19 Effective Tips To Boost Organic Traffic On Your Website In 2022

So you’re here. That means you’re looking to boost organic traffic on your website. Let’s just cut to the chase and discuss how you can increase organic traffic on your website using some tips in 2022.

You can use this table of contents section to jump to your favorite tip.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Simply put, organic traffic is the traffic you don’t pay for.

Basically, if a visitor visits your website without seeing an ad or something, it will be counted as an organic visit.

On the other hand, the traffic that comes to your website after seeing an ad like a Google ad, Facebook ad, etc. will be called paid traffic.

So let’s discuss the tips that’ll help you increase organic traffic to your website.

Let’s start with the ones with top priority.

High Priority

These are the methods that should be your top priority.

1. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

When you target a similar keyphrase through multiple pages of your website, keyword cannibalization happens.

In other terms, keyword cannibalization is when one of your pages eats the other page’s traffic. This can happen because your two (or more) pages are competing with each other by ranking for a similar search on the same page.

Here’s an example of keyword cannibalization:

Now some of you may say, “Isn’t it good to rank at multiple positions on the 1st page of Google?”

Definitely, it is.

But if you look at the above example, both Crazyegg articles are focused on a similar topic. And when I checked both of them, I found plenty of similar points between them.

Here, you can say these blogs are stealing each other’s traffic because the accumulated number of visitors is being divided among both blogs.

I hope now the concept of keyword cannibalization is clear.

So before moving on to how to get rid of keyword cannibalization, you must know, “What’s NOT keyword cannibalization?”

Because this is something where many of us get confused. So let me clear these things for you.

If 2 of your pages rank for a similar keyword, that doesn’t always mean keyword cannibalization.

For example, when you search for a mobile phone and you get its purchase and features page on two different spots. This doesn’t indicate keyword cannibalization. Since one page is made for the purchase and another shows its features. They both have a different context.

How to fix keyword cannibalization:
👌Remove and redirect cannibalized pages
👌Canonicalization
👌Noindex
👌Re-optimizing pages
👌Reworking your internal linking structure
👌Merging & consolidating pages
👌Creating new Intent-Focused Content

More https://t.co/NeLrWtwfCX.

— Semrush (@semrush) September 13, 2020

Tips to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

• Find out if any page is cannibalizing other traffic. You can do that by searching “site:yourwebsite.com keyword” on Google. You can also use tools like Ahrefs for this.
• If you can, merge the content of both pages and delete the least performing one. Add 301 redirects while merging your content so you don’t lose any backlinks. If you can’t merge the pages, change the focus keyword, context, and anchor text.
• List all your website URLs and their focus keyword in a spreadsheet. Check for any duplicate values. If there are, act accordingly.
• You can also delete the page if you don’t need it on your website. If you want to keep the page but avoid cannibalization, you can de-index the pages. De-indexing will make sure that the pages will be on your site but won’t rank on SERPs.
• Use the rel = ”canonical” attribute to define a page as the main page if 2 of your pages have similar content. This will make sure that the main page will be indexed on the search engine.

2. Keep User Intent At The Top

User Intent simply means the intentions of a user behind making a search on Google.

If your content doesn’t fulfill it, Google will rank you down.

In other words, we can say if your content isn’t providing them with what they are looking for, it’ll create a bad user experience. And Google has several algorithms to detect a bad user experience and once it does that, it’ll crawl your page down.

Hence, user intent should be your top priority while updating old content or generating new.

Tips to Satisfy User Intent

• There are 3 types of intent, 1) Navigational, 2) Informational, 3) Transactional. Make sure to understand the intent of the content you’re generating before you write.
• Before generating or updating a content piece, think about what kind of audience will read it. Get into those readers’ shoes and write content they’d love to read.
• Create a content marketing strategy based on your audience and niche to produce relevant content.
• Stick to the topic or link that drives users toward your page. For example, if they searched “upselling tips”, explain what it is. Do not start selling your upselling app there.

