How To Increase Organic Traffic: 20 Actionable Tactics To Grow in 2024

Everyone wants to increase organic traffic to their website. 

As the internet matures, the need to prove your authority to both readers and search engines becomes increasingly important. 

If you’re scratching your brain on how to convert search traffic to visitors, don’t worry. We've put together a list of 20 ways we've found success when creating, optimizing, and promoting content for our clients.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic consists of visitors who have found your content the old-fashioned way: through unpaid marketing channels, such as search or social. Most often, we’ll focus on search traffic, measuring the number of visitors who have reached a site through search engines like Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go.

For most SEO and inbound marketing efforts, organic traffic is typically the primary measure of success for increasing top-of-the-funnel traffic and awareness. It’s a highly coveted traffic source because of its compounding results and high efficiency. It’s more cost-effective and sustainable than constantly relying on PPC ads to drive your growth strategies. 

Search engine optimization tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs can help measure incoming traffic and identify key areas for improvement. When you create content that drives more traffic, optimize your website for better performance, and promote your content for greater reach, you’ll increase your organic traffic.

Why organic search traffic matters for your business

Organic traffic is a powerful aspect of your business’s performance. Unlike PPC ads or other paid media strategies, organic traffic doesn’t cost money per visit. This means you could have huge returns on your investment when converting website traffic into leads and customers. 

Prioritizing organic traffic is a sustainable way to promote growth. Over time, your visitors will compound as your content engine chugs along, attracting more and more interest. 

Capitalizing on organic traffic leads to: 

• Competitive edge: Dominating a larger percent of the market share keeps your business at the forefront of your industry.
• Increased brand authority: Using SEO to increase your organic traffic will lead to higher rankings, and you’ll become a trusted source in your industry.
• Deeper understanding of your audience: Analyzing traffic data and visitor patterns illuminates the audience you’re reaching best.

Increasing organic traffic isn’t the ultimate goal, but it is the necessary first step. Your larger strategy will identify ways to convert traffic into qualified leads and, eventually, turn those leads into customers. 

How to increase organic traffic to your website with your content

Establishing a well-rounded SEO strategy will be a critical guide for your research, blogging, and overall content strategy. Here are our top 20 tips for boosting your organic traffic: 

1. Improve organic traffic by understanding the pain points of your ICP

Before you open up your favorite keyword research tool, dive into audience research to better understand how you can drive the right kind of traffic to your site. You’re looking for traffic that fosters leads for your sales team to convert.

To get to know your ICP better, you can interface with your customers directly through customer interviews or engaging with them on social media. You can also glean helpful information about your ICP from internal teams that regularly connect with customers or prospects, like your support and sales teams.

You’ll also learn a lot by digging through any sales and demo recordings, customer reviews, CRM data, and data about how customers are using the product.

This will give you qualitative and quantitative data that can tell you more about your customers’ pain points, goals, and jobs to be done. The more intimately you understand your customer, the more conversions you’ll get. 

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Recommended Listening/Watch: Finding Your ICP to Build Better Content

Recommended Reading: Using Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) To Improve Your Content Marketing’s Efficacy

2. Use keyword research to identify target keywords and content gaps

Performing keyword and SEO content gap analyses against your search competitors is a great way to find new opportunities — specifically, opportunities where your competitors are currently winning traffic that you aren't.

Keyword research is not a one-and-done venture. You’ll need to frequently revisit your analyses to keep up with the ever-changing competitive landscape. New opportunities for content will always pop up.

Routinely identifying valuable keywords and crafting corresponding content will not only target searchers who could benefit from your product but will also allow you to stay current with digital marketing trends.

Here's a great, detailed guide from Ahrefs on how to do a content gap analysis.

3. Create an SEO strategy that uses topic clusters

In recent years, the world of SEO has been shifting away from strategies that involve individual keywords and their search volume. Instead, focus on topic clusters — several relevant keywords that all play a part in rounding out a topic.

For example, the topic “How to change a bathroom faucet” will likely include several relevant keywords related to the necessary parts, the process, the tools required, and plumbing tips.

