Does reaching the top of Google and increasing organic traffic from search engines seem like an unattainable goal?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of enhancing your website’s performance to achieve higher rankings on search engine results pages, thereby attracting more organic traffic.

Follow our 10-step guide to boost your organic traffic, and while you won't achieve instant success — that's just how SEO works — you'll notice long-term improvements and solid, steady growth. So, why wait? Let's dive in and get started!

How to Increase Website Traffic Organically

1. Evaluate Your Website’s Health and Performance

2. Determine Your Target Audience and Analyse Competitors

3. Study Your Competitors’ Content Strategies

4. Develop an On-Site Content and SEO Plan

5. Expand and Enhance Your Website’s Content

6. Enhance Your Website’s Usability and Technical SEO

7. Establish a Consistent Content Marketing Strategy

8. Promote Your Website and Explore Paid Advertising Options

9. Sustain Your Rankings and Organic Traffic Over Time
   
   

SEO & Digital Marketing Lingo Decoder

This guide inevitably includes some technical jargon, so before we dive in, here’s a quick rundown of what those terms mean in plain English:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): The craft of enhancing your website’s content and technical structure, along with off-site content marketing, to boost search engine rankings and increase organic traffic.

• Organic Traffic: The number of visitors arriving at your site from search engines like Google or Bing, without any paid ads involved.

• SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages, which show up when someone searches for a term or phrase on search engines like Google or Bing.

• SEM: Search Engine Marketing, a digital strategy aimed at improving your position in search engine results pages.

• Rankings: Your current position in the SERPs for your target keywords.

• Optimisation: The process of refining your content for specific keywords or phrases so that search engines identify your content as relevant and rank it higher.

• Keywords or Key Phrases: The words or phrases you target to rank for in the search engine results pages.

• CMS: A Content Management System, which stores all your website’s content and provides the tools you need to manage and edit your site.

PPC: Pay Per Click advertising, a way to quickly get your website to the top of Google by bidding on keywords in an auction against competitors.

1. Outline Your Organic Traffic Strategy and Broader SEO Objectives

To achieve long-term success with your SEO campaigns and gradually increase organic traffic, it's crucial to have a clear, data-driven SEO plan. This plan should outline your objectives and the strategies to achieve them, focusing on setting realistic, attainable targets that align with your broader company goals.

Kayle Larkin, writing for Ahrefs, offers valuable insights on setting organic traffic and broader SEO goals for your business. Larkin points out that, “As SEOs, we tend to generalise goals because there is so much outside our control. We can’t promise results. The problem is that without a clear vision of what a win is, we’re unlikely to achieve results at all.”

If your objective is to boost overall website traffic without focusing heavily on converting visitors into customers, you can afford to be broad in your SEO campaigns and keyword targeting. However, if you aim to drive organic traffic to specific sections of your site, a more targeted SEO approach is necessary.

Begin by setting one primary goal for your SEO efforts, complemented by two secondary goals. Break these down into three-month, six-month, and twelve-month milestones, keeping your ultimate goal in focus. This approach will help align each action with a measurable target and ensure your strategy remains on track.

2. Evaluate Your Website’s Current Health and Performance

In a later section of this guide, we’ll cover how to address various website health issues and enhance your technical SEO performance. However, it’s essential first to understand your website's current state. The most effective way to gain insights into your website's technical performance is by using Google Search Console. You’ll need to verify your site ownership by adding a small code snippet to your DNS configuration. Once verified, you'll have access to invaluable data on your website's technical health and structure.

Free website health and performance tools like Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer, Nibbler, and Dareboost provide high-level insights into your site's accessibility for mobile and disabled users, marketing effectiveness, and user experience. These tools can identify technical issues such as slow JavaScript, broken links, and jQuery problems. Although these top-level tests don’t offer the detailed insights that Google Search Console does, they are useful for pinpointing areas that need attention to enhance your website's performance and health.

3. Define Your Target Audience and Analyse Competitors

Finding Your Target Audience

To boost rankings and organic traffic, it's essential to identify your target audience and learn how to attract them.