Satisfying user intent is one of the most effective tactics to boost organic traffic. And if you want to fulfill the search intent, here’s what you need:

Source: Brafton

The purpose of this method is customer satisfaction. If you write content readers actually need, they’ll come back to your site again and again.

And once Google detects users are having a great experience on your pages, they’ll crawl up your pages on its result pages.

3. Focus On Improving Page Speed

Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content loads on your page.

— Moz

It’s a vital factor in providing a better user experience. The report says,

• 40% of the users abandon the website that takes over 3 seconds to load, and 80% of visitors won’t return.
• Slow-loading websites cost retailers a loss of $2.6 billion every year in sales.

Google will lower your website’s rank if it finds the users are spending less time on your site. The lower your website ranks, the less visibility it’ll get. This ultimately affects your organic traffic as it gets hard for users to find your site.

Tips to Improve Page Speed

• Enable browser caching for faster website loading on returning visits.
• Reduce server response time up to 200ms.
• Remove any script you’re using on the page. Compress images under 100KB to use on your page.
• Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to under 150KB. You can use Textfixer, Gzip for this.
• Check and improve your page loading speed and server response time for both mobile and desktop to make sure no visitor leaves your site because of sluggish speed.
• Gtmetrix and Pingdom are some of the best tools you can use to test your page load-time and site speed and improve it with these steps.

You can check out this infographic to know more tips on how to speed up your web pages:

4. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search is going to take over text searches in the future.

Smartphones are playing a crucial role in fueling voice search growth. And smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home, etc. are the icing on the cake.

Here’s an image from Financesonline demonstrating the growth of voice searches:

According to the above image, half of the searches are voice-based now. And if you don’t want to stay behind, start optimizing your content for voice search.

Since voice search queries target long-tail keywords (that have lesser competition), it’s easier to rank there. Many brands still don’t optimize their content for voice-based queries, which leaves an opportunity you can exploit to improve your rankings.

If you start voice search optimization, you can get an organic traffic boost in the coming time.
I have already created a separate blog on voice search optimization, you can check it out to dive deeper into this topic. But if you don’t have enough time, let me share some tips here.

Tips To Optimize for Voice Search

• Create FAQ pages on your website.
• Use schema markup best practices to help search engines understand what information your page has.
• Use tools like Answerthepublic to find questions searched by people on the topic you’re writing.
• Make your content more conversational that provide answers in the language users often speak.
• Target long-tail keywords as I said earlier.
• Get listed on Google My Business to help local users find you.
• Optimize your content for mobile since most of the voice-based searches are done by mobile devices. User brief paragraphs, lists, and bullet points, so that Google can display your content in featured snippets.

5. Be Consistent With Content Updation

I think if there is an easy way to increase organic traffic rapidly, it’s content updation. I’m saying this on behalf of my experience and some reports.

First, let me tell you what the reports say.

A HubSpot report found updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can increase organic traffic by as much as 106%.

Now let’s talk about my experience.

In April 2020, I updated a blog named “why Mautic” since it wasn’t getting good traffic. After updating it, here’s what we witnessed:

You can say this post is still generating 200 sessions or more in a month. But the fact is, updating it helped us increase its organic traffic by 53%.

Now, this post is among the top 10 blogs that drive the highest traffic to our website. Not only this, but Google also displays it in the 0th position, i.e. featured snippets on one of the targeted keywords.

Even this blog is also a result of content updating. And if you want to increase your website’s organic traffic, there’s no better and easier way than updating old content for keyphrases that you might have missed earlier.

Tips To Follow While Updating Old Content

• Analyze the data of the content before updating it. You can use tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console for this.
• Replace old stats and reports with the latest ones.
• Check if there are any broken links on your page. If there are, fix it.
• Don’t forget to add multimedia elements to your pages when updating them. You can embed Tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Pinterest infographics, etc. to make your content more engaging and interactive. This will also increase dwell time, which is a sign of a good user experience.
• Use shorter sentences and paragraphs in your content. Divide your content with lists and sub-headings to make it easily readable and scannable.
• Look how your page is looking in its AMP or Mobile version. If the mobile version of your page isn’t well formatted, change it so mobile users don’t bounce back off your page.
• If you are changing the slug of the page, make sure 301 redirects are properly working.

