Efforts of corporate companies to increase the number of visitors on their websites are especially important in obtaining organic traffic. Organic traffic refers to the visitor traffic that sites gain naturally, without using any advertising on search engines. Various methods are preferred in this field, from paid advertisements to social media campaigns, from content sharing sites to SEO strategies.
In this article, we will cover methods on how you can improve your organic traffic gain and search engine optimization (SEO) success. However, first of all, it would be useful to talk about the tools that you can use to examine your website’s organic traffic status for free.
The Importance of Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is a key way to increase a website’s popularity and therefore brand recognition. For sales-focused sites like e-commerce, organic traffic can significantly contribute to increased sales.
Being included in search engine results pages (SERP) provides a more sustainable and permanent visitor flow with organic traffic. While budget constraints or changes in advertising strategies can affect the flow of paid traffic, organic traffic is less dependent on such external factors.
Customers searching for a product or service on Google can be directed to your site thanks to organic searches. When a user asks “what is it?” You can gain blog traffic with the answers you give to queries such as, get more followers thanks to shares on social media, and gain traffic and improve your search ranking with your original content. These improvements are directly linked to an increase in organic traffic, ultimately strengthening your brand awareness.
Traffic Types
Traffic flows to websites can come from a variety of sources and fall into different categories:
Organic Traffic: Visitors obtained from search engines without advertising.
Direct Traffic: Visits from users directly by entering the URL into their browser.
Branded Search Traffic: Users reach the site by making searches containing the name of the brand.
Paid Search Traffic: Visits obtained through paid advertisements on search engines.
Social Media Traffic: Users directed to the site via social media platforms.
E-mail Traffic: Directing users to the site through e-mail campaigns.
Referral Traffic: Visitors from external sources such as other websites, blogs, or forums.
Benefits of Organic Traffic
Many businesses have identified obtaining organic traffic and focusing their SEO efforts in this direction as their main goal when determining their digital marketing strategies.
From a cost perspective, organic traffic can significantly contribute to reducing digital marketing expenses compared to traffic generated through advertising. This may vary depending on the company’s goals. Sales through leads can offer a high conversion rate, so organic traffic is seen as a very cost-effective investment.
From a sustainability standpoint, once you stop spending large amounts of money on ads, your traffic flow will cease. However, organic traffic continues once a certain search engine ranking is reached. As the number of visitors increases, the budgets allocated for advertising decrease. This is especially advantageous for cost-oriented businesses.
We always advise our clients to be visible both through advertising and organically. From a time perspective, organic traffic is a model that never has an expiration date. When continuous improvements are made, the amount of traffic obtained can increase. Even a properly directed blog post can lead to sales.
Paid traffic or traffic obtained through social media is also of great value and attracts potential customers with high sales potential to your business. It is sustainable as a long-term traffic model and gives you an advantage in the competition. When your site ranks high, your customers’ trust in you increases and your brand awareness strengthens. As a result, you can achieve higher conversion rates.
Organic Traffic Increasing Methods
Increasing organic traffic means both cost-effectiveness and long-term success for websites. Here are the methods to increase organic traffic:
Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed indicates how quickly content on your website is displayed and is a critical factor for user experience.
Research shows that 40% of users abandon sites with loading times of more than 3 seconds. What’s more, 80% of these users never return to the site. Slow sites are known to cause a loss of 2.6 billion dollars in sales annually.
If Google notices that users are spending less time on your site, it may lower your site’s ranking in the search engine. Low rankings reduce your site’s visibility, which has a negative impact on organic traffic; because users have difficulty finding your site.
Regularly checking and improving your page loading speed and server response time for mobile and desktop platforms is important to prevent visitors from leaving your site.
Tools such as GTMetrix and Pingdom can be preferred to measure your page speed and make improvements. Thanks to these tools, you can test your site’s performance and implement suggested improvements.
Be careful to choose the images you will use on your website under 100 KB. You can use sites such as tinypng.com for image compression. You can use tools like Textfixer and Gzip to keep your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files under 150 KB. Additionally, enable browser caching, try to keep your server response time as low as 200 ms as possible, and remove unused scripts on the page.
Creating Backlinks
Backlinking means adding links to your own site and other trusted sites in your content, and this is an important step for SEO. Some points you should pay attention to when adding links:
It is important that the linked texts provide clear information to the user about the page to which the link will direct. Make sure that the content you refer to as data is up-to-date. Make sure that the site you are linking to is a reliable source. You may consider using the “rel=’nofollow'” tag to prevent Google from indexing the sites you link to. To keep users spending more time on your site, use internal links that make it easier for them to move from one page to another.