Google Analytics offers valuable insights into your potential audience, helping you see who visits your site, their location, and which pages they browse before leaving. Follow these quick steps to identify your target audience:

Step 1: Discover who is visiting your site. Use demographic data from Google Analytics to identify common traits among visitors, such as age, location, gender, and interests, and group them into demographics.

Step 2: Determine if those visitors are converting. Having an audience is great, but if they aren’t making purchases, signing up, or engaging as you’d like, you may need to adjust your marketing strategy, offer more appealing incentives, or target a different audience.

Step 3: Collect detailed information about the audience you want to attract. Now that you know who is visiting your site, how valuable they are, and who you want to target, gather insights into their location, device usage, interests, hobbies, and preferences to understand them better.

Step 4: Segment your visitors into personas. Creating visitor personas helps you understand your target audience and tailor your website content to attract them. Follow our step-by-step process to design your own buyer personas.

Identifying Your Key Competitors

By researching the websites that currently rank highest for the keywords you want to target, you can identify your "key competitors." These are the sites you need to outperform to boost your rankings and achieve dominance in your niche.

Examine social media to identify competitors who are gaining followers on Facebook, accumulating video views on YouTube, and actively engaging audiences on relevant forums or networks. Take note of any advertising they employ during your research; are they using PPC, retargeting, or banner ads? Also, observe their other activities — do they collaborate with industry publications, Instagram influencers, or magazines?

By conducting this essential background research, you will develop a clear picture of each competitor's awareness and traction. This insight will help you gauge the effort needed to catch up to and surpass them.

Semrush’s Competitor Research tool is excellent for identifying your competitors, but a straightforward search for your target keyword phrases should also suffice to locate them.

Investigate Your Competitors’ SEO and Content Tactics

Building on the excellent work you've done in identifying your competitors, it's now time to delve into their SEO and content strategies to understand how they’ve achieved the success you aim for.

As you investigate your competitor’s website, consider the following question:

What makes this website superior to mine?

Is your competitor’s website more engaging, informative, or visually appealing than yours? Does it have greater authority?

Check the age of their domain using a free domain age checker tool to see if it has been around longer. Websites naturally accumulate authority over time, which is crucial for Google when assigning value to websites.

Using the insights from your previous website health checks, evaluate your competitors' websites with the same free tools. Identify areas where they lag behind and where they excel compared to your site. Focus on their link structure, content quality, and how they market their key propositions. This analysis will help you understand their SEO and content priorities and the efforts they’ve made to achieve their current success.

Research Your Competitor’s Backlinks for Inspiration

Examine your competitor’s backlink profile using Semrush’s convenient backlink analysis tool (a free 30-day trial is available with our link, https://thankyouninjas.com). Check where they’re obtaining their links. If they have a substantial number of links from high-authority websites across diverse sectors (e.g., government, education, health, and lifestyle), it signals to Google that they’re a reliable source, helping them gain more traction in search engine results.

Researching these backlinks will also reveal which landing pages on your competitor’s website are the most effective traffic drivers. Examine these pages—are they focused on sales, handy tools, or user guides? This insight will help you understand the type of content your target audience and industry crave and actively consume. Use this knowledge to shape your content strategy and serve as a foundation for future content campaigns and partnerships.

Catching up with competitors and building a robust backlink profile to improve your rankings is achievable, but it requires consistent effort or the expertise of a content marketing agency. For exceptional content that high-quality sites will love to link to, consider Exposure Ninja’s content marketing services to help you reach your goals.

5.Create an On-Site Content and SEO Strategy

With your SEO goals established and your personas, competitors, and their strategies identified, it’s time to craft your own on-site content and SEO strategy. Start by prioritising your content needs according to your existing content framework and specific SEO targets.

Typically, a content and SEO strategy involves simultaneous technical enhancements and on-page content optimisation. This approach allows for a comprehensive view of page improvements, and once all changes are completed, the sitemap can be resubmitted to Google to maximise the chances of improved rankings and increased organic traffic.

Identify topics that are crucial to your business and group relevant keywords within those topics that you want to rank for. Select keywords that are likely to drive conversions or hold high value for your business, ensuring they have substantial search volumes where achieving a high ranking would significantly impact your SEO campaign’s success (Exposure Ninja typically avoids optimising pages for keywords with fewer than 100 monthly searches). Next, map these topics and keywords to target pages, prioritising those based on their potential value to your business. Finally, review the current on-page content and technical SEO setup for these pages, making detailed notes on the necessary improvements to enhance results.

