In My Today’s Guide, You Will See How You Can Drive Organic Traffic to your site Without Needing To Rank in Google’s Top 10 using 5 simple strategies.

Most digital marketers have a simple definition of direct and organic traffic; to most, organic traffic is traffic coming from search engines while direct traffic is from people entering a site by typing URL from their browsers.

However, this explanation is superficial and leaves a lot of details when it comes to these two traffic sources.

In addition to understanding direct and organic traffic, you also need to understand how traffic is classified and traffic sources.

Web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics uses flow chart and algorithm based on the parameters set in the URL or referring website to know the source of the traffic. 

To help you understand, here are the sources of traffic;

=> Referral:

• This is traffic coming from a user who finds you through other sites than search engines

=> Social:

• This is traffic coming from social networks, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter

=> Paid search:

• This refers to traffic coming from search engines as a result of paid advertisement via AdWords or from other paid search platforms

=> Organic:

• This is traffic from search engine results earned by ranking high; it is not paid for

=> Email:

• This is traffic from email marketing

=> Other:

• Traffic not tagged via a URL parameter

=> Direct:

• Traffic from unknown sources

Direct traffic VS organic traffic:

** Direct Traffic**

This is traffic coming from no referring website. It occurs when a visitor follows a link from one site (referrer), to another.

The referrer sites can be social media blogs, search engines, or other websites with links to other websites.

For a long time, most marketers have attributed this traffic as one where a visitor enters the URL of a website or clicks on a link they bookmarked. However, today the theory behind direct traffic is quite sophisticated, and the number of direct traffic has been growing. However, studies have shown that most direct traffic is organic.

Why has direct traffic been growing; well, here are several causes;

=> Internal employees are regularly visiting your site:

• To have a better picture, filter out all your company IPs from your web analytics

=> Customers:

• if you have a customer portal on your site where your customers log into, then direct traffic to your website might increase. To avoid this from giving you a better picture of your ‘real’ website visitors, set up different views in Google Analytics to view your visitors without this traffic.

=> Actual direct traffic:

• this traffic from people who enter your URL or find it via a bookmark. This shows users know your brand.

=> Mobile traffic:

• traffic coming from mobile users

=> Email from email clicks:

• You can analyze if a certain email increased traffic by analyzing the spike in traffic to the time it was sent

• Clicks on desktop software and mobile apps

=> Secure to non-secure site:

• Traffic coming from HTTP sites should not come to your site since this shows the site is unsecured. Secure sites have https on their URL

Only a handful of these traffic sources comprises of a healthy amount of direct traffic. That’s why you need to focus on the true traffic source; organic traffic.

** Organic Traffic**

This is the traffic inbound marketing strategies strive to increase.

It is defined as traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing. It is unpaid traffic- one not impacted by paid search.

However, despite it being the true source of traffic, there are gray areas. Since it is driven by SEO, you need to be smart and cautious with SEO.

You need to consistently create content that is optimized for search engines to continue enjoying a flow of organic traffic.

Today, we will major on organic traffic. We will help you understand how to boost your organic traffic in a safe, legal way.

Here are 7 Strategic Approaches One Can Take to Drive Organic Traffic From Your Target Audience;

[1] Use Infographics On Social Networks and Forums:

Infographics will help you generate traffic and boost your leads and sales since they are visually appealing and summarized.

Studies show that people remember 80% of what they see as compared to 20% of what they read.

Whether you are building a new site or growing an existing one, infographics can help you attract organic traffic from search engines.

To rise above your competitors, use premium tools to help you design professional-looking infographics.

Don’t be tempted to use free infographic tools since the quality of the infographics will be basic.

If you cannot afford to buy a premium tool, you can hire a professional graphic designer specialized for this job to design you one. You can get a couple of them on Dribble.com.

Once your infographic is ready, you will need to promote it. Your infographic may be well-designed, highly useful and rich in content, but if you fail to promote it, then who will see it? Ensure to promote it so you can get the real benefits.