Take your keyword research to the next level and create a comprehensive content strategy that aligns with several high-intent keywords. This will allow your web page to rank for more than one keyword and, ultimately, drive more organic traffic to your site. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can help you research keyword topics. 

But knowing what to create doesn’t get you to the finish line. To optimize your site’s performance, you’ll need to build a sustainable posting rhythm by establishing an SEO content plan that emphasizes consistency. 

Your content calendar should be realistic enough that you can publish high-quality, in-depth content at a steady pace. Upping your content production but churning out low-quality content doesn’t cut it. 

This could look like one solid content piece every two weeks. If you have the capacity to scale or want to outsource your content production to a marketing agency, that’s even better. 

Publishing content consistently will demonstrate that your company prioritizes providing value. It also signals to search engines that your website continuously produces great content that needs to be crawled, leading to a bump in rankings.

Recommended Listening/Watch: Topic Clustering for Better UX and Improved Rankings

4. Optimize for long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords refer to specific search queries, usually four or more words long. Even though shorter queries may have a higher search volume, long-tail keywords are brimming with opportunities to capture traffic because lower-volume keywords often have less competition.

For example:

• “crm” has 253,000 searches/month and a difficulty score of 89/100
• “what is crm software” has 5,100 searches/month and a difficulty score of 62/100
• “why use a crm” has 90 searches/month and a difficulty score of 38/100

You should optimize your content for long-tail keywords as part of the topic cluster process. Understanding the depths of queries and topics that exist outside of the core keywords for your company and industry is critical for expanding the number of keywords where you rank. Populating on a higher SERP leads to more organic traffic, and long-tail keywords help unlock that potential. 

5. Improve the user experience on your website

User experience is a key aspect of viewer retention and long-term site visitors. If your website is difficult to use, slow to load, or unresponsive across mobile devices, people will be less inclined to visit. 

You’ll also want to ensure your pages have clear CTAs and are easy to navigate. A tangled site map or an unintuitive interface will push users away, and a negative experience lends itself to high bounce rates and less overall traffic. 

Increasing your site’s technical SEO by improving site speed and accessibility will bolster your search rankings. Additionally, optimizing for mobile and voice searches can make users more inclined to stick around — or, better yet, come back for more.

6. Try using FAQs, glossaries & help centers

Answering questions is a great way to increase organic traffic while also helping out your audience. FAQ pages, glossaries, and help centers create highly specific and thorough content that answers questions people have that directly relate to your product or service.

Not only are these pages useful for your audience, but they are a goldmine for SEO. Incorporating keywords into your FAQ pages helps them rank higher in searches, making them more accessible, and establishes you as a leader on the subject. 

You can find ideas for these pages in your keyword research, from your customer service team, from the search queries on your site or help center, and from sites like Quora. Browsing the People Also Ask questions in search results will cue you into queries your audience may have next and will help you anticipate what your audience needs.

Sprout Social and Investopedia are two great examples of in-depth glossaries.

7. Publish videos on YouTube and embed them in your long-form written content

Google increasingly features three to five YouTube videos near the top of the SERP for certain queries. If you are creating video content for your site, whether on product pages or as part of blog posts, consider hosting them on YouTube and optimizing the video for target keywords.

Then, you can embed the YouTube video on your site and multiply your views by gaining traffic from YouTube queries and potentially having your video content pulled directly into the SERP. 

Video content continues to rise in popularity, so don’t waste this opportunity to connect with a larger audience. 

8. Allow guest blogging for high-quality content on your site

A great way to increase the amount of content you are creating is to invite bloggers and other subject matter experts to write guest posts for your site. Not only is guest blogging a way to get more content for your site, but it also offers additional traffic benefits.

• It’s common for guest bloggers to promote the content they wrote for your site.
• Many guest bloggers will also link to the post on your site that they wrote for you.
• You give your audience a more diverse set of experiences and viewpoints.

Connect with guest bloggers through marketing communities and social media, and focus on finding experts whose expertise is relevant to your following.