Now you have a prioritised list of pages to work on, clear topics and keywords for optimisation, and action points to enhance performance. Assign tasks, establish timeframes and milestones for content creation, uploading, review, and maintenance. This will give you a practical content and SEO plan that aligns with your overall strategy.

6. Increase and Improve Your Website’s Content

Now, you’re set to take action and enhance your content according to your prioritised plan. Focus first on refining your existing website content, as it inherently possesses more authority than new content due to its established presence.

You can repurpose your existing content to align with the key phrases and topics outlined in your strategy. Whenever possible, retain the existing URL structure rather than creating a new one, as this is generally advisable.

Optimising Existing Website Content

Here are some areas to consider when optimising existing content:

• Is the metadata optimised? Metadata provides search engines with information about the context and content of your pages, including the page title and meta description. These elements are also visible to users who search on Google or other search engines. Continue reading for tips on writing optimised metadata.

• Is the content engaging and useful? If your content isn't helpful and doesn't meet the needs of your target audience, it won't rank well or attract substantial organic traffic.

• Is there sufficient content on the page? A brief description requires at least 300 words; 600 words are suitable for a standard page; 900 words work well for an FAQ or help guide, and anything over 1,800 words is considered an in-depth guide or article, which typically carries more authority and weight than a standard-length page—provided the quality is maintained.

• Is the content sufficiently rich? Most high-ranking content today includes images, videos, infographics, and interactive elements like quizzes, polls, clickable tools, and comment sections to encourage engagement.

• Is the content user-optimised? It's crucial that your content is accessible on all internet-enabled devices and that users can easily understand how to interact with it to achieve their goals without excessive scrolling.

• Does the content include sufficient internal links? Make sure your content has a good number of internal links to high-value and relevant pages within your site structure.

• Does the content link to relevant sources? Ensure your content includes links to high-value websites that offer pertinent information for your target audience, provided those sites do not already link to you. Avoid reciprocal linking, where two sites exchange links, as it can be frowned upon by search engines and may diminish the backlink's effectiveness.

• Have other websites linked to the content? To establish your page as authoritative on a particular topic, it needs to attract links from high-quality external websites. Your upcoming content marketing plan will support this effort.

• Is the content accessible through internal search and the website footer? For a key page on your site, ensure it can be found via your site's search function (if available) and is linked from your footer.

• Can you update existing blog content to make it relevant? One effective way to enhance your website content is to repurpose and republish outdated posts that have become stale or been overtaken by new information. This allows you to leverage the existing authority of the blog page while refreshing it with new content. Our Ninja guide to updating existing blogs will help you achieve this.

Adding New Website Content

When creating new content for your website, remember that it's unlikely to start ranking for your target keywords and attracting significant organic traffic right away, no matter how relevant, useful, or interesting it is. Ranking new content takes time; often, it can take months to gain traction. Top-ranking content typically has links from reputable websites and social media engagement before it can displace competitors from the top spot.

When creating new content for your website, follow these steps to make it as search engine and user-friendly as possible:

• Develop content that addresses your customers' questions: Leverage internal search data and keyword research tools to pinpoint the queries your customers have that aren't currently being answered. You can also engage with your customers through email or social media to discover what they are curious about regarding your company and any questions they've been eager to ask.

• Analyse top-ranking content and enhance it: Identify the content on your competitors' websites that ranks well for your target keywords. Then, create content that is significantly superior, aiming for at least three times the quality and value of theirs. This approach helps future-proof your improved rankings, as competitors will also continue to enhance their content. By making your content substantially better, you can maintain your edge even when competitors reinvest in their content.

• Develop content that attracts backlinks: With insights into which content on your competitors' websites has successfully earned the backlinks you desire, you can determine what types of content appeal most to those linking sites. Reach out to these websites and discuss their link to your competitor, pitch your content idea, and inquire if they would be interested in featuring it. If they decline, ask for feedback to understand why. Use this information to refine your approach, ensuring your content is more compelling and likely to earn backlinks, thereby increasing its authority and improving its chances of ranking well.

