How To Get More Organic Traffic
By: Mark Thompson
Tags: Content Strategy, Affiliatemarketing, Content Marketing, SEO, Articlesrank

How To Get More Organic Traffic — Serious Marketers Only

How To Get More Organic Traffic

In these difficult times it’s often not prudent to spend a lot of money driving paid traffic to your websites, this is where getting more organic traffic can really help you. In this blog post I’ll be looking at simple ways that you can start to get more organic traffic and start to replace paid traffic.

Before we start please ensure that you have added your site to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The more Google know about your site the more search traffic they can send you plus it allows you to analyse your increase in Organic Traffic and set monthly goals for growth..

Step #1 Content Marketing — Choose the Right Topics

Whether you like it or not you are now a content marketer, this means you need to think smartly about the content you create.

Don’t just treat a piece of content as an article create it correctly and pay attention to every aspect. Then it can generate organic traffic for you for years to come.

The first place to start is by creating content people actually want. Do some research and choose your main keyword. The ideal place to start is to look at your close competitors and look at what they are writing about. Next take time to look at the top websites in your niche and try to identify their best performing content.

The simplest way is to look at the number or comments, although not scientific this will give you some ideas. Next start to use a keyword research tool such as Keywords Everywhere, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or Ubersuggest. All 3 have limited free access or free trials.

You are looking for keywords that you can rank for with ease. Ignore the search volume, the difficulty level is much more important. As we’ll see you can rank for multiple keywords based on a main keyword.

For Example here are the keyword research results for the keyword: How To Name a Blog

It shows a search Volume of 480 and a difficulty of 13 so it should be relatively easy to get an article to rank.

Now let’s look at how many keywords an actual article using this keyword term ranks for.. 204 and that will to continue to grow over time.

Next aim to create engaging content that answers specific questions people may ask about your main keyword.

For example if someone asked on google “How Do I Train My Dog To Fetch” Then Google would be more inclined to show them relevant content that addresses that question rather than the wider topic of dog training.

But the inverse is also true.

“How to train your dog to fetch” would more than likely rank higher than “101 Dog training tips”

Whereas “101 Dog training tips” would rank higher if the person asked for “Dog Training Tips”

On top of the questions people ask start to think about Long Tail Keywords these are the terms that relate to your target keyword. An example is that “Dog Frisbee” might be a term that your dog article would also rank for.

Look at the examples in the images above, we’ve got the potential to get organic traffic for over 200 keywords some of which may just get 4 or 5 searches a month but because of that they aren’t targeted.

In the past I’ve found a simple article rank for hundreds of keyword terms that I’d never considered. Some keywords aren’t even in the article but Google is so good at understanding what your article is about is will show it for related terms you’ve not though about. They may only get searched for a few times a month but all that traffic adds up.

My personal rule is, if a search term has a search volume listed it’s a candidate for having an article written around it.

Article Length

How Long Should Your Article Be?

Over time, you’ll find that long form content is treated better by google than short content so take time to cover every topic you can think of. Increasing the length of your post will naturally get you more Long Tail Keywords.

There are hundreds of keyword opportunities available for every article so take time to think about related terms you can add throughout the article. As we already discovered Search volume doesn’t matter, I wish people ignored it and just ensured that they created quality content rather than try to fit in high volume keywords.

The good news is that Google is good at this so you don’t need to find all the long tail keywords just think of a few and add them google should do the rest.

Summary

Create Content That Answers People Questions

Don’t Obsess over Search Volume

Focus On Keyword Difficulty

Use Long Tail keywords

Trust Googles ability to Understand what your content is about

Step #2 — Search Engine Optimization

You don’t need to be an SEO expert to get more organic traffic to your blog, just a few simple things can make all the difference.

For now, we’ll just be focusing on “On Page Optimization“. Off-Page SEO Optimization can come later when you are trying to get those top few ranks in Google, it’s a long soul-destroying process so if we can get the best start with on-page SEO then it’s worth doing.