You can refer to this helpful video from Ahrefs to learn how to update content for traffic growth.

6. Build Links Cleverly

Link building is a smart way to boost organic traffic.

Reports say, 91% of the pages get no organic traffic since they don’t have backlinks.
When you add inbound or outbound links to your content, your pages get more visibility. As a result, more eyeballs on your web pages.

According to First Page Sage, a backlink is the 3rd biggest ranking factor for Google search algorithms.

But about link building, one thing you should keep in mind. If not done right, link building can be prejudicial for your website and can lead you to penalties, account suspension, etc. Thus, you need to make sure that you aren’t violating any policies while building links for your pages.

Tips To Do A Better Link Building

• Use descriptive text to add links to make users understand which page they will be redirected to after clicking the link.
• Avoid building over 2 reciprocal links from any website.
• Check for orphaned pages on your website. These are the pages that are not linked to any other page on your website.
• Interlining all the orphaned pages on your website.
• Make your stats and reports on your page updated with the latest and are not obsolete.
• If you are giving an outbound link to a website, check if it generates genuine and credible content. And if their spam score is low enough.
• If you’re linking to a web page and you are not sure about its credibility, use rel=”nofollow” on the anchor tag to avoid passing the link juice to it.
• Use internal linking to redirect users from one page to another to increase the Average Time on your pages.

7. Do Not Overlook Mobile Devices

In 2018, mobile devices generated 52.2% of all website traffic.

More than half of the users are using mobiles to access the internet. And if you don’t provide them with an awful experience, it can cause you huge traffic loss.

Hence, if you reverse engineer this thought, it’ll mean providing a mobile-friendly experience that can boost organic traffic on your website.

Here’s a fitting example of a mobile-optimized website. Lean Labs has taken mobile devices pretty seriously. Their site on mobile is easy to navigate, and the content is well-formatted and easy to read.

Tips To Optimize Your Site For Mobile

• Code your mobile site on HTML5. Avoid flash, since many devices like iPhones don’t allow them to load.
• If your website has categories, define them clearly for easy navigation.
• Try to avoid pop-ups. They look good on the desktop but can bother users when displayed on mobile devices.
• Make your website responsive so it can have a flexible and adjustable design according to the screen size.
• Provide easy navigation on your site since the user doesn’t have a keyboard or shortcuts to navigate on your site.

8. Don’t Target Keywords Just For The Sake Of It

Keyword targeting is a crucial method of driving traffic towards your site. And by targeting different keywords, you can get a good organic traffic boost.

But if you target keywords just because they have high search volume or CPC, you won’t only jeopardize your traffic but the conversions too.

This is because if you target a keyword that gets good traffic but is not related to your niche, you’ll simply waste your time and resources on generating that piece of content. And it will not give you the result of traffic you desired.

Thus, you should always perform comprehensive and quality research before you decide what target keywords you’ll pick.

Tips To Target Relevant Keywords

• Understand the intent of the keywords before writing content on them.
• Find out keyword gaps, i.e, what keywords you can rank on which your competitors aren’t targeting.
• Make use of semantic or related keywords, since they have a huge potential of driving organic traffic to your pages.
• If you want to increase sales or conversions through your content, target keywords with high CPC.
• Target keywords that are related to your niche.
• Use SEO tools like SEMrush to find the most relevant keywords.
• Use long-tail keywords to increase the chances of ranking on more specific searches.

9. Start Blogging. The Most Obvious Tip

I know you’ve heard this infinite times. But I had to include it because it’s a staple for every business that wants to boost organic traffic on their website.

What else would drive more traffic than content? And what else in content is better than blog posts. If you want to increase organic traffic, cover more keywords, and get more eyeballs, blogging could be the best choice for you.