Try various types of content: Text-only guides are becoming outdated. To attract backlinks, gain social media mentions, and boost organic traffic to your website, consider experimenting with these different types of content:

Whitepapers or eBooks: Showcase your expertise by providing valuable, in-depth information that your target audience is actively seeking. Many high-value websites are willing to link to a free downloadable eBook if it offers genuine value to their readers.

An interactive tool: Stand out from competitors by offering interactive tools that allow customers to visualize or engage with your products. Examples include a virtual changing room that lets users "try on" lipstick shades using their smartphone's front-facing camera, or a slider feature that displays before-and-after results of a makeover or cosmetic treatment.

Informative videos: Instead of simply telling your customers how to do something, demonstrate it by offering "how-to" advice in various formats, including text, infographics, and videos.

Email marketing and social media campaigns: Boost traffic to new or updated pages on your website that you want Google to rank by driving email and social media marketing efforts toward them. Accelerate the indexing and ranking process by hosting a competition or special offer that encourages email and social media subscribers to visit and engage with the page.

For more details on creating new website content that boosts organic traffic, check out our on-page SEO checklist in the Ninja guide to on-page SEO.

7. Enhance Your Website’s Usability and Technical SEO

Your website’s usability refers to how effortlessly users can navigate and interact with it. Google and other search engines favour websites that are fast, accessible, and well-structured, while they tend to overlook sites that are slow, confusing, or user-unfriendly. Your goal should be to create a highly usable website that facilitates easy user interaction and engagement.

Enhancing your website’s usability often aligns with technical SEO improvements, as what benefits your users typically boosts your search engine rankings as well. Cognitive SEO offers a comprehensive technical SEO checklist to help you identify areas for improvement. You can use this checklist alongside our list of suggested enhancements below.

• Optimise your site for all screen sizes: With more than half of website traffic now coming from mobile devices, it's essential that your pages load quickly and display correctly across all screen sizes and browsers. This includes tablets, smartphones, laptops, notebooks, and desktop computers. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to verify if your website performs well on smaller screens. If it doesn't, you need to adjust the design and structure of your pages to enhance the user experience. Developing a responsive site or a separate mobile-optimised website can resolve these issues. Consider hiring a professional website design and development company for assistance — we specialise in this area, so check out our website development services!

  
  

• Reduce page loading times: One of the major frustrations for website users is slow-loading pages. To maintain a positive user experience, your site should load in less than two seconds. Pingdom offers a useful tool to measure your page load times for the average user. If issues are detected, you can improve load times by optimising image file sizes, eliminating unnecessary redirects, and reducing DNS lookups, among other technical enhancements.

• Identify and resolve any 404 errors: When visitors click on links that lead to inactive pages, they encounter a “404 error page,” indicating that the page has been moved or is missing and prompting them to visit an active section of your site. Search engines view broken links negatively, as they result in a poor user experience. To boost your organic traffic, it’s essential to identify and fix as many 404 errors as possible.

  To find 404 errors, log in to Google Analytics and navigate to the Content > Content by Title section of your dashboard to locate your website’s 404 error page. Analyse this data to understand how users ended up on the 404 page, including the internal pages they came from, their Google search queries, and any external websites that directed them to a broken link. Supplement this information with results from a free website crawl tool, such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider or Moz’s Link Explorer. Once you’ve identified broken links, you need to either redirect them to existing, relevant pages or reinstate the original URL with appropriate content if it’s receiving significant traffic. To fix a broken URL, access the administration section of your Content Management System (CMS) and select “add redirect.” There are several excellent WordPress plugins available for this task, such as Redirection by John Godley. Simply fill in the “from” and “to” fields with the broken link and its new destination, selecting “301 redirect” to indicate a permanent change rather than a temporary (302) one.

• Enhance your internal linking strategy: Ensure that every page on your website is integrated into a comprehensive internal linking structure that indicates relationships between pages and highlights the most important ones. Avoid leaving any page without internal links—this includes links in the footer, navigation menu, internal search results, or from existing content on your site.