9. Prioritize proper content structure and on-page SEO

For any existing content and the new content you are creating, it is vital to make sure that the content is structured so that search engines can effectively crawl and index your content. As you review old content, it may surprise you how many pages are missing critical SEO data, share duplicate info with dozens of other pages, or have very little structure.

Make sure your title uses the H1 tag, your page has clear sections that use H2s, and subsections use H3s and H4s respectively.

Additional on-page SEO factors:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• URL
• Rel=canonical
• Image alt tags

Check out this in-depth guide from HubSpot about on-page SEO to learn more.

A lot of successful SEO teams consistently drive organic traffic by creating blog post templates that help writers understand the best structures for certain types of content.

10. Keep getting more backlinks

Referral traffic through backlinks is an effective way to increase rankings and generate more traffic.

One of the best ways to understand how many new referring domains you need to be gaining each month to gain ground is to:

• Analyze how many more referring domains your search competitors have than you.
• Calculate how many new referring domains they are getting each month.
• Then, calculate how many you would need to add each month to begin closing that gap.

Earning reputable backlinks establishes you as an authority in your industry. The traffic you receive from referrals is already primed to trust your expertise as it was recommended by another. Building backlinks to your site can be accomplished by creating good content, link-building outreach campaigns, and PR.

Moz has an incredible resource with everything you need to know about link building.

Pro Tip: Generating backlinks is often about using content types that attract them.

Being on other people's podcasts, having guests on your own podcast, statistics and trend based articles, as well as tools and templates for your industry all generate the highest rates of backlink success without needing to manually do outreach.

11. Remove low-quality, low-performing pages

Just as you prune a tree to maximize the flow of nutrients to the most critical areas, so should you prune your website. Removing thin content, old pages, and anything else that isn't critical to performance helps preserve more of your crawl budget for your most relevant content.

Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console data, you can identify the pages on your site that aren’t performing. From those, you can perform an audit to understand which ones are no longer critical to your overall website and SEO strategy.

If the URL doesn't have any backlinks, simply delete the page and let it 404. If it has a history of performance and has backlinks but isn't relevant anymore, consider redirecting it to a relevant page.

12. Fix keyword cannibalization with content consolidation

Keyword cannibalization happens when you create several pieces of content that all compete for similar keywords. Ultimately, you end up with multiple URLs fighting to rank for the same search terms.

The most common examples of this are when your homepage, a product or solution page, and a few blog posts are optimized for the same search term. Of course, there’s bound to be overlap across similar topics. But that doesn’t mean you can’t actively target unique keywords. 

To remedy keyword cannibalization, consolidate multiple pages into one or modify how each page is optimized to decrease or eliminate the overlap.

13. Improve click-through rates

CTRs are often a lower priority on the list of ways to lift traffic. However, in some cases, there can be pages that rank well and get a lot of impressions, but the title tag or meta description doesn't convert. Lackluster metadata can lose you traffic and potential revenue. It’s important to optimize these to ensure you don’t miss out on a lot of clicks.

Take a look at Google Search Console and view the URLs that rank in the top 10 but have a low CTR. Review the title tag and meta description and compare them to the search intent and other competitors.

Rewriting these to win more traffic without impacting keyword optimization can result in significant traffic gains with minimal effort.

14. Combine multiple short posts into one big one

Writing short blog posts can be a great way to get something published quickly. Short-form posts can be helpful to your audience in the moment, but over time you'll find that you have a lot of content that kind of ranks for keywords but simply can't compete with others for those terms.

Often, you can combine small posts that all tie together into one broader concept. Long-form content performs better in search, and you’ll be able to convert on your keywords more effectively. 

Combining multiple posts into one requires some rewriting and finesse rather than combining them verbatim. The result is a more helpful and comprehensive piece that can rank for all the same keywords and more.

Combining existing content is our bread and butter at Ten Speed. Here’s an example where we updated and combined 50 blog posts on a website, increasing both organic traffic and traffic to the product page.

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15. Optimize for featured snippets

Google continues to increase the importance of rich snippets, and the impact of “ranking zero” can be substantial in terms of the amount of traffic coming to your site.

