How to Increase Organic Traffic: 3 Evergreen SEO Strategies for Marketers

Are you looking for quick ways to increase your organic search traffic? This post is for you.

In this article, we're going to share with you 3 effective ways you can grow your organic website traffic.

The strategies included have proven to deliver fantastic and fast results.

We’ve been able to generate 100,000 visits a month from SEO alone for multiple websites. All in a year or less.

But before that. If you’re looking to learn how to leverage search engines to grow your website, come along to our SEO marketing masterclass workshop.

So, without further ado, here are three simple ways to increase organic traffic.

How to Increase Organic Traffic that Compounds Over Time

1. Create More Content

The “Most Obvious SEO Advice” award goes to…

Yeah, you’ve heard it time and time again.

But that’s because study after study, shows a positive correlation between the number of pages a website has, and the amount of traffic they’re able to generate from search engines.

According to Inet Solutions, businesses that create content regularly have 434% more indexed pages and traffic than those who do not.

By creating more pages, more pathways are opened for your customers to find you.

And with a good internal linking strategy to boot, you'll be on your way to higher rankings.

But you need to be smart.

After all, creating new pages for the sake of it, makes little sense. Especially if it doesn’t translate into meaningful results, like leads and sales.

There are some websites that are able to generate hordes of organic traffic with as little as 30 pages. Whereas others, struggle to get past measly figures, with 10 times as much.

It all depends on the strength of your content strategy.

2. Perform an SEO Content Audit

An SEO content audit is the process of analysing the performance of existing content assets to determine how to improve them.

Performing audits regularly, will present you with opportunities and low-hanging fruits to help you climb the rankings in search with just a few changes.

How to Perform an SEO Content Audit in 8 Steps

1. Create a repository of all your URLs
2. Identify which pages require attention (high impressions/low CTR)
3. Perform keyword research to ensure you’re targeting the best phrase possible
4. Add more internal links to pages with fewer than 5 links (ballpark)
5. Improve the on-page SEO for each page using this checklist
6. Delete or merge duplicate pages whilst adding 301 redirects
7. Identify opportunities and add markup to win featured snippets
8. Build backlinks to pages that struggle to break into the top 10 in SERP

By following this exercise, you’ll be able to create a sophisticated action plan. One that’ll help generate more organic traffic with compound interest.

We’re in the process of creating a full, step-by-step guide to performing and implementing an SEO content audit. Check this post again later for a direct link.

How to Determine Which Pages Should Be Improved, Deleted or Merged

Some SEO experts recommend deleting pages that are not providing value “at-a-glance” to your business.

They’ll advise you to delete your pages if they match ALL the following criteria:

• The page has zero external backlinks pointing to it
• Struggles to generate meaningful traffic
• Fails to conver traffic into leads and sales?

Their argument is that Googlebots assign a “crawl budget”,which determines how often your website is crawled. Therefore it’d be better to assign that budget to your existing pages which are valuable.

Now, unless your website is the size of Amazon, Shopify or Wikipedia, you have nothing to worry about.

Even if you've done in-depth keyword research, you may find many pages fitting the criteria above.

This is because it takes time for pages to rank well.

And the more difficult the target keyword is, the longer it'll take to rank highly.

In theory.

And this is why I don’t recommend deleting pages that provide no inherent value at first glance.

Your goal should be to make them more valuable instead.

After all, the reason you’re probably generating no traffic, links or conversions is because you’re targeting the wrong keyword.

However, there are a few instances where deleting or merging a page makes sense:

• You have multiple pages of content on the exact same topic, covering the same angle, offering no new insights
• Multiple pages targeting the same keyword, resulting in keyword cannibalisation

What is Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is the result of having multiple pages miss out on organic search traffic due to having duplicate content combined with targeting the same keyword.

It's not the duplicate content itself that search engines are against.

After all, many websites (such as Medium, Business 2 Community, Linkedin etc) publish duplicate content from other sources and do just fine.

Also, having several pages (unique content) targeting the same core phrase won't necessarily lead to a drop in rankings.

If you can build enough, powerful links to them all, you should be fine.

[Looking for an example of a website with two pages in Top 10 SERP for the same keyword - Let me know if you have any.]

The problem lies with missing an additional opportunity to rank for more keywords, which could further improve your search coverage and ability to reach your target market.

This is why most SEOs recommend targeted 1-2 core keywords per page.

How to Manage Duplicate Content and Avoid Keyword Cannibalisation

• Merge all duplicate pages into 1 page (choose the page with the strongest page authority)
• Delete the old pages
• Add a 301 redirect from the old pages to your newer, more definite page.

This last step will redirect any traffic that reaches your old pages to the newer, more comprehensive piece.

3. Fix Website Issues

An SEO website audit differs from an SEO content audit in that your goal here, is to identify and fix the blockers preventing your pages from ranking well in search.

This is arguably the most laborious aspect of SEO, yet most vital.

After all, if search engines are struggling to index your pages, your SEO strategy immediately becomes useless.  

Don’t fall into that trap.

Funnily enough, it’s the simple things here, such as improper HTML markup, which prevents millions of websites’ pages from being ranked appropriately.

Some of the issues you can expect to find and fix are as follows:

• Slow page loading times
• Large page sizes
• Misused directives in robots.txt file
• Non-mobile responsive pages
• 404 pages
• Duplicate page title/meta descriptions
• Pages with no internal links (orphaned content)

All of which, have a direct impact on search rankings or the end user experience.

We’ve also written a guide on how to run a full, technical SEO website audit to increase organic traffic.

Summarizing Increasing Organic Traffic

So, there we have it. We’ve just scratched the surface with how to increase organic traffic to your website.

If you want to take your SEO education further, visit our SEO hub and training areas here.

Looking for an SEO provider to increase organic traffic for your website? Get in touch with us today, so we can match you with the very best.

You never know, it could be us!