5 Simple Ways To Drive More Organic Traffic (Quickly!)

Key Takeaways

so you've been working on a website for a while and published loads of content but your organic traffic isn't increasing why there's so much more to search engine optimization than simply publishing content and hoping for the best but until you've sorted your organic traffic there's no point in planning money into ads so stay tuned to find out our top tips for driving even more organic traffic to any website organic traffic is essentially free traffic as it refers to those users who visit your website from unpaid sources such as search engines you probably know of organic traffic from the report within google analytics you may assume that because traffic to your website is declining organic traffic is declining but this isn't always the case if a paid campaign has been paused traffic will have decreased because your organic traffic may have still risen which is why you should monitor the sources of traffic if you're not sure how to do this you can simply go to the channels report within acquisition or traffic report you'll have the option to view by source landing pages or set your own parameters from the landing page report you'll see which pages are generating the most traffic and which are driving the least make a note of these pages and any of the details you find because it'll help you choose from the list of ways to drive more organic traffic that i'm about to tell you before that make sure to subscribe and click the little bell icon to get notifications when we publish our next digital marketing tutorial the first tip is to avoid keyword cannibalization which occurs when two or more pages on your website are competing for the same keyword with the same or similar search intent when two pages are being optimized for the same keyword google may not be sure which page to rank you may have one page that ranks number one and the other page is ranking number 27. this second page may be best suited for a different search intent because you're significantly diluting the chances of ranking at all however this isn't always the case if each of these pages rank for hundreds of other keywords and you remove or delete them you'll lose some of the other keyword rankings which can harm your site's overall organic performance if we look at the traffic generated from the search results for these two pages on moz's blog both are keyword research guides so we'll see that the organic traffic driven to the second page is much lower than the first this includes ranking positions so although we'd want to dig a little deeper we can assume that there is keyword cannibalization happening here to solve the issue you'd either merge the two resources together or delete the page if there aren't any backlinks pointing to that page either way make sure that you use the 301 redirect to the remaining page meaning that if a search engine or user stumbles upon the deleted url they'll be redirected to a still relevant resource there are so many podcasts available in a ton of niches with over 48 million episodes as of april 2021 weekly listeners have increased every year since 2013 with 28 of the us population listening to a podcast on a weekly basis the obvious way to get involved with podcasts is to start your own but it can take a lot of equipment skills and resources to begin a podcast however you can simply take advantage of two million pre-existing shows and appear on one that's already established appearing on a well-researched podcast that your target audience listens to can do wonders for your brand awareness and authority you can find podcasts in your niche by looking in a directory of existing professionals already appearing on podcasts we'll then want to find the podcast that they've appeared on head to the site explorer on ahrefs and enter their website domain we'll go to that links and filter the referring page title by the guest's name this will give you a list of podcasts to contact metadata is all the code that can be added to your web page to describe the content on the page to search engines the metadata is not only vital for encouraging click-throughs in the search results but for providing additional information to search engines this increased engagement and better optimization will help boost your web pages up in the search results improving visibility and organic traffic as a result although google has been known to change page titles in the search results over the last few months you can still have control over how your pages are portrayed in the search results we've created a separate video specifically on how to do that which i'll link above title tags and meta descriptions these titles along with the page descriptions are the first touch point a customer will have with your website if using a search engine you want to make sure that your web page is the most appealing on that list and displays how the web page serves users search intent each platform has a different way of enabling you to add and edit metadata in wordpress for example titles and descriptions can be edited using free plugins like yoast alternative text or alt tags are added to images to provide search engines with more information it also enables images to be crawled and ranked in the google image search not only that but it makes your images and therefore your website more accessible for users with visual impairments as i said before each platform has a different way of managing your old text but it's usually pretty straightforward in wordpress for example alt tags can be edited from within the media library canonical tags are used around duplicates or nearly matching content to signify to google which page you'd like to be crawled indexed and ranked in google meaning that you put all the focus on the primary page increasing its prominence and visibility in the search results although these are the main three meta tags that more likely relevant to every website there are additional meta tags such as social media meta tags which enable integration between your website and social channels which is particularly important for increasing brand awareness and the responsive design meter tag which controls the layout of responsive mobile design as mobile friendliness is a major google ranking factor anything you can do to make your website even more responsive is a big seo bonus now let's look at fixing that existing content that is failing to drive much if any organic traffic these pages may even be harming your overall seo performance here's why non-performing content uses up your crawl budget which is how search engines decide how many pages and which pages of a site to crawl it's limited and if your site has a lot of non-performing content there's a potential that search engines will crawl all the ineffective content and abandon the site before crawling the good stuff meaning that the entire website suffers in its rankings this is where a decision needs to be made do you want to remove the content altogether by consolidating the pages as you would have done with your duplicate content or do you want to update and improve the content so it can position better in the serps winning more organic clicks long term we definitely recommend the latter the content is already there and established so updating the content is always the best option begin by finding the content that is helping to drive a little traffic to your website by looking at the ahrefs rank tracker and filtering your blog post by average position and traffic we can see here that our local seo guide has dropped in traffic and is ranking low but we know that in the past this has driven good traffic so we'd want to start here if you want to know how to find these pages for free using google analytics and follow a step-by-step guide to optimizing existing content i'll pop a link in the card above conduct an audit every few months to optimize organic traffic performance and ensure your content isn't weighed down by non-performing content the next tip is for those who are already ranking on the first page of google but may be struggling to get many click-throughs featured snippets appear in the google search results and aim to answer a search's question directly in the results page meaning that they never need to leave google to find the information they need many jumped to the conclusion that featured snippets reduce click-through rate but matt barbie at hubspot found that this isn't true as traffic to the hubspot website for just under 5 000 queries increased by over 114 percent you can't request that google add your website to featured snippets so you need to manually optimize for them there are a few types of featured snippets including images videos short paragraphs lists and tables smart structure and content are key to increasing organic traffic with featured snippets you'll also push competitors down the search page rankings increasing brand exposure snippet of friendly content must answer the question in the search term and the earlier in the post the better the questions tend to be why what or how it's best to reiterate the question in a separate h2 subheading with the answer directly below it and use high quality images to make it really simple for search engines to crawl and identify even if you don't manage to win the featured snippet spot these tactics will improve content performance by making it more crawlable and more shareable it's a win-win following these tips will encourage more organic traffic to our website but make sure to click the screen now to check out our seo training checklist to really get the most out of your seo efforts through detailed keyword research content strategies technical seo and more you