• Enhance your metadata: Our comprehensive guide to improving meta descriptions will assist you in crafting effective page titles and meta descriptions to boost your SEO. Here are the general rules for creating top-notch metadata:
  
  Page titles should be unique, accurate, and around 70 characters long (600 pixels).
  Meta descriptions should be unique, engaging, and provide all the relevant information users need to determine if the page is useful and relevant to them.
  Follow the 150/150 rule for meta description length to utilize the extra SERP space Google sometimes offers for certain queries.
  The first 150 characters should include essential information.The second 150 characters of a meta description are optional and should contain additional supporting information as needed.
  
  

• Integrate schema markup into your content: Schema markup is an optimisation technique that involves adding a snippet of code to your page to help search engines deliver more valuable results to users. This can also enhance your chances of achieving featured snippets, also known as position-zero rankings. Implementing schema markup is straightforward if you follow the instructions in our guide on using schema markup effectively.

Sometimes, the most effective way to address all your technical SEO needs is to seek professional assistance, and there’s no better choice than Exposure Ninja’s team of dedicated SEO experts. Explore our SEO case studies to see how we’ve helped businesses like yours enhance their rankings and boost organic traffic by optimising on-page elements of their websites.

8. Create a Content Marketing Strategy and Stick to It

Now that you've optimised your website's on-site content and technical structure, set your goals, and begun tracking the performance of your keyword campaigns on a monthly basis, it's time to shift your attention to off-site promotion and content marketing.

Content marketing involves creating engaging, valuable content and publishing it on authoritative, relevant websites in exchange for a backlink or a reference to your site. This strategy helps increase your website's visibility and credibility in search engines.

Recall the competitor content research you conducted earlier, before tackling your on-site improvements? Now is the perfect time to revisit those insights. Review which sites have provided your competitors with high-value links, the type of content they offered to secure these links (whether hosted on their own site or the partner’s site), and brainstorm what you can create to attract similar partners or collaborate with the same sites.

Compile a list of your top 10 most valuable link partners, detailing the type of content you could produce for them, the budget available for content creation, and your approach for pitching the content. With this, you’ll have a content marketing action plan to guide you over the next few months, helping you enhance your backlink profile and boost organic traffic.

9. Promote Your Website: Explore Inorganic Boosters Like PPC and Facebook Ads

Creating a well-optimised website with top-tier content and outstanding technical SEO is only half the battle in boosting organic traffic. With your foundation in place, it's time to focus on promoting your website. To enhance traffic and awareness, you'll need a promotional budget dedicated to various online advertising strategies. This budget should encompass a range of approaches, including Facebook advertising, PPC campaigns, and retargeting efforts, to effectively reach and engage your target audience.

Craft your social media ads to be captivating, visually striking, and appealing to your target audience. Adhere to the recommended character limits for titles and descriptions, and follow guidelines on the ratio of images to text in your ads. Experiment with small budgets to test different combinations of copy and visuals to determine which yields the best results. Hootsuite offers a fantastic guide for beginners in social media advertising that can help you get started and explore the basics effectively.

PPC is a crucial component in an SEO strategist’s toolkit. Surprised? It actually makes perfect sense. PPC, a paid advertising method, enables you to direct traffic to new pages before they achieve organic rankings in search engines.

Incorporating paid traffic into your strategy might not initially seem relevant to organic traffic goals. However, if new pages don't attract visitors, Google and other search engines won't recognise their relevance to the targeted topic and won't attribute any authority to them.

After establishing strong external links to your new page and seeing an increase in organic traffic, you can discontinue PPC ads to prevent cannibalising your own traffic (i.e., paying for clicks that you would otherwise receive organically due to a high ranking). To assist you in integrating PPC with your SEO strategy, Exposure Ninja offers a free PPC guide to help you get started.

10. Sustain Your Rankings Over Time

Congratulations on making significant strides in boosting your rankings and increasing organic traffic! After putting in all that hard work, it's crucial to protect your progress and minimise the risk of rank loss over time.

Rank loss happens when your well-earned keyword positions are overtaken by new or existing competitors. This can result from technical issues on your website, competitors enhancing their content, or algorithm changes that cause your content to lose authority.

Preventing rank loss is unpredictable, so it's essential to consistently enhance and update your content while striving to secure additional high-quality backlinks and forge strong partnerships. By doing this, you maximize your efforts to sustain and grow your organic traffic in the long term.

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