10 Easy Ways to Organically Improve Your Website's Traffic

In today's digital landscape, where online visibility plays a pivotal role in the success of any website, driving organic traffic is key. To harness the power of organic traffic and unlock the true potential of your website, it's crucial to implement effective and organic growth strategies. Discover 10 easy ways that you can organically improve your website’s traffic this month. These actionable tips will help you attract more visitors, increase your search engine rankings, and ultimately drive conversions.

Create High-Quality, Valuable Content:

The best way to improve the number of visitors to your website is to genuinely create valuable, practical, and high-quality content. No matter what quick fixes and hacks you make, content will always be king. Websites that successfully meet the needs of their target audience the best will be the best-performing sites of their kind.

To ensure that your content is indeed valuable to your target audience, take time to empathize with what sort of queries they might be searching on the web. If you were a potential buyer for what you’re selling, what topic might be of interest to you? What tips would help optimize their experience in the topic? What aspects of a product would be important to you?

Optimize Your Website for SEO:

If content is the king of marketing, SEO is the queen. High-quality content should be the foundation of your website but, if you don’t also optimize your website with search engine best practices, it’s likely that hardly anyone will see it. Taking the time to understand and implement SEO best practices is imperative if you want to see traffic improvements.

When Google and other search engines crawl through your website, their tools look for key components that provide hints to what the topic of the webpage is, and to whom the content will be relevant. On-page optimization elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and URL structure contribute to a well-optimized web page. They enhance the page's visibility in search engine results, improve user experience, and provide search engines with valuable information to understand and rank the content accurately. By optimizing these elements, website owners can increase organic traffic, attract more visitors, and improve their overall SEO performance.

Utilize Long-Tail Keywords:

When beginners start creating keyword lists to optimize for, they often fail to consider potential keyphrases that their audience may be using. Short keywords are important, but long-tail keywords are more specific and detailed, often reflecting the searcher's intent or a particular niche. For example, while a broad keyword might be "shoes," a long-tail keyword could be "red running shoes for women." By using long-tail keywords, you can better match the exact search queries of your target audience, resulting in more relevant traffic.

Of course, when adding keywords to your content, take care that they fit naturally into your content. Keyword stuffing or forcefully incorporating keywords into your content can harm the readability and user experience, and search engines may penalize such practices. Instead, focus on creating high-quality, valuable content that naturally incorporates relevant long-tail keywords where appropriate. Ensure that your keywords flow seamlessly within the context of your content, maintaining its readability and providing genuine value to your audience. Strive for a balanced approach that prioritizes user experience while optimizing for search engines. By creating content that is informative, engaging, and keyword-rich naturally, you can maximize the benefits of long-tail keywords while maintaining the integrity of your content.

Build Quality Backlinks:

Backlinks are crucial for SEO and organic traffic as they signal authority, trust, and relevance to search engines. Quality backlinks from reputable websites improve search engine rankings, leading to increased visibility and organic traffic. They also drive referral traffic, with users clicking on backlinks and landing on your website. Backlinks aid in indexing and crawling, helping search engine bots discover and index your pages. Niche-relevant backlinks from authoritative sources within your industry enhance SEO efforts and attract targeted organic traffic. Investing in a strong backlink profile provides long-term value and contributes to the overall success of your website.

Building backlinks involves creating high-quality content, reaching out to relevant websites for guest blogging opportunities, collaborating with influencers or experts, and leveraging resource link-building and broken link-building strategies. Social media promotion, submitting to online directories, and utilizing public relations efforts can also contribute to building backlinks. It's important to prioritize quality over quantity and focus on earning links from reputable sources within your industry. Building backlinks requires time, effort, and strategic outreach to attract natural and valuable links to your website.

A Note: stay far away from services that “build backlinks for you”. Many times, these services focus on quantity over quality, and many of the links you build will fail to have any significant effect on your website’s authority.

Leverage Social Media:

It’s no secret, social media is remarkable at influencing where people navigate on the web. Social media plays a crucial role in driving organic traffic to websites and even other online platforms.

Social media platforms provide a vast audience base where businesses and individuals can distribute their content. By sharing links to their website or blog posts on social media channels, they can attract users' attention and redirect them to their website, increasing organic traffic. But social media also indirectly influences organic traffic through its impact on SEO. Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments, can contribute to search engine rankings. Engaging content that attracts attention and generates social signals has a higher likelihood of ranking well in search engine results, driving organic traffic from search engines.