Although ranking on the first page of Google may be your ultimate aim search ranking isn’t the be all and end all of the process.

Later we’ll look at how distributing content, relaunching content and repurposing content your content will all draw referral traffic long before google has ranked your content. These are the things you can do on your blog that have a big impact on your search engine ranking and therefore you’ll get more traffic from organic search.

But for now lets just ensure that your content is given the best chance of being blessed by Google with a first page ranking.

The first step is to get an SEO plugin such as Yoast or an app like Textmetrics which I am using. This will guide you and show you what you need to do to get the maximum SEO boost on each piece of content.

One of the most important tasks is to ensure you have created the Meta Description which helps Search Engines know what your content is all about.

Here the meta data from this post (Including spelling mistake!)

I use Textmetrics which I got as a lifetime offer on AppSumo (I documented why I’ve spent over $3000 on AppSumo Deals here).

Getting There…

It gives me a simple step-by-step guide to optimizing the SEO on each blog post.

I simply follow the instructions on-till I get as close to 100% as possible.

It’s the same principle with YOAST, Once you have your plugin installed simply follow the instructions and try to get the highest rating possible.

It’s amazing the effect a few minor tweaks can have.

The next step to take is to find content within you site that is related and link to it with internal links, this ensures that search engine “spiders” can find all your content.

This should help you get more search traffic to all your blog posts over time.

Summary

Use an SEO Plugin Or App

Follow The Recommendations

Set Up your meta tags and ensure the search engines know what your content is about.

Use Internal Links to Link Between Content on Your Site

On-Page SEO before Off-Page SEO

Step #3 Repurpose & Relaunch Your Content

The most successful content creators repurpose content, why write a great post and only use it once?

The choice is yours but would you rather write 5 or 6 pieces of content each year or 50+?

Having 2 or 3 great pieces of content is much better than having 20 poor ones, so aim for quality engaging content from the start. The best place to start with repurposing or relaunching content is with a site audit.

List each piece of content you have in a spreadsheet and decide what you can do with it. It should be classified as follows.

Fine as it is no action needed

Can benefit from an upgrade or rewrite

Out of date, time to retire

Can be improved to merging with another article

Once your content is classified then decide what you should do with it there are 2 choices.

I use the spreadsheet to list each piece of content to be either repurposed or relaunched and this process is repeated yearly.

Repurposed content is turned into different types of content videos, podcasts LinkedIn Posts,Facebook posts etc.

Relaunched Content is added to a social media posting schedule and dripped out over the coming months.

After you’ve been through an audit and classified your content it’s time create a content plan for the coming months.

If you repurpose and relaunch your content correctly you’ll need far less content and you’ll get far more traffic in the future so it’s worth the effort.

First off make sure you post all “new” content to your social network of choice. That’s the bare minimum you need to do.

I schedule each article to be distributed 9 times over the next 12 months. The chosen social network will receive it multiple times in the first 3 months and then less as time goes on. Over time the views and organic traffic grows.

I generally use Twitter , Facebook and Instagram for each piece of content I create. If you create good content this can ensure regular social media shares throughout the year.

Here is my twitter stats for the last 5 distributed articles, the top article was repurposed and relaunched 2 weeks ago.

Repurposing and relaunching content isn’t difficult and it’s usually less time-consuming than writing a new article.

Look at all your existing content and ask yourself can this content be improved?

If it can then improve it and do a content relaunch, which is exactly the same as you do to distribute a new article. In step 4 of this article I’ll give you some ideas.

I find that creating an SEO blueprint and referring back to it helps me keep on track. Every 6 to 9 months I’ll revisit every piece of content and decide if I can improve it or if it’s time to replace it.

If I decide to update it I’ll consider increasing the length of the post to potentially get ranked for more Long Tail Keywords.

A typical content relaunch might consist of some of the following:

Post your content to Medium after 30 days. If you’ve not done it yet open a Medium account and ensure that your content is posted there after it’s been on your site for 30 days. Also ensure that you set the canonical URL in Medium to your own article in your site. That will ensure there are no duplicate content penalties.