Featured snippets or “rich results” pull structured data from your content and present it at the top of the search engine results page. From recipes and event data to flights and roundup lists, many industries are impacted by this, and it is essential to make sure you are setting yourself up to be a contender.

The easiest way to optimize for featured snippets is to understand and implement on-page optimization. Google prioritizes lists, definitions, and tables that are easily identifiable for users and the search engine.

If you'd like to get a list featured in a snippet, you would either:

Create a page with a header structure like this:

H1: 5 Secrets of Super Successful Video Marketing

H2: Center Your Video...

H2: Make your Video Feature...

H2: Use Humor in Your Video...

Or use this page structure:

H2: 5 Secrets of Super Successful Video Marketing

Immediately followed with <ol></ol> html to deliver your organized list

To learn more about rich snippets, check out this guide from Backlinko.

16. Fine-tune your internal links

Internal links connect one page on your site to another. Each internal link is a pathway for search engines to crawl your site. It also signals to crawlers how you prioritize and associate your content. Similar to earning a high volume of backlinks, the number of internal links pointing toward a page signals to search engines that your content is important. 

Beyond SEO, internal links also make your site easier for readers to navigate and encourage more time spent on your site. Utilize accurate and impactful anchor text to clearly demonstrate what readers can expect when clicking on an internal link.

Recommended Reading: Internal Linking for SEO: A Comprehensive Guide

17. Cross-post content on platforms like Medium

While this won't directly impact your rankings and won't earn true organic search traffic, cross-posting your content on platforms like Medium can be a great way to get the content you are already creating in front of a larger audience.

Using the Import feature on Medium, it will automatically pull in the content from your post and add the proper canonical tag. All you need to do is drop in the URL, clean up some formatting on the imported content, and hit publish.

18. Create high-quality open graph images

Open Graph is an image protocol that allows for on-page images to be resized and recontextualized when sharing posts on social media platforms. They populate as preview images, and without them, your content will appear with nothing in the image box. 

Putting in the effort to create high-quality images specific to each post can have a tremendous impact on your shared content's performance on social media. High-quality Open Graph images directly correlate to more clicks and more shares. This can also lead to significantly more shares and backlinks, which will ultimately help your web pages rank better in the SERPs.

This comprehensive guide from Ahrefs on Open Graph images breaks it all down. 

19. Distribute your content through a variety of channels

Different channels will appeal to different segments of your audience, so if you only ever share blog content, you’re missing out on possible traffic. Sharing your blog content across multiple platforms can be an excellent way to increase your reach and drive more overall traffic to your content. 

You can repurpose blog posts into email newsletters, scripts for video content, podcast topics, and social media posts. As more people engage with your content across various platforms, you’ll see a corresponding rise in website traffic — not to mention an increase in brand awareness, a boost in backlinks, and searches for more of your content across channels.

Recommended Reading: Yes, You Should Be Repurposing Content [+ 7 Examples To Get Started & Expand Your Reach]

20. Create a content strategy aimed at your target audience

Content marketing focuses on all content, not just SEO content intended to drive more organic traffic. A well-rounded content marketing plan raises overall awareness for your company, generates backlinks to more of your content, establishes you as an authority in your space, and ultimately creates more search volume for your topics over time.

Your strategy should include more than just long-form blog content. Comprehensive guides, webinars, case studies, infographics, videos, social media, and podcasts — and so much more — are all fair game. 

A cohesive strategy will lead to the creation of more content types, giving you more content to promote and more ways for visitors to interact with your brand. 

We created a guide specifically designed to help you build a SaaS content strategy that you'll find helpful.

Reach new heights through organic search with Ten Speed

There are a variety of ways to increase organic traffic to your website, and the best path forward depends on your resources, your industry niche, and your ICP. Optimizing for growth is an ever-evolving process, and what works now might not work in the future.

Partnering with a reliable, experienced agency to build and roll out your content strategy can be a game-changing way to boost your organic traffic — and sustain that growth. If you’re ready to increase organic traffic through content that works and want the right partner to help you get there, book a call with us.