When you leverage social media, make sure that you optimize what content you’re providing to your audience. To learn more about how to make your content work, check out: The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2023.

Note: Just because you’re on board with using social media as an organic optimization tool, doesn’t mean that you should hop right into making 25 different accounts with your brand. Especially if you’re operating in a small team, select 3 or 4 social media sites to start with (ideally ones that your target audience frequently uses).

Utilize Email Marketing:

Using emails as a resource to drive traffic can be an excellent strategy for capturing previous visitors and customers, especially if your company or brand is B2C. Sending out an occasional reminder that you exist, advertising new pages, blogs, or products, or providing valuable deals to your audience can drastically improve the retention of your already loyal customers. If you want your traffic to improve, keep visitors coming back again and again.

Of course, for your email campaigns to work, they’ll need to be optimized. If you’re interested in learning more about this, Forbes has an excellent article that covers best practices for creating an engaging brand newsletter: 12 Ways to Create the Most Engaging Email Newsletter.

Note: I cannot emphasize this enough - do not purchase email lists to bolster this acquisition channel. It may temporarily make your metrics look a little better, but sending people emails without their permission is the easiest way to ruin your domain. Habitually sending unsolicited emails can harm your brand image and result in your marketing and sales messages ending up in the spam folder. It’s not worth it.

Encourage User-generated Content:

I see brands mess this one up all the time. Some meme or bizarre phenomenon will sweep some social media site that includes a brand but maybe doesn’t quite fit the brand guidelines. The marketing team, in a panic, will try and silence it which will result in one of two unfavorable outcomes: the meme gets more popular or the brand loses out on free user-led marketing.

If your audience or community is creating content for you for free without your request, let it happen. If you’re particularly fond of one of these pieces of content, be it meme, video, or textpost, signal boost it by reblogging, retweeting, etc. Promoting what they’re doing will encourage those users to create more, effectively advertising your brand for free to their community of friends and followers.

Improve Website Loading Speed:

No one enjoys waiting forever for a website to load. If your website takes too long, some users might grow impatient and navigate away from your content. The more performant your website is, the better. And, not just for your web traffic - for conversions too.

When modifying your website, ensure that the changes you make are ones that either improve or are relatively harmless to your website’s loading speed. If you’re unsure where to begin with this, Gaurav Tiwari has a great article that goes in-depth with some of the changes you can make to your site to improve performance. In addition, he also goes more into depth about why this affects your organic traffic.

See: Why Website Speed Matters and How Does It Affect Traffic?

Focus on Mobile Optimization:

You must design your website to function dynamically, no matter the device that your users are viewing it from. Modern website design must take into account the variability of screen sizes that are used to access online information. In 2019, according to Broadband search, 53% of all web traffic came from mobile device users (both phones and tablets). That number isn’t static either, experts predict it will continue to rise as more and more people around the world become connected to the internet.

To ensure that your site is functional on smaller screens, responsive design best practices need to be your best friends. With either your web builder or, if you’re particularly tech-savvy, your code, ensure that your website changes its layout depending on the size screen it’s being used on.

If you’re interested in learning more about best practices, see Responsive Design: Best Practices and Considerations | Toptal®.

Analyze and Adapt:

The web is an ever-changing, dynamic habitat, and you must adapt with it to stay relevant. The best way to stay up-to-date is to continually monitor your site's performance via software like Google Analytics. Understanding the data behind your content can provide incredible insight. With just a regular quick check every so often, you can determine which pages are performing the best, which conversion funnels are performing well, and much more. To truly see continual successful growth on your website, you’ll need to constantly work at it.

In addition, stay up to date with marketing and internet news. Blogs like Ubersuggest: A Comprehensive Guide for Maximum Results and podcasts like Exposure Ninja Digital Marketing Podcast | Podcast on Spotify are great resources to keep up with innovations in the field. The more you know, the better you’ll be able to implement changes that positively impact the popularity of your website.

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By implementing the 10 easy ways discussed in this blog, you can organically improve your website's traffic. Valuable content, SEO optimization, backlink building, and leveraging social media and email marketing are crucial. Additionally, optimizing website performance and mobile experience, and analyzing data will contribute to sustained growth. Start implementing these methods today and unlock the potential of your website for increased organic traffic.