How to Attract Relevant Organic Traffic – Quality vs. Quantity

If you have a website you will want to grow your organic traffic. Organic traffic is any traffic that arrives from a search engine but isn’t paid for. Your Adwords expert leverages pay per click search engine ads to get traffic to the website, so these are not organic. When you search for a keyword and click on any link that isn’t an ad, that’s considered organic traffic. Organic traffic is key to the success of any site. Site owners focus on organic traffic volume as a key metric because the logic is that if organic traffic increases then sales increase, revenue increases and so does profit. And because it is not ‘paid’ for (at least directly) it is considered a very cost efficient way of driving visitors compared to paid ads.

But it’s really not enough simply to try and grow organic traffic volume. You can grow your organic traffic by a million in a month and end up in the same position as the previous month if the quality of traffic is poor. You want more organic traffic but you want quality not just quantity. So why is quality important ? Well, when we say quality traffic what we really mean is relevant traffic. Relevant traffic is more predisposed to your product or service, they are more likely to enquire and or buy and their conversion rate will therefore be much higher that poor quality traffic.

Poor quality traffic leads to high bounce rates and low conversion rates. High quality traffic leads to low bounce rates, and high conversion rates. This is why you want high quality relevant traffic arriving on your site.

But how do you go about driving high quality relevant organic traffic ?

1. Identify Relevant Keywords

If you want to attract the high quality of traffic you have to appear for relevant keywords. Relevant doesn’t always mean highest volume. The right SEO consultant will optimise your site for the keywords that are most relevant to your brand, product or service. Focusing on relevance means creating experiences that work for those specific keywords and not trying to cover every keyword in your vertical.

2. Make Your Metadata Work to Drive Relevance

Once you’ve identified the relevant keywords it’s time to make sure your metadata is optimised for those keywords. Your meta title url and page description are very important because they help inform Google about what the destination is. The better connected the content is to the metadata and the keyword, the more relevant the traffic will be because all elements work together.

3. Match Content to Intent

To attract relevant traffic you have to have content that matches the intent of the search. Whether it is transactional, navigational or informational, think about the keywords you are targeting and match the content to the intent behind the keyword search.

4. Quality Link Building

Link building is important to drive authority and authority drives organic volume. So to dive up authority and organic traffic you need to build links – but you need to build links with relevant sites. Poor authority sites with no relevance to your category are to be avoided. Build links with high authority sites that have a direct connection to your brand, product or service. As well as building links with relevant external partners you should also link between the pages on your site. Internal linking on the site enables Google to see that you are an authority on certain connected topic areas which will increase your visibility and relevant traffic

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a very broad area. But it is incredibly important when you are thinking of ways to drive relevant organic traffic. Content marketing is content (not ads) that can be distributed anywhere. So that includes your own site (blogs, whitepapers) social media (Facebook, Reddit,Tik Tok) and PR. All of these channels can be used to drive your content into relevant corners of the web and generate relevant traffic back to your site. When thinking about what content to produce, look back at your keyword strategy and link the content strategy to your keyword list. Build content that provides new and original content around those keywords then use the most appropriate platform to distribute and promote that content.

Driving relevant traffic is not one strategy but many interconnected disciplines. To drive relevant organic traffic you have to make them all work together. Your keyword research is critical because it defines all the areas you want to target. You need to ensure that every page has the right meta data so that Google understands what you want to rank for. You need to connect the destination content to the keyword intent to ensure that the journey is seamless which will improve your authority in Google’s eyes and deliver more relevant traffic as a result. Your link building needs to be targeted not spray and pray, and your content marketing needs to be regular, high quality and well distributed. All of this takes time, energy and resources. But if you are able to get this integrated engine working you will reap the benefits of high quality, relevant organic traffic.