What is organic traffic, and why is it important? 

Organic traffic is important for lead generation and driving sales for your business. This is the traffic that is driven through SEO (search engine optimisation). 

There are two types of traffic: 

• Organic traffic - any traffic driven to your website that you do not directly pay for.
• Paid traffic - this is the traffic you have paid for. This includes site visitors who have clicked pay-per-click (PPC) ads, anyone who hears about you through influencer marketing, newsletters or other types of paid advertising. 

Once you’ve built your site and it’s ranking well for relevant keywords, you’ll drive a steady stream of monthly traffic. However, it’s important to remember that organic traffic isn’t completely free. To increase your organic traffic, you will need to spend time creating content or pay someone to create it for you. 

SEO will continue to pay off for years to come as long as you maintain your website on a regular basis. On the other hand, once you turn paid ads off, the traffic stops immediately. 

The assets and content you create through your SEO strategy may take time to build but, the traffic you generate can work out to be much less expensive than paid traffic over the long-term. 

How to drive organic traffic to your website 

There are a number of elements involved when it comes to SEO and being able to drive organic traffic to your website so here are our top tips for getting started. 

1. Conduct keyword research 

Keyword research is essential for any SEO strategy. It should also be helping you drive your content marketing strategy too. 

Finding the keywords that your customers are using when they’re searching online around their problems, pain points and in relation to your products and services will allow you to create content on your website that provides them with an answer or solution. It will also help to make your brand more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when your customers are actively searching. 

Where should you start with keyword research? 

Consider your buyer personas, the topics they’re searching for in relation to your product or service and the exact keywords and queries they’re using. This will help you to see exactly what your customer want and allow you to build your SEO and content strategy around it. 

‍You can use the following tools to help you: 

• SEMrush 
• Ahrefs 
• Moz 
• Google’s keyword planner 

Alongside the search query, you will also need to note down two other metrics to help you understand how often the search term is being typed into the search engine and how easy it will be for you to rank for that term. 

• ‍Search volume - how many searches are run for a keyword every month. 
• Keyword difficulty - how hard it will be to rank on the first page of the results for that keyword.

To get the most from the time you spend creating content, we recommend that you start with long tail keywords which are more specific keywords with decent search volume and low competition. 

For example, as a digital marketing agency, Logica may want to rank for the term ‘digital marketing agency’. However, with so much competition, this may be difficult. We may want to look for more specific search queries such as ‘digital marketing agency in sheffield’ as we will have a better chance of ranking for this term. 

📑 If you’d like more information on keyword research, take a look at our blog: How to do keyword research for SEO. 

2. Create interesting, relevant and optimised content 

Writing huge numbers of articles that don’t offer much information or are stuffed with keywords for your blog in an effort to improve your organic rankings could harm your efforts and result in your website being penalised by Google. 

Whenever you create content for your website, it should always be high-quality. When customers land on your website, they are looking for information or answers to a problem or a question. If, when they get to your website, all they find is a short or badly written article that doesn’t solve their query, they will leave. They will then most likely navigate to one of your competitors who has a great piece of content! 

So, what do we mean by high-quality content? 

If you want to make sure your content is high-quality, aside from optimising it for SEO, there are a few main factors to consider. 

Match search intent

Always consider the search intent behind the query you’re creating content for. When someone sees your website in the search results and clicks through, will your content answer their question or help them to find a solution? 

Knowing the types of search intent can help with this: 

• ‍Informational: these people are in the research phase and looking for information about a topic. Think ‘how tos’ and ‘guides to’. 
• Transactional: these people are researching a potential purchase, so they may be looking for specific information. 
• Commercial: these searches are conducted by those who know which product or service they want to buy and are now looking for the best price or supplier. 
• Navigational: these queries are those looking to land on a specific website. For example, if you were to type ‘Nike’ into the search bar, you’re looking to go directly to that website. 

👉Find out more about this in our blog: A guide to search intent for SEO. 

3. Create comprehensive content 

When you create content for any blog post, always have a look at what others are doing and what your competitors are doing. Then aim to make sure your blog post is the most comprehensive piece on that particular topic. 

Making sure you address the pain points and search intent of your customers and then tailoring your content to match, whilst also providing a solution without being too salesy, will help you to drive website visitors to make a purchase from you. 

4. Optimise for your readers, not search engines 

Always write for your readers first. Your content should resonate with your target audience and provide them with the information they need. This will naturally improve your SEO and help to traffic to your website. 

Keep website visitors happy and you will please the search engines too. User experience and website bounce rates are two factors that search engines use to rank your site. 

Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ Algorithm Update means that content should be written to satisfy humans and not be keyword stuffed and purely published for SEO reasons.  

5. Be consistent 

A key step towards driving organic traffic is being consistent with your posting schedule. You should aim to post and share a piece of content once a week as a minimum. You can post more than this as search engines love to see websites that are updated frequently, and so do users. 

By updating your website often, you will show users that you want to provide good content for them to read and makes it worth investing their time in reading your content. Updating your blog frequently will keep visitors coming back to your site and sharing your content. 

6. Optimise content for SEO 

Making sure your content is optimised for SEO so that both users and SEO can see what your content is about and helps it to rank in the search results. 

This includes on-page SEO such as using target keywords in your post in:

• The post title 
• In the first 100 words of the post 
• In the article several times 
• In the meta descriptions
• In the URL 

Optimising these factors will also help you to improve the click-through rate of your organic search results which, in turn, will help to improve your rankings. You will also need to check page speed as this is a major ranking factor and a slow site can have a negative impact on user experience. 

But how do you create good, optimised content for SEO? You can find out more here: How to optimise content for SEO. 

7. Build backlinks 

Aside from the keywords and building high-quality content, one of the most important Google ranking factors is backlinks. Link building is an important part of any SEO strategy because other websites linking to your blog post indicate that the web page is valuable and relevant. 

One of the best ways to build backlinks for your website is through guest posting. This is where you offer a free guest post on an established website in exchange for a link to your website. Websites with higher domain authority scores provide more valuable links, so aim for website authority of 50 and over. ‍

In addition, look to build internal links wherever you can. These help to keep your visitors on your site for longer and helps Google to understand how the content on your site relates to other pages. 

🔗 Want more information on links and SEO? Take a look at our blog: External vs internal linking for SEO: which is more effective? 

8. Use social media to promote your content 

Building a following and presence on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram will help you to get your brand out there and start driving traffic from those platforms too. 

In addition, these are the perfect platforms for sharing your content and making sure that as many people as possible see it. Not only does this help you to get more from the content you produce, it also helps to keep driving traffic to your site. 

9. Track results 

Once you have created and shared your content, it’s important to keep track of the results. Knowing where your content is ranking, the traffic that’s being driven to your site and where it’s coming from will help you to understand what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll be able to tweak existing content to try and improve it so it ranks well within Google. 

Google Analytics is a great tool for looking at traffic sources and the amount of traffic being driven to your site by particular pieces of content. You can look at the amount of traffic on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. 

In addition, Google Search Console will show you which keywords users are typing in to find your site and where you rank for those particular search terms.

If you’d like to know more about how an SEO strategy can help you drive organic traffic to your website, request a free digital marketing audit for your business. 

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