6 Ways to Improve Your Organic Website Traffic
Having a great online presence is more than just having high-quality products and services—it involves a combination of technical skills, qualitative and quantitative research, and loads of time and effort. Increasing your organic traffic is very important because it leads to better conversion rates and higher rankings on search engines.
In this article, SEO experts in Los Angeles outline the six best ways for you to generate more organic traffic on your website.
1. Design a Great Website
When it comes to the technical aspects of your website, look and performance are absolutely crucial. Your website needs to look great, so your readers can easily find what they’re looking for, while it needs to perform well so your readers won’t have a hard time clicking through your website.
Think about the last time you came across a website that had too much small text—you probably didn’t stay very long, did you? And we’re pretty sure everybody’s experienced great annoyance at a website’s grievously slow loading speed or a plethora of broken links at some point.
Additionally, because subpar website designs affect a user’s experience, your rankings on search engines can be severely affected. Google, for example, cares very much about page loading speed and mobile optimization and will actively rank sites without them lower.
2. Do Thorough Keyword Research
Almost everybody familiar with SEO will know what keyword research is. It’s basically how websites end up getting ranked in the first place—if your website has certain keywords and phrases that get searched a lot, it increases your chances of getting discovered by organic searchers.
Now, proper keyword research isn’t just about stuffing your website with as many keywords as you can fit. This is called keyword stuffing and will get you sanctioned by Google, so please don’t do that. Instead, focus on having a sizable number of keywords that you input here and there depending on the contents of the page.
These keywords need to be relevant to your business (thereby being relevant to your customers), diverse (so you’ve got a wide range of topics), focused (e.g., ‘deep tissue massage techniques’ instead of just ‘massage’), and location-specific (so your local customers can easily find you). You can use Semrush’s Keyword Generator to help you out.
3. Optimize Blogs for Search Engines
Blog writing isn’t just about adding the right keywords! It’s also about using proper language and tones, organizing data logically, and of course, making it an entertaining read for your readers. Whenever you post something, you need to put yourself in your readers’ shoes—is this something you would like to read?
Blogging is pretty nifty because it’s one of the easiest ways to update your website. As a business owner, the last thing you want to do is let your website go stagnant. You need to regularly post updates, so readers will be coming back for more.
However, make sure you’re not just posting blogs for the heck of it. You need to make sure your blogs are both relevant to your content and meaty—you don’t want to write a 1000-word article about something you can answer in three seconds, for example!
4. Add Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are text boxes that show up on top of the search engine’s result page. Unlike meta descriptions that only briefly describe the contents of the page you’re about to click, featured snippets are blocks of text that are pulled directly from your page so searchers can find whatever they’re looking for without clicking on any links.
Now, we know what you’re thinking—why on earth are we discouraging your customers from clicking your links?
Well, being on a featured snippet is super advantageous because you’re smack-dab at the top of the search engine results, like this:
As you can see, featured snippets don’t even have to be the #1 search. This gives you an edge over your other competitors!
To get featured on a featured snippet, try and post informative blogs that answer questions “why” and “how” questions. Give a short form of the answer in your first paragraph and elaborate on the succeeding ones so searchers will still be encouraged to click on your site to learn more.
Featured snippets take a lot of trial and error, but it’s very well worth it.
4. Improve Old and Outdated Content
People are so often focused on creating more content for their websites that they leave the ones they’ve already created in the dust. Los Angeles SEO experts recommend you go over your old content once in a while to freshen things up, but why?
Firstly, this is content you already have—if some of your pages have little to no traffic, you can simply just repost it with no problem to get another shot at exposure. If you feel this content has something to bring to the table, you can bring it up again instead of letting it get buried.
Secondly, your old content might be severely outdated, especially if it’s related to fields that are constantly changing, like medicine or information technology. If your information is no longer useful, it will harm your SEO.
5. Build Links
Internal and external links are crucial to increasing your organic traffic. They are both confirmed ranking factors for SEO.
Internal links are links that lead to other pages on your website. They help your readers navigate through your website (e.g., menu, breadcrumb trail) and suggest other pages they might find relevant. You also use internal links to drive them down the marketing funnel.
External links, on the other hand, increase your credibility, especially if they lead to sites that are authority figures. You should always aim to get a link back from these websites so you can get traffic from their websites, as well. You can do this in a variety of ways, including guest posting on people’s blogs or forming partnerships with other relevant websites.