If you have a YouTube channel, create a video version of the article, and link back to the original article in the description and then create a comment which you can pin to the top of the comments section with your Call To Action.

You can then repurpose the video to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Mix up the links so that some go to your video and other go to the original article.

Finally, get a social media scheduling tool that can do the work for you! Hootsuite and Missinglettr are 2 I use but there are lot’s available

Summary

Do a content audit and classify each post

Decide if your content can be relaunched or if it should be repurposed

Distribute updated content as you would new content.

Use a content distribution tool and schedule the posts over the period of the next few months

Step #4 — Further Steps You Can Take To Get More Organic Traffic

In this part of the article I want to give you some ideas for growing your organic traffic over time. This will build on the work you’ve done in the first 3 sections.

You don’t need to do them all pick a few and stick to them, keep doing the ones that work and drop the ones that don’t.

1. Do a Guest Post.

Doing a guest blog post has fallen out of favour in the last few years but it’s still a great way of link building (check that backlinks on the site are Do Follow) and getting a steady trickle of organic traffic to your site.

Here’s a good search to use to get started just use your niche at the start

I would strongly recommend creating the best guest post you can and treating it as if it was some key content for your own blog.

2. Build Simple Backlinks

There are lots of sites out there where you can get backlinks with very little effort it really doesn’t matter if they are no follow or do follow as you should have a mixture of both.

Things like profile links on social media websites, links from forums or even content you can post on hosted blogging sites like WordPress.com.

I’d recommend keeping a list of the sites you use and every time you create content or post an article you use the list and generate backlinks

Using your keyword tool can be a good way of finding these.

3. Create More Video Content

Youtube can generate a lot of traffic if used correctly, as we discussed earlier in the post links to your content from your video descriptions and a pinned comment on your videos.

4. Featured Snippets

Make an active effort to get listed in Google as a featured snippet. As part of the content creation process create sections in your post which answer questions in that people may ask in a list form.

Check out this post by Neil Patel to learn more about how to get featured snippets

5. Link Building.

Building links isn’t for everyone and if you one of those people who hate the thought of it don’t worry about it. By distributing your content and getting eyes on it you’ll naturally build links over time. If you don’t mind taking time i would recommend coming up with a plan that will get you a whole host of backlinks.

I would start by sending details of your best content to sites that have linked to similar content in the past.

You could also try writing about a large site and then sending them details of the post, they may link back to it or ask you to write a guest post. Earlier I link to a post I wrote about AppSumo, I sent them a link via twitter, and they asked me to write a version for them. https://blog.appsumo.com/grow-a-business/

That resulted in organic traffic and several high value backlinks.

6. What is Your Traffic Source For Organic Traffic?

Look at your Google Analytics reports or SEO tool every quarter and try to determine which is your best source of traffic, then work at getting more traffic from there.

For example if you get a lot of traffic from Pinterest and hardly any from Twitter then focus the time you spend on Twitter on Pinterest.

7. Put Your Content on Product Hunt

I’ve hidden this one down the list as a bonus for people who take time to read this far down.

I’ve seen some people get amazing results by adding free content to product hunt. Create a free guide or curate some great content and offer it. The product below ranks high for SEO on the ProductHunt site, that is a link to their site on the top left and also in the get it button.

8. Guest Post on Relevant Sites

We’ve discussed this before but by creating guest posts you can get both links and traffic to your content. It can be time consuming but if you have time to create 5 great articles you can reach out and give people a list of content they can choose for their sites.

9. Post unique content where your target market is.

A Bit of a no-brainer this one, but wherever your audience hangs out make posts that give great information and then link to your main content at the end or in the comments. I did this ONCE in Reddit and I still get traffic to this day, this image shows the traffic for the month I posted it, If I paid for that traffic it would have cost over $2000

10. Tell The World — Create Press Releases.

This is an oldie but still a Goldie! If you write a great piece of content then create a press release and get it distributed this isn’t just for getting eyes on it but you will find you will also get backlinks and some organic traffic.