7 Actionable Steps To Increase Organic Traffic To Your Blog (Expert picks)

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I think you’ll agree with what I’m going to say:

Getting traffic from search engine is hard..buying traffic is easy.

But do you know?

Organic traffic (Search traffic) is still, the best traffic for your blog or business website.. as it sends you highly targeted traffic and once you do it right, it’s free traffic.

In the past 16 months, ShoutMeLoud has received over 8 million clicks alone from Google search:

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That is more than half a million clicks every month.

Well, this did not happen automatically and with a strategy and action, you can replicate our method in any niche.

In this guide, I have shared all the strategies that you or your team can apply to get organic traffic from search engines.

There are unlimited ways by which you can drive traffic to your site.

and today you will learn how to get organic traffic to your blog.

The best of profitable visitors that you can get to your site are from organic search results.

This means when people search for something in search engines and land on your website, these visitors are most likely to convert into customers or clients.

In blogging, it’s also most profitable as users will see more high CPC AdSense ads, as they will see ads based on their search terms.

Also see: Earn up to $50/Click via AdSense

Even direct advertisers prefer blogs that get organic traffic from search engines.

Now, there are many search engines like Google, Bing, but we mostly optimize for Google as it’s one of the most used and popular search engines.

For Bing, you can refer to our earlier guide on Getting Started with Bing Webmaster tools.

If you have noticed ShoutMeLoud’s monthly traffic reports, then you know that ShoutMeLoud gets its maximum traffic from organic search results. Getting traffic from organic search is always beneficial for generating income from advertisements and affiliate programs.

Another good reason to get organic traffic is that we get targeted visitors, thus it helps in lowering bounce rate and increased avg. time on the page.

Apart from organic traffic, there are other ways to drive huge traffic, such as via social networking websites like Twitter, Pinterest or sometimes images that might also help you to get targeted traffic.

Here are a few articles which might help you to get good traffic apart from search engine traffic:

• 50 Ways To Drive Huge Traffic from YouTube
• The list of dofollow forums for bloggers to increase backlinks

How to increase organic search traffic

There are various things you can do to get organic traffic and the most important is SEO and we will start with the same.

1. SEO – Make Search engine bots easily crawl and understand your blog

SEO is all about ensuring search engine understand your content and you rank for your target keyword.

Making your site more search engine friendly and giving them what people are looking for.

There are various aspects of SEO and here are three:

• On-page SEO
• Off-Site SEO
• On-Site SEO

The best place to start is with On-site SEO.

Make sure your site is not only indexable but also all important part is crawlable by Google bots.

It is important that you must take good care of titles, tags, URLs, descriptions, broken links etc.

There are many things that must be taken care of for rock-solid SEO. You can refer to a checklist of SEO, which will give you a good head start.

If you are using WordPress, check out my WordPress SEO tutorial to optimize your WordPress based blog or website for SEO.

2. SEO optimized content: Write content that the search engine understands

Content marketing is the best way to attract organic traffic. The key is to write content based on something that people are seeking. For example, I wrote this piece of content to make people understand how organic traffic will help and how you can increase it.

Similarly, a website selling fashion clothes can write content about the latest fashion trends and channelize it to drive traffic to their product pages.

Though, we write this piece of content is difficult as it comprises many steps, which start from doing Keyword research, SEO-friendly content, and then promoting the content to drive traffic and also earn backlinks.

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I have already covered everything you need to write content that drives organic traffic, and below are a few articles that you should check out right now, which will help you to make the most out of content marketing to get organic traffic.

• How to write SEO friendly content to rank higher
• Keyword research for SEO

3. Link Building – It works as a trust vote

Link building is an important part of SEO strategies. Search engines love quality links and hate irrelevant links. Thus, it is important to have relevant and quality links to your blog.

• Learn: What are backlinks and advantages of backlinks

Links can be backlinks, outbound links. You should focus on getting backlinks from high domain authority websites, or have outbound links to only quality websites.

Especially avoid falling into the trap of buying backlinks for sake of improving your search engine ranking as Google has rolled out an algorithm update called Google Penguin, which flags all such sites that are using spam ways to build backlinks to their websites.

The best and easy ways to get a link to your site is by guest posting and broken link building method. Write content that is not only unique but also attracts organic backlinks, which will help the most.

4. Maintain blog frequency – Regular content keeps the reader happy

By maintaining a regular posting frequency, you would help search engine bots to understand your publishing frequency, and this will help in faster indexing. If you are not regular in posting your content, your new posts/pages would take a lot of time to be included in Google.

Read: How To Create An Editorial Calendar For Your WordPress Blog

5. Capture your audience: Make traffic revisit

So you got organic traffic from your search. But what next?

Many business owners miss out on taking this to the next level and later on regret it.

Don’t you want visitors should stay on your website regularly? If you haven’t thought about it, you should. As returning visitors are the audience, brand advocate.

These people are the ones who will share your post on social media and will tell people about your blog.

How can you do that?..

The process is simple, as you need to play one secret trick. You need to give them options to subscribe.

I’m sure you have your Instagram page, YouTube channel, Twitter page all set up..but are you giving them the option to subscribe via email?

Understand one simple yet powerful thing:

You might not check your Facebook or Twitter always, but you will always check your emails. If my email hits your inbox, you will either open it or delete it.

Point is, you will see it & take action.

Since ShoutMeLoud sends high-quality posts to our email subscribers, the open rate is about 16.1%, which is a decent number.

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Do the simple math:

The email was sent out to approx. 60000 subscribers

16.1% opened the email : == That is 9660 readers

0.4% clicked == that is 39 returning visitors…

These are the people who will share or comment & increase the social value of the post.

Want to do the same for your blog?

Offer email subscription on your blog/website. Good placement is on the homepage and after every blog post & the sidebar…

.. This is what we use at ShoutMeLoud

I have put an easy to follow guide here to getting started with email marketing.

You can read his guide over here & create an email subscription box for your blog. If you looking for the best plugin to add the box on your blog, use this easy to use WordPress plugin called OptinMonster.

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Another technique that you should be using in today’s mobile-driven era is “Push notifications” technology. Here are two guides that will help you learn everything about it and also to get started:

• Benefits Of Web Push Notifications For Bloggers : A Powerful Marketing Tech
• How to Add Push Notifications to WordPress for Free (In Easy Steps)

6. Social media promotion:

Social recommendation is the best way to promote a product and people are more likely to trust something when their friends or family recommend something to them. Google understand it and they are using social media shared content as a ranking signal.

..You need to make sure your content is shareable.

and you should add social bookmarking buttons on your blog so that people can easily share your content on their favorite social bookmarking sites.

7. Avoid unethical ways

Many bloggers use unethical ways like link farms to get good search engine ranks and drive traffic, but it can cause your getting your blog blacklisted. Getting good ranks in the search engine in an ethical way might take time but it gives excellent results in the long term to increase organic traffic.

There is no rocket science or secrets to getting a good amount of organic traffic for your blog.

You just need a proper strategy for the same.

If you know any useful strategy to increase organic traffic then do share with us.

Here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:

• Social Traffic vs. Search Traffic: Which Is Better For Your Website?
• 6 Marketing Tactics You Must Follow to Promote Your Blog & Website