You can promote your infographic in different ways including through social media marketing and blogging. However, the most powerful avenue is sharing it on community-based forums and networks. You will find bloggers on these sites who will help you share your content as well.

Most of the bloggers on community-based sites are always looking for content to republish and curate. Sites such as GrowthHackers community allows one to syndicate your content.

If you have ever published an informational product, you know that having affiliates promote it for you is the easiest way to skyrocket sales. Similarly, by sharing your infographic on community-based networks, you will be recruiting content marketers, digital entrepreneurs, and bloggers who are looking for valuable content they can curate. This will be a good avenue for link building.

The more natural links to your web page as well as shares you get, the organic traffic you will get. And on another thing, any inbound link you get will be a plus to your search engine growth.

You can also share on Blokube.com, another community-based network. It is free, but registration is needed.

[2] Tactical Competitive Auditing:

Do you see your competitors’ web pages ranking high in Google while you are struggling to get into page 2 of search results? Then you need to learn a thing or two from them.

One of the most important things to check are the on-page factors that are making your competitor’s web pages rank high.

A competitive edge your competitor might have is influence on social media- whereby they have many people who share their content.

This prompts search bots to crawl, index, and rank their web pages higher. Even local business with a limited marketing budget can use the power of social engagement to rank high.

Another edge they may have is targeting unique keywords. Possibly, you don’t see these keywords on your Google AdWords Keyword Planner or the keyword research tool you are using. By doing a keyword analysis on your competitor site will help you optimize for most of those keywords and be ahead of them in search engine results.

However, before spying on your competitors, you need to know them first. So, how do you identify your true competitors?

• Go to SimilarSites.com and enter your site URL in the search box then click search icon

• Scroll down, and you will see sites and blogs that write similar topics as your site. Now that you know who your main competitors are, you can spy on them

• Go to Alexa.com to know your competitor’s best keywords; keywords they are using to rank in Google. On Alexa’s homepage, paste your competitor’s site URL and click find

=> Analyze their audience geography;

• where their traffic is coming from and their level of engagement. This will help you know the keywords to optimize for so as to rank in the location near you.

• You may aim for a few keywords targeting other regions as well. However, for you to get an increase in useful organic traffic, you will need to have useful content, speedy web pages, and good user engagement on your blog

=> Analyze organic keywords:

• These are keywords your competitor’s visitors are using to search for their content. You can know how your competitor is ranking for your target keyword by entering their site’s URL into SEMrush.com and clicking on the search button. This will display ranking for all your competitor’s target keywords

It is high time you start to dig to see what your competitors are doing differently and decide which strategies to copy for your small business.

By implementing the strategies your competitors are using, you will begin to see a significant improvement in your ranking and consequently your organic traffic.

You will also need to know more about emerging trends and popular tools your competitor is not targeting; by combining their strategy and your strategy, you can easily outsmart them or at least rank near them.

Above all, pitch all the high-quality guest articles on your competitors’ site and optimize for the same keywords they have used. Google will likely rank it in the top 10 results pages after a short time since it has already identified the topic.

[3] Optimize for long-tail keyword phrases:

To drive valuable organic traffic for a long time, you will need to target long-tail keywords. This might sound an obvious point, and you might have heard it over and over again; the reason for this is that it works.

Using the long-tail keyword strategy is one of the most effective, and you will rarely encounter any problems with it. Of course, overdoing it will land you in trouble, but that’s the case with almost any other SEO strategy.

When you target long-tail keywords, you may not appear in Google’s top 10 results, but with time, you will rank for related keywords that you never optimized for. That’s how long-tail keyword phrases are powerful. You will start to generate traffic from related keywords.

So, how do you find long-tail keywords?

The first place to start with is Google’ keyword tool to help you find seed keywords that have thousands of searches (monthly).

Here is how to do it;

=> Visit Google AdWords Keyword Planner and log in:

• Type your main keyword and click the ‘Great Ideas’ button. Click on the keyword ideas tab to see related keywords

=> Select keywords with more than 1,000 monthly searches:

• For good ROI, you will need to target keywords with a decent search volume.

