How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

If you asked any marketing manager, head of SEO or even a CEO what one of their top digital goals for 2024 is they’d all likely mention increasing the organic traffic to our site.

To achieve this, partnering with a dedicated SEO Agency can be instrumental in executing effective strategies.

The number one tactic to increase traffic to a website is ranking highly in Google’s organic search results. You can do this by targeting important keywords, writing best-in-class content, refining your linking strategy and running an audit on your website to identify and fix issues holding you back.

In this guide, we explore some tried and tested methods for increasing organic traffic to your website.

What exactly is organic traffic?

Organic traffic is the number of visitors that come to a website through unpaid search engine results, rather than ads.

Compared to paid traffic, organic traffic has a number of advantages:

• It’s free (except for the internal resources utilised)
• Relevant search results are often more credible than paid ads
• Users follow a more natural journey towards discovering your brand
• You build a relationship with your audience by creating content that connects with them and their needs
• Organic search results may vary over time, but ads are fleeting while organic results last

There are four main forms of organic traffic to be aware of:

• Search traffic
• Direct traffic
• Referral traffic
• Social traffic

Is organic traffic connected to SEO?

Yes, organic traffic is driven by the work of search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals and SEO agencies, like Polaris, that use SEO tactics to drive traffic to their client’s websites.

SEO is the primary driving force behind organic traffic.

Apart from SEO, organic traffic can also come from direct traffic – when users enter your URL directly in the search bar, referral traffic – links to your site on other websites and social traffic – especially paid social, some people don’t consider social organic traffic, we do!

Organic traffic helps you:

• Reach people with a specific intent
• Reach people that have never heard of your brand before and weren’t searching for you
• You can reach people worldwide
• Scale your marketing activity cost-effectively
• Build credibility

How to increase organic traffic

You can’t cross your fingers and hope. You need a detailed SEO strategy that’s in place all year round and that follows SEO best practices.

To improve your rankings and boost organic traffic, focus on the following areas:

• Keyword research – the process of finding relevant search queries that people use, especially your audience, and target them with content that aligns with their search intent
• Content creation and optimisation – develop content that is well-written and useful to the user, while targeting keywords to rank highly in SERPS
• Technical SEO – organise technical elements of a website to ensure search engine ‘robots’ can efficiently crawl, understand and categorise your content
• Link building – create high-quality backlinks – links from authority sources to your website – to increase your authority and visibility

Refresh content

A quick win you can make is to refresh out-of-date website content. This is because the Google algorithm favours information that has been recently written.

Any out-of-date pages that aren’t being used anymore can be merged with more current pages that already attract visitors, this helps to send signals to Google and other search engines that your website is well-maintained.

Any pages that are relevant, but don’t receive traffic should be identified and refreshed or merged with pages that have newer and more relevant content.

Carry out an audit to identify content that can be refreshed and pages to merge with newer content. You can use tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to streamline this process.

Create your own content

Performing keyword research allows you to identify topics to write about to drive more traffic to your website.

Build a keyword list and create optimised content to target your priority keywords.

You can find target keywords by seeing what your competitors are ranking for on popular tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Another viable strategy is to identify content gaps between you and your competitors and write content to target keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can outrank them by writing more up-to-date, relevant and useful content.

Usefulness is key, your content shouldn’t exist simply to rank on Google, this approach will never get engagement and build your brand. Instead, write helpful content designed to solve people’s problems and answer real questions from your target market.

You can promote your content more widely by making use of social media. Make sure your footprint on social media is unique to the channel you use, short-form video content for instance works best on TikTok and Instagram.

Rinse and repeat, write regular content so that your audience regularly expects useful information from your brand and associates you with being a trusted voice that makes their life easier.

Add internal links

Improve the internal link structures throughout your website to make it more navigable for users and easier to crawl and contextualize for search engine robots.

You can improve the link structures of your website by improving and simplifying header navigation, making links logical and consistent is key with a clear hierarchy of importance, where your most valuable pages are at the top of the tree.

Also, show Google evidence of your topical authority by linking between similar pages. This also helps pages with lesser authority to rank better as you are effectively endorsing them by linking from your more prominent pages.

Use keyword-specific anchor text that includes your target keywords, this shows search engines which pages you want to rank for specific keywords.

Links from high-traffic pages can also carry traffic to intended parts of your site.

Refine on-page

Refining your on-page SEO is critical to improving your visibility and boosting organic traffic to your website.

Start by optimising on-page elements for your target keywords. Some elements are given more weight by Google when it crawls websites. This includes navigation elements such as header links, on-page headings, especially H1s and H2s (page titles) and meta descriptions.

Don’t forget long tail keywords, targeting keywords with lesser volume can be a good tactic to generate traffic as they are less competitive.

Run a technical audit

Running a technical audit on your website will reveal a number of issues you can fix and improve that might have been holding back your rankings.

Issues like broken links make it more difficult for Google to crawl your site and discover new content, it reduces the authority of your website and makes for a frustrating experience for users, which can increase the number of users exiting your website.

Other issues that you can identify and fix include broken images, duplicate titles, pages and content.

Fixing all of these issues can boost your website’s domain authority which is one of the crucial factors Google looks at when deciding where to rank content.

 

Outsource to an SEO agency

SEO can be a time-consuming process, and it’s an ongoing process, not a job that can be done once and forgotten.

We understand that not every business has the time to commit to SEO that it deserves, especially small businesses.

A dedicated SEO agency can take the load from your shoulders, completing a range of tried and tested strategies quickly, efficiently and to a high standard.

If you would like to discuss your needs in more detail, please get in touch with our team for a consultation and ask us how to increase website traffic for your business.