Organic is the latest craze for fitness nuts—unless, of course, you’re a little more hardcore with your nutrition and you’re diving deep into sugar-free, gluten-free, non-GMO, cruelty-free, FUN-free, vegan nonsense. (I personally enjoy a crappy burger hugged by real cheese and buns now and then, but, to each his own.)
Anyway, for us Las Vegas SEO nerds, we’re less concerned about organic food and more obsessed with organic traffic. Find out just what that is, and how to increase organic traffic to your business’s website.
The Difference between Organic Traffic vs. Direct Traffic
When it comes to any type of marketing, it’s always important to understand who your audience is and what they’re looking for. The quality of your visitors will vary based on their source. (Users who click on ads may be closer to a conversion than someone who simply wants to know what the latest trend in luxury interior design is.)
Websites get traffic from a variety of sources, including paid online advertising, but for, now we’ll focus on the two main sources of traffic: organic and direct.
Where does direct traffic come from?
Before you start learning how to increase organic traffic, it’s important to understand the difference between it and direct traffic. Direct traffic has no referring website. This means visitors went directly to your site, as opposed to clicking a link that leads them to your site from another. Users can manually type your URL into the address bar, or loyal customers may have your page bookmarked.
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High direct traffic can mean you have a strong, brand awareness or loyal customer base but means few people are finding you through discovery, which is to say, organically.
What is organic search traffic?
Organic traffic, on the other hand, comes from website users who visit your site from a search engine like Google. This, however, does NOT count for those who click on an ad that shows up in the SERPs—PPC and other paid search traffic counts as another category within Google Analytics.
Organic traffic deals strictly with your SEO efforts. The better your site authority and the higher your ranking, the more likely you’ll see an increase in organic traffic to your site. When you blog consistently and optimize content on your site, that helps improve your organic traffic as well.
Why You Want That Healthy and Delicious Organic Stuff
Organic search traffic is great, but why? For one, it’s better at delivering relevant, long-term traffic to your site than ads or social media traffic. The people who are searching for terms related to your business are often more likely to become loyal customers than someone casually scrolling through their social media feed.
Visitors from social media may click to your site because something caught their eye on Facebook, but it’s not guaranteed they stay if your site isn’t absolutely amazing. Organic visitors can become long-term customers, and often have lower bounce rates than people visiting from social because they’re actively looking for you.
(“Just like organic greens can be better for you in the long run?” Yeah, kinda, but let’s get back to the point.)
Traffic from social media can often be out of your control, too. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter can change, releasing new updates that alter the algorithm that used to be doing so well for you—after that change, your traffic could decrease if your don’t learn quickly how to work the new algorithm.
Organic vs. Processed (Ahem, Paid)
And, you may get traffic from online ads, but once you stop shelling out that money, your traffic will decrease, too. However, when you put in place SEO best practices, you’re doing well for your website in the long run. So, even if Google updates their methods, the owned media you publish on your site will still be there, waiting for Google to crawl it and index it.
Many tactics increase brand awareness and sell things, but organic is your best bet for getting people to find you, remember you, and keep returning to your site.
Organic is your best bet for getting people to find you, remember you, and keep returning to your site.
How to increase organic traffic
We suggest you put in the work and learn how to increase organic traffic. It’s hard work, but it’s an investment you’re making into your site, and it will help you rank and grow your website for days, weeks, months—years even!
Write high quality content and post new stuff consistently. Organic traffic generation is all about giving users what they want. Write for the Internet users, not just the Google Bots. You always want to provide relevant, useful content; then, your site will start gaining more traffic organically.
Do some keyword research. When increasing organic web traffic, you want to target relevant keywords and topics, and find those specific long tail phrases with a good search volume but less competition.
Use white hat tactics. Black hat SEO will piss off the Google gods and risk doing more damage than good. Stick to the tried and true SEO efforts.
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Organic Traffic: A Lifestyle Choice
Much like choosing a Mediterranean diet for your brain and heart health, choosing the organic traffic diet for your website and to fuel your online presence are not choices to take lightly. It is, in fact, a lifestyle decision similar to when you chose to dress in mostly black v-necks and khaki cargo shorts.
This means you can’t eat organic for a week and be done with it. It’s an ongoing habit that at times is equally arduous, mundane, and simply, un-fun and very much less fun than a cheeseburger with extra cheese.
But to have people find you, remember you, and return to your site, you have to be willing to put the long-term effort into an ongoing organic traffic strategy of creating high-quality content, researching keywords and topics relevant to your audience, and using the tried and true SEO tactics it takes to rank and grow a lean, mean, super-organic, green machine web presence.
