Wondering how to increase website traffic organically? With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s some stiff competition, even in the least competitive niches.
So getting found by the search engines is getting tougher by the day. Google is still the most popular search engine but there’s others too which shouldn’t be forgotten: Bing.com, Duckduckgo.com, Yahoo.com etc. If you can create some awesome content in your niche, which has less competition than the most popular keywords, you have a chance at getting a ranking on one or all of those search engines.
But you need to get smart about it. Google won’t give you a top place listing easily. You need to slip between the cracks and find low competition long tail keywords for which you can rank. If you’re successful, this can be a strategy which you can build on. Over time and with effort you can start to see more and more free visitors coming to your website.
So lets have a look at the nuts and bolts of this simple and effective strategy for getting more free visitors to your website.
How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Customer Avatar
Before we delve down into keyword research, we need to know who we want to land on our website in the first place. It can be tempting to think that everyone wants our products and services. After all, we’re awesome right?!
But the large proportion of the online marketplace isn’t looking for what we have. We don’t want to waste our time creating content on our website which brings in the wrong kind of visitors. they won’t buy – ever. We want the other kind of visitors – those who will be long term loyal customers who stand to benefit the most from what we have on offer (and who will buy from us). In simple terms we want to find our target customer persona, or customer “avatar”.
The customer avatar is the person (or type of person) who will most benefit from what we are selling. They are our “perfect” customer. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf and find out who they are. Once you’ve done this come back to the next step!
How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Keyword Research
Now you know who it is you want to attract to your website, you can start doing some keyword research. This can help you identify the specific searches which are already being conducted by your customer avatar. Head over to Google’s keyword research tool here. Or Neil Patel has one called Ubersuggest. Type in your main keyword (the one which is most specific to your business) and have a look at the related keywords which show up. Here’s a snapshot of some of the keyword research I did for this article:
Now, it’s tempting to think only in terms of the number of monthly searches. But this is a big mistake. The most popular keyword in the image above is “how to get traffic to your website” (1600 monthly views). However, this term is super competitive. If I chose that as the title for this particular article I would have less chance of getting traffic from the SERPS – search engine results pages.
Lets have a look on Google for this term to show you what I mean:
Even a phrase match (“in quotes”) search for this keyword brings up a huge number of competing pages. See the number in the image above (168,000)
Compare that number with the one I chose for this article:
So, even though my term gets far fewer monthly searches:
I’m still much more likely to get ranked for it because it’s far less competitive than the other term which gets a tonne of traffic! A little bit of “something” is worth far more than no amount of “a lot”!
How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Compare And Contrast Keywords
So, you can now compare and contrast the different keywords within your niche using Google’s keyword planner/ubersuggest and a normal Google search. Remember too that you want to find buyer keywords within your niche too. Those are the keywords which attract your particular customer avatar. So, to recap; the main criteria of finding keywords for content are:
- Longer tail keywords with less competition on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages
- Keywords which relate to your business and ideally are, (or could be) “buyer keywords”- keywords which your customer avatar are likely to use.
Once you have identified a good keyword for a piece of content you want to write on your website, you need to create some awesome content for that particular keyword!
Writing Content For Your Website
So, you have your keywords which are going to become the titles of your articles. Next you’re going to actually create some content. A good idea is to look at the top result on Google for your keyword idea.
Read the top ranking article and have a look at the quality of it. You’re going to out perform that article! Write a better article which is longer and has more value in it!
This can take some time but it’s worth putting the effort in. A good quality article will stand the test of time. So if you’re going to do this, it’s worth doing well! I use an SEO plugin to help me write SEO optimised content.
Ideally write for the person reading it, but optimise for the search engines. If you write an article which is full of your keywords, it can be a little off putting for readers. So a plugin can help you find a healthy compromise. Yoast SEO is free for WordPress and reminds you to place your keywords in images, headings, meta tags, descriptions and so on.
I’d suggest writing around 1000 words per article, or longer depending on the topic. But if you’re “filling” with repeat information, it’s better to do a shorter post.
Written Your Post? Sit Back, Pour a Cup Of Coffee And Wait.. Right?
Sorry to disappoint you but, sadly no. Once you have published your content your job isn’t over! You also need to promote your content as much as possible. Don’t rely on Google finding it and putting it up there on the top of the search results. It might never happen. Some of your posts will rank and some will sadly not. But one thing you can control is the effort your put into the promotion of your posts.
Google has a number of ranking algorithms which it uses to determine how it perceives your content. Here’s just a few of them:
- Domain age and authority – newer sites have less authority
- Backlink profile – who links to your content, what’s their niche, authority and standing with Google? Is your link profile natural and does it imply you have a high quality site?
- Content on site (SEO) – what’s the quality and volume of your on-site content
- Visitor interaction – Google sees how people perceive your content – do they stay on your content or click away immediately, for example?
You need to get eyes on your content. So sharing it as much as possible will help. Use a social media share plugin on your site to encourage visitors to share. There’s also a number of other plugins you can use to automatically syndicate your content throughout your social media platforms. I use Revive Old Posts which helps me to promote posts automatically. You can also guest post or blog comment on other people’s blogs to get backlinks from other websites within your niche.
Your social media backlink profile is a large signal to Google that your content is share worthy. So this is definitely worth doing as it can significantly boost your SEO. You’ll also get organic traffic this way too, which is also the point of creating high quality content. A good post can even go viral on social media and lead to tens of thousands of website visitors very quickly.
