffic statistics about your site for free with Google Search Console.
With this tool, you can only check the organic traffic for a verified property—a website you own.
Once you connect and verify your website with Google Search Console, you can click on “Search Results” tab under Performance to view the total number of clicks and impressions for any time period.
Additionally, you can also see the top ranking pages and queries for your website which help you to optimise your website better.
Tools to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website
Track SEO Metrics with Google Analytics
Viewing organic traffic in Google Analytics is easy.
Just open your Google Analytics account and click on “Acquisition” in the left menu.
Then click “All Traffic” and you’ll see a breakdown of your website traffic by source, including Direct, Referral, Social, and Organic Search.
Organic search is traffic coming from search engines like Google when users click on your website in the search results. Click on “Organic Search” and you can view keywords, pages, and other reports to understand which search terms and landing pages are bringing the most visitors from search engines.
You can track how this organic search traffic is performing over time by adding an organic search metric like “Sessions” to the graphs. Comparing organic traffic vs other channels shows you how vital search engine optimization is for your website growth.
Google Analytics has tons of data to dive into so you can analyse and improve your SEO results.
Get Queries to Target from Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides invaluable data on how your site pages rank for different keywords in Google search. Under the Performance tab, go to Search Results to analyze your search presence.
Here you can view all pages from your site that have ranked in Google’s search results for a selected time frame. It shows the specific keywords each page ranked for, the position it attained, number of impressions, and clicks received.
You can sort this data in different ways – by number of clicks, impressions, or average position. Sorting by clicks shows you the queries that are driving the most traffic to your site. High impressions but low clicks indicates opportunity keywords to optimize for higher click-through-rate.
Digging into the keywords and landing pages provides insight into what content resonates most with searchers and where you have ranking opportunities. You may uncover related long-tail variations to target or find that some pages rank well for unexpected terms.
Use these insights to prioritize keywords and topics to create new content around. Optimize existing pages targeting high-potential queries by adding keywords, improving page speed, and enhancing content quality.
Analyzing your search presence and performance data in Google Search Console is crucial for executing an effective search optimization strategy to drive organic traffic to your website.
Analyse SERPs with various SEO Tools
If you’re new to SEO, you can analyse your website’s presence in search engines using tools like Thruuu and other keyword research tools to create a winning SEO strategy
Thruuu lets you enter a target keyword and see a detailed analysis of the top-ranking results on Google – identifying opportunities for you to improve your own page and content to rank higher. Look at elements like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and page speed.
You can also use keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz to find keywords your competitors rank for related to your business. Do competitor content analysis to see what they are doing well. Then use those insights to optimize your on-page content and technical site performance.
Check your own keyword rankings and work on creating content that answers searcher intents but does so better than current results. With some competitor analysis and SERP optimization, you can improve click-through rates and rankings to drive organic traffic to your site.
Organic Traffic Case Studies
The Challenge
Khilonewala, an online toy rental service in India, was struggling to drive traffic and leads to their relatively new website. With limited content and some technical issues, they weren’t ranking well for key phrases like “toy rental” and “games on rent for kids”.
The Plan
After a comprehensive audit, we built a strategy focused on content creation, on-page optimization, and link building. We identified hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords to target through new service pages and blog content. We also fixed technical issues hurting rankings.
Month 1: Optimizing and Building Trust
We optimized existing pages for 30 primary targets. We published 10 new blog posts with keyword-focused content to start gaining some rankings and traffic. Link building started through guest posts and citations.
Month 2-3: Scaling Content and Gaining Authority
Over the next 2 months, we rapidly created service pages targeting long-tail variations of our primary terms. More blog content established Khilonewala as a thought leader in the industry. Our link building expanded through partnerships.
Month 4-6: Reaping the Rewards
After months of consistency, we began to rapidly climb in the SERPs. Within 6 months we ranked #1 for 226 keywords, increasing organic traffic 800% and leads 700%. The focused efforts established Khilonewala as the leader in toy rentals.
The Results
Khilonewala’s organic growth changed their business. Ranking for all the keywords related to toy and game rentals allowed them to significantly scale. SEO is now one of their top acquisition channels, driving 40% of their leads.
In essence, this is how we managed to achieve these results:
Research and find keywords with easy competition and good search volume
Create epic content, which is better than the top 10 combined
Rank for these keywords with just the epic content and almost no links
Attract links because you are ranking for these keywords
Attack more difficult keywords and repeat steps 1 to 4
SEO and Content Marketing is a game of relativity and time.
You have to be better than the top 10 websites, both in terms of content (relevancy) and backlinks (authority). To do this, you need to give it enough time; you cannot achieve results like this, in a period of 3 months or even 6 months.
You have to allow the content that you have created to brew and compound the results over time.
What do you think of this case study?
Next Steps – Drive Traffic To Your Website
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