Mobile Compatibility Optimization
The rate of mobile users worldwide has reached 67%, and the proportion of users who prefer mobile phones to access the internet constitutes more than half.
Providing a poor experience for mobile users can cause your site to lose a lot of traffic. Since mobile compatibility is an important ranking factor, it is important to make your site compatible with mobile devices.
Choose to use HTML5 to make your site compatible with mobile devices. Avoid technologies like Flash because many mobile devices do not support them. Avoid pop-ups that can negatively impact user experience on mobile devices. Create your site with a responsive design to adapt to any screen size. Since there will be no keyboard use on mobile devices, create a design that will allow users to navigate your site easily.
Bounce Rate Reduction
Bounce rate refers to the rate at which visitors leave your page without reading or progressing. The lower the bounce rate, the more successful your site is.
Maintain a good bounce rate by adding videos to your content and using images that encourage users to scroll down the page. Analyze your page metrics to understand why visitors are leaving your pages. Use exit intent popups designed to present visitors with an offer when they are about to exit your site. Set your links to open in a new tab and use effective call-to-action (CTA) messages. This helps you keep visitors on the page without interrupting their reading process.
Cleaning Unnecessary Codes
While brands often focus on page design and back-end development, they may neglect unnecessary codes that can negatively affect site speed, search rankings and user experience.
Reduce or remove on-site JavaScript and CSS so Google can crawl your site faster and increase organic traffic. Cleaning up unnecessary code or reducing lines of code can increase your site’s speed and improve user experience. Don’t forget to minify your CSS codes.
Targeting Featured Snippets
If there is no featured snippet, 26% of clicks go to the first URL. If a featured snippet is present, the URL immediately below receives 19% of clicks, which is a 6% decrease.
When you have a featured snippet, your chances of getting more clicks and traffic increase.
Use bullet points or numbered lists in your blog content. Determine what questions your target audience asks and create content that best answers these questions. To increase your chances of getting a featured snippet, keep your content within 40-50 words. In a study conducted by Ahrefs, 2 million featured snippets were examined and it was found that 90% of these contents came from the first 5 URLs of the search engine results page. This shows that focusing on the featured snippet can increase your potential to drive more traffic to your site and rank higher in search results.
To boost your content:
Identify the frequently asked questions of your target audience and prepare content that provides clear, concise and valuable answers to these questions.
Keep your answers short and clear; Aim for a response length ideally in the range of 40-50 words.
Keep information organized and easily scannable by using content formatting such as bullet points or numbered lists.
When creating content for featured snippets, you can use tools such as Ahrefs to research which topics have featured snippets and which questions are included in this feature. Thus, by directing your strategy to topics and questions with high potential, you can become more visible in search engines and increase your organic traffic.
Focus on High Value Keywords
Cost Per Click (CPC) refers to how much advertisers pay for a click in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads. High CPC values indicate that that keyword is valued by investors and that they truly want to attract relevant users.
Targeting high CPC keywords is one way to expose your content to an interested and curious audience. Users rarely spend time on topics they are not interested in.
Target keywords that fit your niche.
Determine the most effective keywords with SEO tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Use long-tail keywords to rank higher for more specific queries. This strategy can reduce your site’s bounce rate and increase the average time users spend on the site, meaning a better ranking in search engines and therefore more traffic.
Quality Content Production Suitable for User Purpose
User intent refers to the real goal behind a search. If the content presented does not match users’ searches, this can negatively affect your Google rankings. In short, if your content doesn’t give users what they want, you’ve created a poor user experience.
Google uses various algorithms to detect bad user experiences and examines your site thanks to these algorithms. As a result of this review, your site will either be highlighted or relegated to the background.
Develop a comprehensive content strategy to produce content tailored to your audience and niche.
Stay consistent with the promised topic while creating headlines and links that attract the user.
Determine the search intentions of your target audience and make a detailed content plan accordingly.
Create high-quality content that will meet user intent. This method is one of the most effective strategies to gain organic traffic and is fundamentally based on customer satisfaction. This will provide users with the information they are looking for, which will keep them coming back to your site again and again.
Effective Use of Title Tags
Long and hard-to-read blocks of text can cause users to quickly leave your site. It can be difficult to attract users who have had such an experience back to your site.
- Improve readability by breaking up your content with headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists.
- Make your text more accessible by using clear and short sentences.
- Use tools like hemingwayapp.com to improve your readability rating and achieve a score below Grade 3 if possible.
