Building a Successful Organic Traffic Pipeline in 5 Steps

Increasing your organic traffic is the most cost-effective way to improve your brand reputation and drive your conversion rates. However, you won’t be able to compete with the top-ranking websites on Google without a comprehensive SEO strategy that can connect you with interested audiences.

The good news is that even small, local businesses can improve their organic clicks by consistently following several key steps. Below, we’ll explore how you can start building a successful organic traffic pipeline in five steps that can improve your ROI for years to come.

What are the Advantages of Getting Organic Traffic?

Every business benefits from organic traffic as it is the best way to drastically increase your ROI. Users can discover your website, gather information, and purchase products or services without ever clicking on a paid advertisement or promotion. In other words, these are sales that come to you at a minimal cost-per-click.

Furthermore, your ability to qualify your customers will drastically improve as your organic traffic pipeline improves with time. All of your traffic accesses your website with the use of keywords. When you design content to target certain keywords, you will also be able to understand the true intent behind using those keywords.

If someone uses informational keywords, you understand that they are very early in the sales pipeline and need to be nurtured before attempting to close a sale. Likewise, users searching for transactional keywords are already primed to buy. This natural insight into your audience will allow you to better refine your pipeline and get better results out of the traffic your receive.

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Finally, a strong organic traffic strategy can potentially drive competing websites out of the equation. As you consistently serve your audience’s needs, you’ll gain even more traffic, drive conversions, and earn customer loyalty. All of this is a formula to drive your website to the top of search rankings, making you the prime choice over the competitor websites ranked beneath you.

If you want these benefits for your brand, continue reading to learn our five steps for building a successful organic traffic pipeline.

1. Spy on Your Competitor’s Strategy

It’s not devious to spy on a competitor’s strategy, it’s simply smart business. If another business in your industry has cracked the code on how to earn one of the top spots on search engine results pages, you need to pay close attention to what they’re doing.

Google does not favor websites by happenstance. Every result on the first page is utilizing a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy that is consistently driving organic traffic to their domain. Beyond the volume of daily traffic, Google is also closely examining the quality of content to retrieve the best matching answer to a user’s search query.

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While we’ve made very obvious efforts to illustrate the power of content and SEO in our past articles, it bears reiterating here. Your competitors attract more organic traffic than you because their content, both on their main pages and their blog, contains elements that are clearly working with your shared audience. If you’ve been implementing a content strategy for an ample of time with no real results, you’ll want to discern what is different or unique about the content your competitor creates.

Websites that receive high amounts of organic traffic typically can target an audience’s most pressing questions or concerns. In addition to observing the type of content and the quality, consider how they choose to implement their target keywords throughout the article. By taking note of what is indisputably working, you can plan to make changes when it comes to your own content creation methods.

However, you don’t simply want to imitate what your competitor creates verbatim. Doing so is what is known as content scraping, which means that it’s primarily derivative of other content on the web that’s of higher value and quality. Instead, you’ll want to use your knowledge of your customer base and the industry to determine the potential flaws in their content strategy that you can exploit. In other words, what can you help your audience with or answer in a better way than the competitor has on their website?

You never want to remain static when it comes to content creation. Constantly analyzing your content performance with Google Analytics can alert you to when articles or posts simply aren’t performing. If your article is based on a topic that’s commonly written about, observe how other content is unique and why it is outperforming yours. Latch on to the tactics that appeal to your niche and then use them in a way that highlights your unique perspective and insight into your industry.

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2. Attack User Questions with Your Content

Using user questions as a basis for your content serves a very specific purpose in that it has a much stronger opportunity to match user intent. If a person asks Google, “how can I acquire more backlinks?”, then you can precisely curate your target to aid that user in their very specific request.

Compare this to a general search such as “SEO tips”, which leaves it very open-ended as to what you could potentially write about. While writing an article on meta descriptions technically qualifies as an SEO tip, it doesn’t help the user in the example above and therefore won’t earn you the click as it doesn’t match the user’s true intent behind their search.

Basing your articles off of popular user questions not only helps you to better serve your audience, but they often boast much higher conversion rates. This is because the long-tail keyword typically demonstrates that the customer is further along in their buyer journey and showing interest in making a purchase. Compare this to our example “SEO tips” keyword that is more about general information in nature.

Be aware that when you research your long-tail keywords, you’ll likely see a much lower search volume than those shorter, informational keywords. However, don’t make the common mistake and ignore this step in your organic traffic pipeline strategy. Lower competition provides an opportunity to exploit this niche. Because you now have the knowledge to match your content to this strong buyer intent, the quality of your organic traffic will be substantially higher even if the overall volume is initially lower.

Where to Find Popular User Questions?

If you’re unsure of where to start, you won’t have to look far to get questions to utilize as topics. You can start by entering industry-relevant keywords into a Google search and looking at what appears in the “People Also Ask” section of most search engine results pages. There are also sites like Quora that exist to provide answers to popular user questions regarding any topic.

You can also reverse engineer topics from popular keywords that might not take the form of a question. For example, if users are searching for information about a specific GPU error, you can infer that they are effectively asking questions about what the error is or how they can fix it. With that in mind, you can begin to formulate topics that directly address the user’s need for information on the topic.

Finally, you should take note of the issues that come up in your everyday customer interactions. We produce countless articles for the DashClicks blog that directly address the questions individuals have when it comes to the marketing services fulfilled for their site. By answering these questions in detail with our content, our audience can educate and empower themselves without needing to ask for additional assistance.

