If your business isn’t focusing on how to increase organic traffic to your site, then you need to do two things immediately:
- Thank the business gods above that you’re still in
- Change your attitude and budget allocation, because as noted by Forbes contributor Steve Olenski: SEO works, it’s cost-effective, it’s extremely important for reaching mobile consumers, and it’s not going anywhere soon. No, SEO isn’t the end all and be all of online marketing. But yes, it’s here to stay and ignoring it is about as sensible as ignoring the web itself.
So you know that organic traffic matters, and that you need more of it (or much more of it). But what’s the next step or steps? Relax: we have you covered! Here are 3 proven ways how to increase organic traffic to your site, and get on your way to populating your pipeline with qualified leads that covert into profitable customers.
1. Select and Optimize for the Right Keywords
Before you can pull in more traffic, you need to tell Google (and Bing and Yahoo) what your site is about. And while there are a few ways to do this, the most important is by selecting and optimizing the right keywords – which will typically contain a mix of popular keywords, and those that are less common yet associated with more focused, qualified leads (these are called “long-tail” keywords).
Once selected, your keywords should be strategically implemented in your web copy, blog content, page titles, URLs, and meta descriptions. We emphasize the word strategic, because under-using keywords is a wasted opportunity, and over-using them is even worse, because Google hates that kind of stuff, and can whack your website clear off the search ranking landscape.
(Note: we don’t want to drill too deep here, but in case some of you are keeping score at home – no, Google doesn’t use meta descriptions to hunt for keywords. But including keywords in meta descriptions is a good idea, because these descriptions show up in search results and can help attract attention and generate a click.)
2. Blog, Blog and Blog Some More
The single best way how to get organic traffic to your site is by regularly publishing relevant, topical, engaging and, of course, keyword optimized blog content. There are a couple of reasons why doing this makes so much sense.
The first reason is that many customers – regardless of whether they’re B2C or B2C -- aren’t necessarily in “buy now” mode, but are instead of “information gathering” mode. Blog posts are ideal ways to connect with these customers and pull them onto a site, where they may be enticed to sign-up for a newsletter, watch a video, download an ebook, or take any other action that moves them into a relationship.
The second reason is that Google loves blogs, and rewards sites that churn out a steady steam of quality content. Remember: Google doesn’t exist to serve businesses that get found via a search – it exists to serve customers (and searchers in general) who are looking for answers, insights, solutions, help, etc. Google rightly thinks that quality blog content is a great way to give searchers what they want.
Of course, this begs the question: what is “quality” blog content? As noted above, it’s content that is engaging, relevant, topical and, in the simplest terms: worth reading. Generally, blogs should be at least 400 words each, strategically optimized for 1 (though sometimes 2) keywords, have both internal and external links to help readers learn more (if they want), and feature a relevant graphic, photo, embedded video, etc. As for the publishing frequency, a minimum of 3 blogs/week is advised, although the best practice is once a day.
3. Use Social Media to Generate Backlinks
No discussion of how to increase organic traffic to your site would be complete without a look at on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
On-site SEO is the stuff we’ve highlighted above; i.e. creating web pages and blog content on your site that helps Google understand what you’re all about. Off-site SEO is measured by the number and quality of other sites and social media posts that are linking back to your website.
In its overall weighting, Google leans heavily towards off-site SEO, because it likes the idea of other folks (i.e. not you) deciding what your site is about. That’s not to say that on-site SEO isn’t important – because it certainly is. But off-site SEO matters even more.
As such, to win the off-site SEO game you need to create quality content and give other sites/social media account holders a reason to link back to you. The more and better reasons you give, the more links – and the more love from Google.
Learn More
To learn more about how to increase organic traffic to your site -- cost-effectively, strategically and correctly – contact the Leap Clixx team today. Your consultation with us is free.
For more information about how to make your website into a lead generation machine, download our FREE eBook:
Topics: SEO, Lead Generation
