Increasing your website’s organic traffic is the holy grail of most business owners and marketing managers. The challenge is always to make sure your business is found over a competitor’s. SEO and PPC obviously play an important part in this, especially when short-term wins are required, however, they’re not the be all and end all and there’s actually plenty you can do to boost organic site traffic.

Blogging to increase organic traffic

Content is king and blogging is perhaps the most effective way to increase your website’s organic traffic. Consider who your target audience is and write for them. Create helpful content that is actually going to resonate with your customers. Make sure it’s well written and don’t try and keyword stuff. If it’s spammy or poorly written it’ll do more harm than good, so keep it valuable and worthwhile to your readers.

Remember that a blog is ‘for’ your readers, it’s not a sales pitch, you’re not trying to overtly sell your product or service, in fact if you do, you’ll put your customers off very quickly.

Optimise your content for your ideal customers

At Shareable we create marketing personas for our clients. These are essentially snapshots of our client’s target demographics. We then craft content that addresses the wants and needs of these personas. Doing this will naturally increase and improve your site’s SEO scores. Think about who your customers are and what they need from your company. Then write content that serves those needs.

Write often and consistently

Set yourself a time and day of the week where you write a new blog post and stick to it. The more quality content you have on your website, the more chance you have to generate quality traffic, which in turn, increases your site’s page rank with Google. Research your articles with solid industry knowledge and ensure anything you publish answers the two questions: “Is it interesting?” and “Is it useful?”

Be active on Social Media

Building your presence on your company social media accounts will have a huge impact on your site’s ranking

“Similar to links, getting quality social shares is ideal, but being shared widely on social networks is still helpful. Good things happen when more people see your site or brand.
Again, participation in social sharing sites is crucial. If you don’t have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a Google+ Page you’re missing out. You’re not building up a network that can help spread (aka share) your content, site and brand.”
Searchengineland.com

Add share buttons from Sumome and ensure your content is worthy of sharing

Encourage Links from other quality sites.

Google places a higher value on sites with incoming links from other quality websites, placing what they call a higher ‘page rank ‘on them. Encourage family, friends and other non-competing industry figures to link to your site from theirs. Talk to your suppliers and see if they’ll link to your site if you link to theirs. Talk to other bloggers in your field and see if you can guest blog on their site and offer them a reciprocal deal.