- Be careful not to exceed 300 words under each heading and divide the text with subheadings when necessary.
Optimization of Site Map
By creating and optimizing your XML sitemap, you can ensure that Google can easily find and index your pages. This process will increase your site traffic.
- If you use a content management system such as WordPress, you can create your XML sitemap through plugins such as All in SEO Pack or Google XML Sitemaps.
- Submit the sitemap you created to Google via Google Search Console.
- Although the maximum file size for sitemaps is 50 MB, it is beneficial to keep the file size as small as possible. Gzip compression can help reduce the size of your sitemap.
- When you make significant changes to your page, update the page modification date.
Resolving Errors in Structured Data Markups
If you’re into technology, you know that machines can interpret the content on web pages in different ways. Structured data helps search engines analyze and index your content more effectively.
- Using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, you can detect and fix structured data errors on your site.
- You can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool to easily mark structured data on your site.
- Identify the pages you need to edit manually and make the necessary corrections to those pages.
- Once you’ve completed the fixes, retest your pages to double-check that your structured data markups are correct. These processes allow search engines to better understand the content and purpose of your site and also help users find your content easily. This way, you increase the chances of your content reaching your target audience and improve your click-through rate.
- Structured data markups may not directly increase organic traffic on your site, but combined with an effective marketing strategy, they can help you attract more visitors to the site and increase user engagement.
Creating a Google My Business Listing
One way to get a better position in search engines is to register with Google My Business. According to Moz, Google My Business is a key ranking factor, especially for local map searches, and helps businesses become more visible in organic searches, which can increase traffic.
- Add your business to Google maps via Google My Business and create an account.
- Fill in all the details such as your business name, description, photos, videos, working hours, contact information.
- Respond to questions and comments regularly.
- There is a 750 character limit for your Google My Business description. Include the best aspects of your business and keywords here.
Solving Broken Link Problems
Broken links can harm your site’s traffic and rankings. Finding and fixing any broken links on your site improves the user experience.
- Find broken links on your site using tools like Screaming Frog, DeadLink Checker, Broken Link Checker or Google Search Console.
- Import a list of these links into a spreadsheet.
- Fix any broken links you find and update them in your content management system.
- I recommend watching a video on using Screaming Frog to find broken links.
Determining the Ideal Blog Post Length
It’s hard to find a definitive answer about the ideal blog post length to rank higher on Google. There are different opinions on this subject; While some think 500 words are enough, others advocate posts of 2000+ words.
- According to research, articles between 2000-3000 words attract the most organic traffic.
- Buffer states that blog posts should ideally be 1600 words.
- In some sectors, articles of 1500 words in length may be sufficient. However, you should consider your own site and target audience when determining the ideal blog post length. Since every business and audience is different, analyze your data to understand how long content your readers prefer.
Active Use of Site Links
Sitelinks are additional links that appear in Google search results along with the main result or within the meta description. For example, links to your home page, blog page, or contact page fall into this category. If you include a table of contents in your blog posts, links that allow users to jump directly to specific sections may also appear in the site description.
Sitelinks help visitors navigate your site or a blog post easily, they also increase on-site traffic and click-through rate, build trust and therefore have a positive impact on organic traffic.
While there’s no guaranteed way for sitelinks to automatically appear in Google, including a table of contents in your content can increase the chances of these links appearing in search results.
Optimization of Images
This method is overlooked by many SEO experts and brands. However, optimizing images properly is of great importance.
Compress your images before publishing. You can increase image and page loading speed by using tools like TinyPNG or Compressnow. Use keywords in the alt text, meta description, title and caption sections of your images. This not only provides information about the content of the image, but also contributes to better ranking of the image in search engines.
Use of Visual Content
Although there is no type of content that can replace texts, supporting text-based content with visual materials can increase user interaction and interest. Adding images or videos to your blog posts makes the content more engaging, encourages users to read the article completely, and extends the time they spend on your site. If you use a content management system such as WordPress, you can create your XML sitemap through plugins such as All in SEO Pack or Google XML Sitemaps.
Submit the sitemap you created to Google via Google Search Console.
Although the maximum file size for sitemaps is 50 MB, it is beneficial to keep the file size as small as possible. Gzip compression can help reduce the size of your sitemap.
When you make significant changes to your page, update the page modification date.Add your business to Google maps via Google My Business and create an account.
Fill in all the details such as your business name, description, photos, videos, working hours, contact information.
Respond to questions and comments regularly.
There is a 750 character limit for your Google My Business description. Include the best aspects of your business and keywords here.
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