Organic traffic comes when people search for something online via a search engine and land on your client’s website.

Many experts believe that because these people were actively searching for information, they are the most likely to convert into customers or clients. Therefore organic visitors are the best, and the most profitable, visitors to a site.

There are a number of ways to drive organic traffic, but you must remember not to get ahead of yourself. While it is important to work at ways of driving traffic, if the content on your client’s site is not worthy of a visitor’s time, it does not matter how much traffic comes because most of it will not stick. First and foremost, your client must have a high quality site with quality content.

Start from the beginning

To create a quality site, it is important to understand the target audience and then become relevant to it. Relevance engages an audience. Research helps you understand the audience. This can be achieved through polls, direct inquiries and examination of data and trending topics.

Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics, also suggests creating a “buyer persona,” a fictional, generalized representation of your client’s ideal customers. When you figure out who your client’s target buyers are and you gain an overall understanding of the audience, you can tailor content to their specific wants, needs, concerns and behaviors. Consider why a targeted customer would search online: What is his or her intent?

Then, figure out ways your client’s website can solve the customer’s problem or become an important resource.

Creating quality

It is extremely important that a website be error free. Typos, grammatical errors and incorrect information make any website less trustworthy. Use professional photos and graphics. Have clean and clear navigation. Clear up clutter and have a polished look. All these things make for a quality site for the visitor.

While this is being achieved, remember that quality means something different to a search engine. It is no longer acceptable to stuff in keywords throughout the website. Search engines look for real and applicable content. It is important to make sure headlines and titles include targeted keywords, but the website should have content that is relevant to the page descriptions. Create unique and compelling information, but do not duplicate it throughout the website. Links should be reputable and up-to-date. A broken link is not helpful to the user nor search engines. Additionally, keep up to date on search engine optimization (SEO) practices as they change over time.

Start driving organic traffic

Because it is more important to be relevant than to simply be found, do not optimize your client’s website solely for search engines. Always keep the customer in mind.

Visitors are not going to enjoy a site that is simply a listing of keywords; build quality content around keywords. SerpIQ analyzed the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords. The findings revealed that for the average web page to appear on the first page of a Google search, it has to have at least 2,000 words. The more depth a page has, the higher in the search results it will appear.

A quality website should have content that is frequently updated. Try and publish as often as possible. One strategy is to incorporate a blog within the website. Research by Lindsay Kolowich, the lead writer of Hubspot’s blog, showed that companies that published more than 16 blog posts per month increased traffic by three and a half times over companies that published four or fewer monthly posts.

Using visual content can also be good if your client’s customers consume content this way. Hubspot reports that “whitepapers, previously a B2B darling, are now losing ground to more interactive, easy formats such as video.” Invodo’s Video Statistics: The Marketer’s Summary 2014 research showed each American consumes an average of 19 hours of online video per month. Invodo predicts that 74 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 will be video.

Currently, consumers who encounter product videos watch them 60 percent of the time. And engagement is high because 65 percent of those viewers watch more than 75 percent of a video. Thus, video is considered to produce the best ROI of all content types.

Webinars, audio and visuals such as infographics and slideshows are also great ways to get website users to engage, become repeat visitors, convert to customers and become influencers. When you utilize social media to publicize your client’s content and encourage sharing, organic traffic grows even more.

Remember, every successful company has its own unique personality. Experts say it’s one of the most important, yet unquantifiable aspects of a brand. Just as people tend to flock to celebrities who have unique styles, consumers gravitate toward companies that not only know what the customer wants, but how they want it. When consumers relate to the content and it becomes part of their persona, they want to share it with others.

If you have a content marketing program, or are planning one, download our ebook:  100 mistakes businesses make when starting, optimizing and scaling content marketing programs. 

Learn from the mistakes of hundreds of other companies.  100 mistakes walks you through common and uncommon challenges that they faced with their content marketing programs.