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When website owners want to improve their organic traffic, they often want it to happen immediately. It can be frustrating to put in a lot of work and not see immediate results. However, the wait is a normal part of every effective organic marketing strategy and should never discourage site owners from pursuing organic growth. The wait can be well worth the results.
Boosting organic web traffic is worth your time. The time and patience you put into your organic marketing strategy can lead to sustainable success. Unlike traffic from paid ad campaigns, which significantly boost your visibility over a short period of time, organic traffic doesn’t die down fast — especially when you implement the right search engine optimization (SEO) tactics.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of practicing patience to grow organic traffic. Then, we’ll introduce a handful of SEO strategies that you can use to land and maintain solid rankings on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who enter your website from unpaid sources. Essentially, it’s any free traffic you earn rather than paying for with ads.
Website owners can get organic traffic from social media posts, email campaigns, business directories, guest posts on external blogs, and many other sources. However, some of the most common sources of organic traffic are search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When your web pages show up high on SERPs — as a result of being selected by search engine algorithms rather than paid ads — you’ll naturally gain more clicks to your site. This is organic growth.
Why Growing Organic Traffic Is Important
While growing organic traffic may seem tedious compared to investing in paid ads, it’s key to long-term growth. Organic marketing tactics are designed to attract consistent, dependable traffic to your site. Since paid advertising can only drive website traffic for a defined period of time — and often for a specific audience — you need to generate organic traffic to have a strong foundation for your success. It’s the most cost-efficient way to improve your website performance and win more sales, sponsorships, or whatever you’re hoping to achieve.
Organic traffic also shapes your brand in the long term. Organic traffic is typically achieved when consumers are actively searching for answers that your content provides. When you align your website content with the needs of your target audience, you can attract the most relevant visitors — and repeatedly so. This helps you position your brand as an industry leader
SEO Strategies for Increasing Organic Web Traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best strategies for increasing organic website traffic. When you implement SEO tactics, you give search engine algorithms clear indicators that your website is trustworthy, high-quality, and relevant to your target keywords. As a result, you’ll show up higher on SERPs that actually help you drive organic web traffic from the right audiences.
In this section, we’ll provide five SEO strategies that you can use to grow your organic web traffic. While a willingness to wait is necessary for each of these strategies, your efforts can lead to impressive growth over time.
1. Set Clear, Realistic Goals
Before you begin optimizing your website, it’s important to define what you want to get out of your SEO campaign. Your goals can, and should, include details about what keywords you want to rank for and how much traffic you want to achieve. Additionally, you need to set a timeline for hitting your organic web traffic goals.
To ensure your goals are realistic, it’s important to first acknowledge that you’ll need to be patient to reach your ideal traffic levels. Successful SEO professionals will tell you that a favorable campaign will take time to achieve your desired results.
The first month of implementing an SEO strategy should typically be treated as a discovery phase — one that can be used to learn where your website stands and what tactics will work best — while the next few months should be used for content creation. During your goal-setting stage, keep realistic expectations for your SEO campaign. Remember that six months may pass before organic traffic begins to grow. However, after a year, you can expect more steady growth and adjust your goals and timelines accordingly.
2. Focus on the Quality of Your Content
High-quality content is key to improving search engine rankings. Search engine algorithms are smarter than ever, which means keyword stuffing can actually hurt your ranking rather than improve it. Rather than trying to artificially prove the relevancy of a web page, you need to develop content that actually matches users’ search intent.
Before building out a landing page or writing a blog post, identify the keyword you want to target. Then, take a look at the web pages currently ranking highest for that keyword to understand what information searchers using that key term are looking for. Targeting long-tail keywords for SEO is the easiest way to match search intent and win more organic traffic.
3. Stick to a Consistent Publishing Schedule
Whether you’re practicing link building by guest blogging or writing content for your own website, sticking to a regular publishing schedule can help you increase organic web traffic faster. This is where persistence comes in. When you’re consistent about your SEO content creation, you can steadily increase the number of SERPs your website gets traffic from — and, as a result, naturally boost traffic as a whole.
To make your publishing schedule as effective as possible, make sure you’re focusing on a few content pillars instead of trying to tackle too many subjects. This way, you’re still targeting a specific, niche audience instead of spreading your content creation efforts too thin.
4. Improve Your Website Accessibility
When your content is already catered to your audience, one extra step you can take to further boost your traffic is improving your website’s accessibility. Many accessible-website elements align with SEO best practices. By improving your navigation, adding keyword-rich alt text, adding video transcriptions, and more, you make it easier for search engine algorithms to understand your website’s relevancy to your target keywords.
Accessible websites are also easier to use, which can decrease your bounce rate and increase the time users spend on your site — both of which can indicate that your website is high-quality.
5. Perform Regular Audits To Improve Your SEO
Search engine optimization is a process, not a task that can be performed in one day. As competitors create new web pages and algorithms change, your ability to assess and adjust your SEO strategy becomes key to maintaining and improving your website performance over time. Through regular website audits, you can identify which web pages need re-optimization and where there are significant issues, like duplicate content, that need to be fixed.
You don’t have to conduct these audits completely on your own. Nowadays, you can use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to complete SEO audits within minutes. Platforms like Semrush can give you a comprehensive look at the issues on your platform, so you can prioritize the efforts that will make the biggest difference in your search engine ranking.
When performing manual audits, you can simply take a look at potential search engine ranking factors that your AI tool doesn’t already evaluate.
Patience Is Key to Effective Website Growth
Increasing organic web traffic is a steady process that requires plenty of patience and persistence. While it won’t lead to immediate results — and can require six months of investment before the first signs of traffic growth start to occur — your efforts can support your long-term success far better than paid ads.
One of the best strategies for achieving organic traffic growth is embracing search engine optimization strategies, which help you get more website visits from search engine results pages. Start improving your SEO by setting goals, identifying the keywords you want to rank for, and consistently publishing content that fits into your content pillars. Then, take time to improve your website accessibility and conduct regular audits to maximize the amount of targeted traffic you get.