It’s free, gives superb results, and also builds your reputation in the market.

But you can’t start blogging just like that. If your blogs can’t engage users, remember, there’s always a replacement for you. So you need to be creative while writing blogs.

Tips To Write Amazing Blogs That Generate Traffic

• Do not try to exceed or curtail the word count of a blog unnecessarily. If you can explain the topic in 1500 words, don’t increase the length. If your topic needs 5000 words, don’t try to finish it early.
• Write at least 8-10 headlines for every blog post and select the best one among them.
• A little clickbait title is fine. But do not promise something in the title you’re not offering in the content.
• Create a content cluster. This means creating a pillar page that covers a topic completely and linking child pages that cover its subtopics.
• Always proofread your blog thrice after completing it.
• Create a buyer persona to understand what type of readers will read a specific blog.
• Optimize your content, title, and URL for better readability, SEO, and CTR.
• Create shareable blogs like stat-related blogs, expert roundups, etc.

10. Listen To Your Current Metrics

If you’re willing to grow organic traffic on your website, analyze what you currently have. This means your current data.

Examining your existing data can provide you with many insights in minutes. And it will help you comprehend this data to generate new ideas that usually require plenty of brainstorming.

When you analyze your data, you know how users are and will behave on your website. This enables you to make modifications that have a better potential of driving organic traffic. But data analysis requires several methods, so let me tell you about some of those.

Tips To Analyze Your Data for Better Insights

• Start with the ABC of data. Acquisition, Behavior, Conversion of your website.
• Check how much organic, referral, and social traffic you are getting.
• What devices do your users prefer for accessing the internet?
• How much traffic is converting? And what elements are dropping them off?
• Examine the bounce rate of your overall website and find out the reason behind it.
• Watch visitor videos, heatmaps, scroll maps, and funnel performance through tools like Hotjar. This will give you a better understanding of your visitor’s behavior.
• Use Google Analytics to understand the behavior of visitors on your pages. Check pages/sessions, returning visitors, dwell time, etc. to find out how engaging your pages are.

11. Analyze Your Competitors, But Don’t Copy Them

If you’re in the business, you definitely have competitors. Competitors can eat your business, but sometimes they can give you great insights as well.

So if you want to boost organic traffic on your website, you can spy on your competitors to get insights. BigCommerce has written an amazing article on how to do competitive analysis. But if you fall short on time, you can read the tips written below.

Tips To Analyze Your Competitors

• First, identify who your actual competitors are.
• Check out their website and their top-performing content.
• Look for their best-selling products.
• Analyze their cost structure, unique selling propositions, and where you and they lack.
• Look for the improvements you can make on your website, products, content, SEO, or anything else.
• You can also use tools like LinkedIn, Awario, Owler, and Mention, to get more knowledge about your competitors, revenue, reputation, etc.

12. Embrace Videos in Your Content Marketing

Videos are super important for your business. It’s the kind of content people love to consume as compared to text-based blogs.

Sorry to say but nobody likes to read these days.

But this is not the case with videos. People love watching and interacting with videos. This is why videos generate more traffic, engagement, and on top of it – Conversions.

Thus, if you create a perfect video marketing strategy, you can not only boost organic traffic but also conversions to your website. I’m saying this because a large number of conversions on our website come from videos.

Tips To Create Awesome Videos

• Just like an article, specify your buyer persona before you record the video.
• Make a world-class introduction. If your intro is not engaging, viewers will leave your video in under 10 seconds.
• Try to keep your videos short. If it’s not possible, you can divide a single video into different episodes.
• Transcribe your video content to convert.
• Do not compromise with the audio. Any smartphone these days can record in 1080p but they don’t have a decent mic. So you have to use good audio equipment for perfect audio quality since users will not watch your videos if they don’t have a good sound.
• Editing is where the magic happens. I forgot who said this but it’s true. You can make a mediocre video amazing with editing.

