I’m sure you’ve heard that organic traffic is not such an easy thing to build, but be aware that at the same time, it is more than good investment in time and effort you can make.

There are at least two reasons why search engine traffic is great- it’s relevant and targeted. Majority of websites that have organic traffic, convert it better than traffic came from other sources like social media. Another benefit is consistency in visits from a search engine.

A proper view of a common mistake that nearly everyone makes will help to learn how to increase organic traffic. This is a mistake I see over and over:

You know when people tell you, “Write content. Use content marketing, and you’ll get a ton of traffic” share it on social media and…

Nothing…

No comments. And no influx of organic search traffic.

Well, that’s not how it works. So, what to do?

If you don’t want to be one of those people who’s writing content and getting no results, these are the most important things to apply right now:

#1: Write better content than your competitor

You can use search engine optimization (SEO) tools (for example Ahrefs, Spyfu, MOZ..) that helps you to learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them.

It’s easy! Put in your competitor URLs and see a list of all their most popular pages. Go to every single one of those pages, and write better content than what they have written.

The next step I have for you is to use an online tool like Social Animal, Content Studio and quickly identify what content is working well, where they’re getting their Facebook traffic, their Twitter traffic, their LinkedIn traffic… Take their most popular articles and write way better ones.

#2  Look for website’s bad/good links

If you’re serious about the intention to improve organic traffic it’s almost a must to search for backlinks that will help you with SEO and ones that have a bad influence on your ranking.

Hope I don’t have to tell you that more links don’t mean it’s good for ranking and it doesn´t mean all of them are good links. Quantity is not the key to search engine optimization but quality.

Here’s a thing, every website has bad links and they are unavoidable for sure. Even popular and highly trusted websites have them. The point is that: more bad links- poor ranking. Remember, Google has penalties for this kind of stuff, so dig deep into getting rid of bad links.

#3 Build an internal linking system

When you link some previous post from your website with next one you can build the whole chain of good links that are relevant for organic traffic.

Creating an internal linking system brings you many benefits. You can even double time visitors spend on your site and such links are valuable for SEO.

#4 Write articles based on questions

I assume you know what I mean by this but let explain it how to use it.

People ask questions and it doesn’t have much to do with the fact is your website based on content. Replace short answers with writing an article. By doing this, you show that you care more about reader’s problems and you attach importance to what they want to know about.

This is great because there are many the same questions people ask Google and if you can turn your website into a treasury of answers at the same time increasing ranking. People can actually be more than helpful to create the organic traffic.

#5 Search for keywords and create a keyword database

First, don’t become obsessed with this but you should do your homework before you get into writing some text. Do a search for keywords, it can help you a lot with writing and do it everytime you want to post something new. Google can give you entire phrase people type when using a search engine.

The best way to do a keyword search is still with the good, old Google keyword tool.

Don’t forget to optimize metadata and content. Google sees everything, but what Google looks at first is your you first paragraphs of content and what keywords are used. Higher ranking directly depends on information your metadata contains about user’s asks.

#6 Create quality content on a regular basis

The truth is, first comes content. But, I assume you know, quality content is what counts. It will attach good backlinks, more shares on social media, bring improvement to UX on the website, etc.

 And you know what,  it’s not enough. Your blog content has to be outstanding every time, each new text has to be better than one before and better than your competition. Writing something new just for the quantity and make a pile of useless texts is waste of time.

Avoid this and concentrate on quality, this is the only way to succeed and get high ranked.

# 7 Take advantages of social media

Use as a tool what is right in front of you, and today that is social media. Take advantage of Networks like Google+, Twiter, Facebook, LinkedIn to improve your presence in search engines. If you don’t have a „share“ button, make it, set it and use it!

Warning! Blog something worthy of sharing.

#8 Monitor your SEO progress and the incoming links

What comes at the end is –never stop analyzing and monitoring.

Monitoring means you’ll be able to move forward with every post. Make a plan how you want to look, week by week or more, but tracking results and what’s good or not can help you to be even more productive. This, like previous tips, will attract backlinks, good as well as bad, so you already know you have to check them. Analysing mistakes and good moves are the most important for making the progress in SEO.

Eventually, theory and praxis are matching- hard work brings results.

More organic traffic requires more work and what’s the best-it always pays off. Nobody says it’s easy to develop marketing strategy but if you do your best, don’t miss opportunities, follow the plan of blogging, choose a good strategy for monitoring and there’s no room for being afraid and chased by Google penalty system.

Work hard, think harder!