Imagine that you have opened a store and your biggest preoccupation is to lure customers into your storefront. Nothing too complicated you may think, all it takes is a bit of advertising and a billboard. But then imagine that your store is located on one of those teeming New York City streets, bustling with people who can hardly watch their step. To attract some attention, you will need to resort to a different advertising strategy or avoid common mistakes and gain an edge over your competitors.
This example provides a good illustration of how difficult it is to drive organic traffic to your website. The good news is you can still outperform your competitors on the search engines. The key is to step up your game and stay away from everything threatening to ruin the organic relevant traffic in your SEO strategy.
Organic Traffic and its Importance
Organic traffic is the traffic driven to your website from the search engine results pages, and it represents over 60% of the traffic on each website. What is important to have in mind is that only the traffic coming from unpaid sources counts as organic traffic.
There is also paid traffic, generated from Pay Per Click ads. So, you may be thinking: Why should I hire a paper writing service and get them to write the best content for me and who knows what else, if all it takes is to spend some dollars on PPC ads?
The main reason why organic traffic is superior to paid traffic is that the latter is short-lived- no pay, no play. In the similar vein, paid traffic can be misleading because you often get non-human traffic which does not boost conversion rate. Not to mention that organic traffic is essential to building your online presence, something that will benefit your business tremendously, especially considering that people nowadays rely on the Internet/ search engines and customer reviews as their main source of information. To put it simply, you absolutely need organic traffic, if you want to attract regular visitors, build credibility and outperform your competitors by ranking higher in search engines.
Main Obstacles to Driving Organic Traffic
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is one of the most overused SEO black hat techniques. Back in time, people thought that all they had to do was to trick the search engines by using the same keywords tirelessly and all over the page. This no longer works because unnatural keywords are dead. Those who resort to this strategy run the risk of getting blacklisted by Google.
Poor, Boring or Duplicate Content
If you still have not hired professional writers to produce some high-quality content for your website, better hurry up because the user experience is what matters the most to Google these days. If your content does not engage your audience because they find it poor, boring and unhelpful, you will get ignored. But do not even think about duplicate content if you do not want to suffer traffic losses.
Slow Website
It’s not only that Google uses site speed as one of its ranking factors, but also that people do not have much patience nowadays, especially if they need something urgently. If your website takes forever to load, people will simply go elsewhere. After all, the Internet is huge, and your website is not the only one around.
Poor Link-Building Tactics
High-quality links are among the top Google ranking factors. Buying low-quality and irrelevant links is one of the most popular black hat strategies used to trick the search engines. But guess what? Google flags these websites for being spammy. Some people decide to build private blog networks (networks of websites artificially linking to each other for the purpose of improving search rankings). But this strategy comes with the risk of a Google search penalty, and on top of all that, ROI is uncertain.
How to Get More Organic Traffic
Fresh and High-Quality Content
Remember when you were in college, struggling with one particularly complicated essay and thinking: Should I find someone who will write my paper? Back then, it did not seem like a good idea because it was called cheating. Nowadays, if you are incapable of writing high-quality content, you should not hesitate to hire content experts.
Taking shortcuts is no longer an option if you want to rank in 2017 and beyond. Your content needs to be high-quality and fresh. Freshness is another ranking factor Google uses by giving each page a score for freshness. According to Cyrus Shepard, adding some fresh content can boost your search rankings for a certain period of time, but you must make sure to update your content regularly, thus making it always fresh and relevant.
Pay Attention to Keyword- Rich Anchor Text for Internal Links
You want your content to be organized and to give your audience the best possible user experience and provide valuable information from different places on your website. The best way to do that is to include internal links. But pay attention, because they need to be relevant, useful and you should make sure not to use too many keywords as anchor text, because you will be penalized by Google. In fact, it is recommended that 17% of your anchor text should be brand names.
High-Quality Link Building
Your main concern should be to build a brand for your business. Relying on irrelevant and low-quality links in an attempt to trick the search engines is not the way to do it.
Instead, you should make sure only to rely on natural links that can improve your brand and build links only from the most reputable websites visited by your target audience.
Forget About Aggressive Ads
Just like college students who find someone to write a paper for money eventually get caught, so do website owners who use aggressive ads. Google introduced one of its newest penalties in 2017, targeting mobile pop-up ads so that pages with mobile pop-ups will lose much of their traffic. If you are working on subscription popups, make sure that you don’t become too aggressive.
Final Words
You have probably understood that learning how to drive organic relevant traffic to your website is vital to your business and brand recognition. We also hope that you have realized that you should not take any shortcuts or resort to black hat SEO strategies in an attempt to trick the search engines. These strategies no longer work, and all they can do is to get you penalized. What really works is to master SEO techniques that can double your organic traffic. Some of them include completing an SEO audit, using infographics, updating your content regularly, posting high-quality content on social media, tracking your competitors’ SEO keywords, making sure your website is mobile friendly, etc. But what all of these strategies have in common is that they are customer- focused, striving to provide the best possible user experience. Google cares about that, so you should care too if you do not want to get blacklisted.
We hope that our tips have helped you to introduce some changes in your organic relevant traffic driving strategy if you have been guilty of making some of the most common mistakes. We also hope that they will help you to grow your business and build credibility and we wish you success.
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