How To Increase Organic Traffic

Did you recently see a drop in your website’s organic traffic? Or do you think Google’s recent algorithm update hits your website?

Fear not because this how to increase organic traffic article covers the steps to improving your website’s organic traffic.

So let’s dive into ways to increase organic traffic.

Website Analytics

The first step is to check your website’s google analytics. From your dashboard, you will see where the traffic started dropping.

Once you have seen when the organic traffic started dropping. The next part is to understand what caused the drop in organic traffic.

Though basically there is no exact way to know what may cause your website’s organic traffic to drop. But they are some elimination processes we need to carry out once we know the exact spots the traffic started dropping. They are four main things that cause a decrease in organic traffic.

what causes organic traffic to decrease

• Backlink: you may see a drop in your organic keyword traffic when you stop sending backlinks to the article.
• Changes to keyword position: Your competitors are outranking you.
• Changes on the website: Check if they are any changes you made to your website that may violate search engine policies.
• Algorithm update: find out if there is a major algorithm update that affects our search engine optimization.

So let’s go through them individually.

Organic traffic drop

You can use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs to check the organic traffic drop. Each of these tools has its own way of calculating its metrics.

You can enter your website on Semrush. Then click on organic traffic to see the sudden drop in organic traffic.

Most time if we stop building backlinks. Or we lost some of the previously acquired backlinks. We may start seeing a drop in our organic traffic.

You can see your lost backlinks in Semrush.

When you check your best-performing keywords. You notice that they started generating traffic when you were sending backlinks to the blog post.

Link building helps our content rank higher on the search result page. So if you started noticing a drop in your organic traffic. It’s either you stopped building backlinks or you need to build backlinks for deranking pages.

SEO tools for checking organic traffic

For you to effectively check the sudden drop in your organic traffic. They quite a few numbers of SEO tools you can use.

Such as Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Google search console, Ubersuggest, and Semrush. So these tools are free while some have free trials like Semrush has a free 7-day trial.

So if your go-to Semrush organic keyword research to check the keywords that your website is ranking for.

Make sure to set the date to when you initially saw the drop in organic traffic. Then filter your top-ranking keywords because you don’t need to care about the keywords that moved from the 70 to 90 position. Because no matter what you do it will make no difference.

So focus mainly on your top-ranking keywords to see where the drop in organic traffic started.

So check those pages that are dropping in ranking. Since we are sure the drop in organic traffic is not caused by the lack of link building.

How to increase organic search traffic

The best way to increase your organic search traffic is to optimize your content that drop in search position. So to see your ranking in the search result. Search for the top-ranking keyword and see the content position in Google.

As you can see in the example in the image above. We drop to number four for that target keyword. So what happened next is that I look at the page that is ranking first and also the one that outranked us. I tried to find out what is in their own content that is not in mine.

So after going through their article I came up with great ideas which are to optimize my article. And also send backlinks to the article.

The only solution is to add more words to the article. And add more semantic keywords. I also restructured the blog content. For your content to maintain its ranking position it has to be well-optimized. And well written. Here is an article on how to write a well-optimized blog post.

Check your article to be sure it is well-optimized, and check if you have enough internal and external linking. Use the proper header tag in each section. Also, make sure the content meets up with the search intent. Read about Search intent optimization.

You can optimize your content using the information covered in this On-page SEO checklist. After you have fully optimized your blog post.

The next part is to check the number of backlinks on your competitor’s article.

As you can see the article that outranks our content has around 85 backlinks. While our own has zero backlinks. So they were able to outrank my content was the lack of backlinks. So what will help my article to gain back its position is by doing link building. I have put together all the strategies that I use to build links in this link-building tutorial.

So if you find out your blog post is well-optimized and have enough backlink. Another fundamental issue that will cause a drop in organic traffic having broken links on your website. Or changes in your CMS. You can run a full website audit on Semrush to see if there are any other issues with the website.

Website audit

Once you run a full website audit on Semrush. You can check some other SEO-related issues your website will be facing.

Run the site audit setting up the date to match the period of drop in organic traffic. Once the audit is fully done. You will see some issues that may cause a drop in your organic traffic. Try to check out all the problems.

So if you have checked all these things and your article is in good shape. And it also has plenty of backlinks but you still see no increase in your organic traffic. Then the issue with the drop in traffic will be associated with the latest Google algorithm update.

Google algorithm update

If they are any new updates in the Google algorithm. It may affect our organic traffic. Because our website may no longer be playing by Google rules.

You can use the Semrush SEO tool to check if the drop in organic traffic is caused by a recent Google algorithm update.

You can see all the places where Google did algorithm updates. So if you started seeing low organic traffic after the recent update. Then maybe Google has hit your website.

Another way to find out the recent update is to Google it. Search for “Google algorithm update” Then also include the month your started seeing the organic traffic drop.

So you will see the articles that talked about the recent update. Go through the article to know if your website violated any of the recent SEO rules.

Expertise and authority

A few years ago Google started putting a lot of emphasis on their E-A-T guideline. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

This update affects a lot of websites in many niches. So if you are not an expert in the niche you are blogging about. Google ranking will favor mostly websites that are authoritative in their niche.

The best way to avoid your site from getting penalized is to make sure you include your expertise in your about page. Google wants the source of the article they are ranking to be qualified to write about the topic.

If Google can’t verify your credentials. They assumed you do not have the expertise, authority, and trust to be writing such content.

Another algorithm that Google is putting more emphasis on is the Core Web Vital. It is all about the overall performance of your website speed and website responsiveness. Check out how to improve your website speed.

So if you have a slow-loading website. If your competitor has a fast-loading website, then they can outrank your content. Make your website load fast and have a good user interface.