Medium Priority

You can consider these methods as a secondary plan. But do not commit the mistake of ignoring them.

13. Rank in People Also Ask(PAA) Section

Do you know what the “People Also Ask” section is for? For those who don’t know, It is a section that contains questions related to the query the user has searched.

If you click any question, you’ll see a snippet with the link to the article in which it is written. Here’s an example:

Ranking in the People Also Ask or PAA section can give a significant push to your organic traffic.

How?

Because 43% of search results have a People Also Ask section. And many users including me always check it.

Hence, if you try to rank for a keyword and can’t secure a place on the first page of Google, you can target the People Also Ask box. It’s easier to rank there and very few of the brands write content that can appear in this section.

Tips To Rank In People Also Ask Section

• Discover pages in your niche that rank for multiple keywords. You can use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. for this.
• Find out keywords that the page is currently ranking for.
• Look for the questions that are already there in the People Also Ask section.
• Try to create more questions and write their answers in your content.
• Do not forget the user’s intent while writing those questions and answers.
• Also, check whether you’re already ranking on any of those questions.
• Use a conversational QnA language while writing answers.
• Perform thorough research before you start writing and provide every information that will satisfy the searcher’s intent.
• Make sure you’re writing answers in a format google accepts to display answers in PAA boxes. Like you can use bullet list format and short paragraphs to write answers. They have a better chance of ranking in these sections.

14. Get Engaged With Others in Your Niche

Marketing is a world of giving and take. If you want others to engage with your content, you should engage with others too.

And engaging with others will also help you drive traffic to your website. Let’s see how.

Tips to Engage With Others in Your Niche

• You can comment on blogs that are similar to your niche. Many websites ask for your website URL when you post comments. If you post the link there, you increase the chances for others to click on the link which will drive them to your site. This may sound a bit unprofessional but this actually works.
• If you get comments on your articles, do not forget to reply.
• Just like blogs, you can engage through YouTube videos in your niche.
• Do not hesitate to link others’ content. Also if possible and the content is genuine, pass the link juice. If they find out you’re linking with their content, they may link back to you.
• Also, engage with people on platforms like Quora and Reddit and resolve their issues. But remember, do not be promotional on these platforms or you’ll get your account suspended.
• Connect and engage with other brands on social media. You can engage with them and build relationships that can result in link building, content, and other sorts of collaborations in the future.

15. Aim For Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are a rich source to increase organic traffic.

Reports say, 26% of the clicks go to the first URL if there’s no featured snippet. And if there is, the URL right below the featured snippet gets 19.6% of the clicks, a sudden drop of 6.4%.

This shows if you get featured snippets, chances are you’ll get more clicks and traffic. Apart from the traffic, featured snippets also generate a sense of credibility among the users.

Tips To Boost Chances Of Getting Featured Snippet

• Use bulleted or numbered lists in your blogs.
• Identify what kind of questions your audience asks.
• Write content that answers those questions the best.
• Try to add a Q&A page on your website for better chances of ranking in snippets. It will also help you rank in voice searches.
• Keep your answers between 50 to 55 words in length to have a chance of getting a featured snippet.
• If you can’t explain the concept in under 55 words, try to divide it into different steps with subheadings.

16. Create And Optimize XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps contains a list of all important pages available on your website. You can say it is a kind of roadmap of your website that helps Google understand your website structure.

Moreover, an XML sitemap also helps Google identify the important pages of your website. Because you want all of your pages to rank but sometimes you create pages that are not linked with any other pages on your website, just like orphaned pages.

In this case, it gets hard for Google to find those pages but if you add them in your XML sitemap, Google can find them and crawl them on SERPs for indexing.

Since XML Sitemaps help Google crawl your pages an optimized sitemap can increase the visibility and rankings of your pages. And this will result in an increase in organic traffic.

To create your XML sitemap you can use Yoast SEO plugin if you use CMS like WordPress. Google also lets you create a sitemap with its plugin Google XML Sitemap.

