Foster Organic Traffic in a Crowded Internet With These 6 Steps For new and established businesses alike, organic traffic is a precious resource, and building it can seem insurmountable.
By Eric Siu
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Groupon deindexed its own site for about six hours to determine how much it affected its traffic. The result? About 60 percent of its direct traffic is actually organic search.
For new and established businesses alike, organic traffic is a precious resource, and building it can seem insurmountable. Fortunately, there are ways to build organic traffic in a crowded Internet. It starts with digging into your data, working through a meticulous ranking process, and ends with greater readership and a robust and synergistic marketing presence.
1. Tap your established marketing data. Deeply understanding your audience is the foundation of good content marketing. Survey responses, consumer data, analytics records and other marketing properties are a boon to building a better understanding of your audience.
Related: Want to Improve Your Content Marketing? Think Like a Journalist. (Infographic)
Examine any and all available data regarding visitors to your site and look for trends. This can also help reduce your budget and provide sample size to draw accurate projections of audience tastes.
2. Build a content-creation process. Demographic data and buyer personas offer little without systematic implementation. Use your data to figure out what your audience really wants and what are their pain points to brainstorm topic ideas and optimize keywords.
Start with a consistent schedule to establish credibility and attract leads. Creating a solid marketing plan, but posting sporadic content won't do you much good. According to Hubspot, brands that consistently produce 15 blog posts per month see 1,200 additional leads in the same period.
3. Commit to your core messaging. With a clear grasp on what your audience wants and your content marketing machine in place, the next puzzle piece is strong content. But what does that really mean?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, as little as 44 percent of business-to-business marketers actually have a documented content strategy. Consider 80 percent of readers never make it past the headline copy. The reality becomes clear: strategic, intelligent topic selection matters. Each piece of content from blog posts to infographics holds an opportunity to convert new customers and raise brand awareness.
4. Optimize and repeat. With your content ready to go, it's time to put it in a language that search engines and potential customers can understand. Keyword optimization and SEO play an important role in getting your content noticed.
Related: How Google 'Sitelinks' Can Improve Your SEO
Instead of focusing on single keywords that your competition is also using, look for long-tail keywords and searches and incorporate it into your strategy. As many as 70 percent of searches are long-tail queries.
Include an attention-grabbing headline promising value to anyone who enters, without giving the whole story away. Create subheadings that guide the reader through the article to keep their attention and allow them to skim through the content and land on what they really want to learn about.
5. Don't publish. Focus on promoting. Promoting is where effective organic traffic building actually happens. With a foundation of insight and process, it's time to build enthusiasm and raise awareness for your content.
For many businesses, promotion means publishing your article, video or other work on your corporate social-media accounts where no one is really engaging. Instead, contact authorities interested in your content. If you produce a compelling article about SEO, contact bloggers, experts and other "community influencers" about your new piece. Doing so will help garner links on their sites, building pagerank of your article, and acquiring the attention of additional audiences.
Finally, take note of how past posts have performed during different times of day, and focus on promotion at peak hours. Note the most frequented social networks of your target audience and push your promotion efforts on these, more profitable channels.
6. Repeat. Building organic traffic takes time, but can be done effectively with a consistent strategy and proper optimization. Quality content, published consistently, optimized, and aggressively promoted is the key to building links, page rank, keyword share, and readership. Over time, each article will become an effective, long-term tool in finding customer conversion and revenue.
Related: Try These Tools to Supercharge Your Website Visitor Engagement