=> Find long-tail variations by using KeywordTool.io:

• This is an alternative tool to Google Keyword tool. Find variations to all the keywords you got in the 2nd step. Since most of these keywords are not grammatically correct, you will need to use punctuation marks to make them make sense.

• For instance, if a keyword reads, “best SEO agency Chicago” you can phrase it as “best SEO agency- Chicago trusted SEO agency.

• Google will treat the keyword with “-“or a colon, or parenthesis the same way as one without any of these. This is a creative way of using grammatically incorrect or odd-reading keywords

[4] Make use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI):

SEO is a risky adventure, and you may think you are on the safe side and find yourself on the wrong side.

To minimize your chances of getting penalties for stuffing keywords and using long-tail keywords to manipulate search engines, use LSI keywords.

LSI involves identifying patterns. Google gauges the value of keywords in your content by using LSI. When search bots crawl a web page, the most common keywords are pinpointed.

LSI then looks for related words and synonyms relevant to your page title. For instance, if your title was “how to drive traffic to your blog,” search engine expects to find related keywords in your content such as ‘drive web traffic to site,’ ‘attract visitors online,’ etc.

By repeating the same keyword, regardless of whether it is a head keyword or long tail keyword, in your web content, Google will definitely catch up with you and penalize you. The safe method will be to use synonyms.

By using the LSI approach, you will not need to mention your long-tail keywords or head keywords repeatedly in your content. You will need to keep the main keyword in your title and synonyms in the body.

A professional knows that using related keywords and synonyms when writing high-quality blog posts will keep you on the safe side.

By understanding Google better, then it will be your friend and will send the right users to your site, irrespective of where your main keyword ranks.

[5] Resource Page Organic Approach:

Email outreach is a popular way of getting traffic and links. However, there are limits, especially for people who are aggressively building links.

Moz stats shows that 31% of bloggers ignore email whose subject line has a link request. However, the same study found out that clients will likely open detailed emails with valuable content.

A resource page organic outreach enable you to research web pages that rank highly in the first 10 results on search engine. ‘Resource’ in this case means a web page that ranks highly right in top 10 search results on Google; it doesn’t necessarily mean the type of content offering plenty of value.

What if you can improve on a post and ask the author to publish it and include a link to it in one of their popular posts?

Yes, this is a creative way of getting organic traffic. However, you will need to write well; a better post than the one posted by the original author.

Here are simple ways you can use to improve value to a blog post before you send it to an editor:

• Craft striking headlines

• Make your introduction attention-grabbing by making a bold statement, asking a tricky question, showing typical results, etc.

• Show examples of successful marketers or blogs who have benefited from whatever you are promoting. For instance, if you are talking about monetizing email lists, show marketers who do email marketing and have benefited from it

• Add plenty of screenshots, charts, and custom images. Avoid using stock photos

• Add credible references such as authority blogs that are relevant and popular in your niche

• Assure the blogger or editor that you will do all you can to promote the guest post on community-based networks and social media networks

• Do your best and proofread your work severally to ensure it is free of basic errors

Remember when pitching your guest post idea (in this case in a bid to improve the value of a popular post), don’t mention ‘link building request’ in your email subject line.

This is because you are after traffic and not necessarily the links. This is one of the worst mistakes many people make.

The purpose of pitching a guest article idea is to add value to it so it can be of greater benefit to a new set of target audience. Thus, never request for a favor in return.

If you manage to appeal to a blog owner or editor, you can request them to reference you or link to your guest article from their popular post that is ranking high in Google.

You will be getting significant organic visitors to your website on a consistent basis. Leveraging resource page email outreach will be better than going on guest blogging pitching spree.

Bottom Line:

If you had received penalties in the past from Google, then you can rectify that by utilizing the above strategies.

You will not only rank high and get organic traffic, but you will also become a resource center in your niche.

Embrace social media marketing, leverage other people’s web content and direct traffic to your site, and make use of related key phrases. With time, you will begin to see results.