Tips To Create And Optimize Your XML Sitemap

• Create and submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. But you should not neglect Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit it there too.
• Before submitting your sitemap, ensure there are no errors.
• 50MB is the maximum file size for sitemaps. But you should try to keep it as low as possible. Gzip can be used to compress sitemaps.
• Generate XML sitemaps dynamically since they’re faster than statically generated sitemaps.
• Do not forget to reference your sitemap index URLs in your robots.txt file.
• Change your page’s modification time only when you’re making major changes on the page.

17. Be Found On Google My Business (GMB)

Another indirect helper to make you rank better on search engines is Google My Business (GMB).

Moz says Google My Business is a major ranking factor in local map searches. Listing your business on GMB will make it easy for local users to find your website and also reach out to you physically.

The more you’re found on local searches, the more traffic you will drive.

Tips to Rank Better On Google My Business

• Go to business.google.com or use the Google My Business app to set up your business account on Google maps.
• Provide every possible information on GMB like Business name, description, photos, videos, open hours, contact info, etc.
• Always reply to queries and reviews.
• The character limit for GMB’s description is 750. Include the things that are best for your brand in that section. You can also use keywords in it.

18. Visuals Are The New Normal

I have already said, nobody likes to read these days.

This is why the text has become sort of boring and users like to consume content they can watch and listen to.

Reports say people only remember 20% of what they read but a massive 80% of what they see. So you can guess the importance of visuals with this data.

Text is crucial. We cannot replace text but can use it in some other places where it can have a better impact.

Here visuals like images, infographics, and videos come in handy. You can use them to make your posts more engaging. This’ll boost user engagement, prompt them to read the complete article and increase your website’s dwell time.

This results in a good sign on UX which can help you rank higher on SERPs. Even this page contains 4 videos and 14 images.

Tips To Increase Organic Traffic Through Visuals

• Instead of writing a stat in plain text, you can show it in an image. This will not only make your page look good but improve brand visibility since many bloggers use stat-oriented images in their blog posts.
• Try to embed videos and infographics in your blog posts, articles, or other pages wherever needed.
• Memes and GIFs are trending these days. Use them wherever possible.
• Write a descriptive alt text for the images you’re using. This will help users understand what kind of image is there if the images don’t load successfully.
• You can use (but don’t stuff) keywords in your images since images can also drive traffic just like blogs.
• If you write articles with plenty of subpoints, you can also create an infographic to display those points.

19. Try Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is another way of blogging and an awesome off-page SEO strategy. And it can be a great help for you to drive traffic (not organic but referral).

In guest blogging, you can post articles on other websites as guest authors and vice versa.

Guest blogging gives more exposure to your content because when you submit articles on other websites, you reach out to their audience. And increase the chances of driving them to your website and if they have a great experience, they can also recommend your brand to others.

Tips To Drive Traffic Through Guest Blogging

• Do not post on websites that do not belong to your niche.
• Avoid posting on websites full of ads, pop-ups, and other distracting elements. People don’t like reading content on such sites.
• Always offer 3 or more topics you may write on. There would already be plenty of blogs on their website so you must have a backup.
• Many websites that accept guest posting have different guidelines. Do read them carefully even before you approach them.
• Make your pitch irresistible and convincing and do not give them any reason to reject you.
• Do not forget to add links to your website in the guest post you write.
• Before accepting the guest posts on your website, do check the credibility like Domain Score, Spam Score, etc. of the approaching site.

Take Away

CONTENT IS KING but it can also be dethroned by readers. Taking care of readers will make them hail your content for a long time and let you sit on top of SERPs.

Remember, you just can’t rank for a keyword by including it in your blog post 10-15 times.

A complete strategy is needed to climb on top of SERPs, maximize your organic traffic, boost profit and sales, etc.

Using these tricks can back your SEO campaign and lift your chances to get more visibility in 2022.

Any tip I missed (which I know I sure did since there are plenty of them), or any tip you have been using to boost organic traffic on your web pages?