Guides

Every business needs a foundation on which to build, and that foundation is, usually, organic traffic. While organic traffic isn’t necessarily ‘free traffic’, a flow of interested visitors coming from non-paid sources does cost less generally than paid traffic. Of course organic traffic does often mean website or blog traffic, but that’s not the whole picture. And in the AI-era, there are even more methods to drive organic traffic than ever before. So I’m gonna run through what constitutes organic traffic and the sources of organic referrals, an explainer of how organic vs paid is different, and a quick overview of how to grow your organic traffic. What is organic traffic? By definition, organic website traffic is any visitors to your online business platforms which don’t come from paid advertising. Typically this comes from searches in the main search platforms, such as Google and Bing, but also increasingly referrals from those large language models (LLMS) such as Chat GPT, Google Gemini and Claude. Traffic can also come from social media platforms, YouTube videos, external websites and even offline sources. Lets just summarise the list: Is organic traffic ‘free’? While traffic from organic sources means that you’re not paying per click or impression, there is usually an outlay in either time, money or both to build your organic foundation. The content that resonates with your niche audiences usually needs to be built around data-based research and then have a strategy to target those specific areas. It’s one thing to just start writing content for your blog, without doing any research – yes, it can work. And it’s another thing to look into the specific niche search terms and built out content designed to meet your audience where they are. So organic traffic is usually built on insight, some level of expertise, quite a lot of research and the hard work to put the content together. With that being said, paid traffic also requires a lot of work to create campaigns that resonate – but organic traffic is designed to bring in traffic even when you’ve stopped paying for the individual clicks. Done right, organic traffic can start flowing within a few days, and with well crafted content you can see the results years after the initial work has been put in. How to build your organic traffic Whether you’re a brand new business, or you’re established but underperforming, or looking to challenge the competition, there are steps you can take to start building your organic traffic. Lets start with the foundations: Get your site right Nothing will happen until your website is ready, so don’t waste time and money if your site needs work. This means focusing on the simple technicals – it needs to be mobile friendly and fast loading. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights to spot any issues. Typical things to fix will be slow loading images, outdated or glitchy code and pages that aren’t indexed or with odd referrals. Make sure your website also tells people what you do. This might sound obvious, I mean, of course your website tells people what you do, right…? But often websites have rambling copy or heavy jargon which puts off visitors as soon as they arrive. Make your front page an engaging portal, explaining what problem you solve and why you’re the right solution in clear language. Ask someone who has nothing to do with your industry what they think of your website, and if they think it sounds confusing or boring, go back to the drawing board. As well as your site, you should also… Fix up your social pages You need social media pages – so go sign up, add your URL and a good bio. If you already have social media pages, make sure your bios are clear and there is a URL visible. Also, make sure your social links are on your website, somewhere. Service pages Your service focused landing pages are also very important. These landing pages are often used for paid ad campaigns, so are often clear and conversion driven – usually focusing on a specific search term. For example, you might be a business consultancy but then your landing pages will niche down and explain in detail a specific aspect such as ‘financial consultation’ or ‘business expansion’. These pages will be optimised (or should be anyway) to explain this individual service in clear detail with plenty of CTAs (calls to action). Planning your blog or on-page content Once everything is in place on your website, you should look into answering questions for your audience. This is your on-page/blog content. The aim here is to create a regular flow of useful content designed to both help your audience and hit those search engines (eg. Google). The struggle for business marketing teams is often finding the right search terms, creating quality on-page content and managing the cadence. The ideal flow is one fresh blog a week, at least. More is better, but then this usually relies on capacity, budget and even the content strategy. However, its not just what you put out on your blog… Supporting technicals As well as regular content, you need a plan to build internal links to your blog content, and make sure you have all the SEO elements present and connect. This means alt-tags, meta titles, meta descriptions, page schema and a bunch of other fiddly elements. Backlinks also matter here – as building external backlinks to your content is a huge signal to Google that your content matters and is relevant to your audience. Careful with those backlinks though, as poor quality backlinks can have the opposite effect. We’ll look at that in more detail in another article. Cross-posting on socials Sharing your content on socials is key to ensuring it reaches a broader audience. BUT… You don’t just share a link to your latest blog, as that is pretty much the most boring way to share anything on social media. The best way to cross post is … Read more