Remember that gaining lots of clicks and traffic will matter very little if it’s not improving your ROI and simply increasing your bounce rate. By focusing on improving the quality of your traffic, your site’s overall SEO will improve. Maintain consistency with this strategy and your organic traffic and ranking will increase naturally with time.

3. Create More Access Points to Your Website

Your primary focus for improving organic traffic is carefully curating the content on your website. However, regardless of your efforts, the user will ultimately only be able to discover your brand by accessing your domain either through a direct URL or from SERPs. If you’re having difficulty cracking the first page on Google, you’ll find it difficult to improve your organic traffic. Because of this, you’ll want to focus on creating new ways for users to access your domain through external sources. Several SEO strategies allow you to do this.

• Content Aggregator Sites

The first is to sign your website up for every website aggregator that applies to your business or blog. These are excellent ways to gain additional circulation of your content by leveraging the traffic that the aggregator website organically receives. For example, Google News aggregates the best news-related content for users all in one place. While it won’t guarantee the click, it provides additional visibility off-page that you wouldn’t normally receive.

Other popular websites can serve as blog content aggregators, but you’ll need to research what’s available by industry niche. More general content aggregators exist such as Mix, Digg, or Reddit. These sites exist to serve the consumer by helping them cut through the noise and discover material that serves their interests. Sharing your posts in the appropriate sections of these sites can boost your visibility and potentially attract additional shares.

• Get Connected on Social Media

You’ll also want to get your content circulating to the social media websites that are most relevant to your brand. Certain platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram cater to the consumer whereas a site like LinkedIn primarily serves B2B businesses. In either case, these platforms provide a unique way for communities to connect.

You will not only be able to communicate with and learn from your target audience, but you can connect with influencers and like-minded content creators that can eventually aid in promoting content on your website. In this way, you’ll gain access to new audiences and potentially forge longstanding partnerships that can earn you valuable backlinks. Each share of your content on social media platforms creates a new way for organic traffic to access your domain.

• Guest Blogging

Finally, creating unique, high-quality blog content for websites other than your own is an excellent way to acquire backlinks and attract more organic traffic. With a little bit of outreach, you can discover opportunities to partner up with other websites that serve content that is relevant to your area of expertise. This provides mutual benefits for the website owner and your brand.

Guest blogging benefits the other website owner by giving them access to a unique voice and perspective that they otherwise cannot provide on their own. Your unique content comes with a built-in perceived value due to your experience, licenses, education, and other qualifying factors. It also adds variety to their content selection, which can attract more organic traffic.

On the opposite side, you get to plug your name, your brand, and your domain on another website. Think of it as performing your act in front of an entirely new audience at a new venue. The audience is already qualified as interested in your content and is therefore likely to engage with anything you create. Along with that content, you get to link back to your website and gain some of that organic traffic for yourself. This not only has the potential to boost your search rankings but can potentially blog or email list subscribers, as well.

4. Repurpose Your Best Blog Content in Video Form

No matter how excellent your website content is, there are always going to be audiences that simply won’t read long-form posts. However, that doesn’t mean that these individuals are not interested in what you have to offer. You simply need to create new ways to convey your message to those who consume content differently.

This is why some of the best content creators on the internet have a strategy to make all of their content go the distance. While a giant company may have the resources to have a dedicated video content team, most operate a bit more efficiently. You can utilize a lengthy blog post and convert the information into a script. Grab the person that you want to be the face of your brand and let them present the information to your audience in a new way. You get to interact with different sections of your audience in a new way without too much additional work.

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We also recommend breaking up lengthier posts into several smaller videos that can serve as excellent, bite-sized content for social media sharing. A quick video on a timeline is one of the most effective ways to attract the attention of new audiences without asking too much of their time. As long as the content quality is there, users will be happy to like and share, creating additional entry points for organic traffic to access your company website.

5. Be Aggressively Consistent with Your Content

Finally, one of the best ways to increase organic traffic is to simply be consistent with how you post and share content online. Too often, website owners start experimenting with SEO and blogging only to be inconsistent with their posting and give up on everything prematurely. Even a great SEO strategy will take months to produce results for a website that has no prior basis for search ranking results.

If you only have the resources to write one blog post a week, then choose a day and deliver the content on that day without fail. Audience retention relies heavily on scheduling and patterns. When you promise to deliver something, but are typically late or don’t come through at all, it will annoy and put off users from visiting your website again. After all, why should they give you their time if you won’t give them yours?

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Regarding how often you should post, the general rule is that more is better. A popular HubSpot study indicates that blogs with 16 posts or more a month generate 3.5x as much traffic as those who post less. More posts mean more opportunities to appeal to different topical interests, which is how you get more organic traffic on your site.

However, the type of content and the length will also play a factor. If you’re keen to share important industry updates or news that your consumers care about, you should post daily to appear as an authority instead of being behind the times. However, if you’re posting lengthy, dense informational pieces, you may want to scale back to give your audience more time to consume the material you post. In other words, you’ll need to make a judgment call on what plays best with your audience’s needs.

We also recommend getting your audience involved and polling your active readers about how much new content they would like to see every week or every month. Ultimately, you’ll want to stick to a formula that allows your team to make the best content possible with the resources you have. Should your business scale and allow for more content creation, you can scale up your content strategy to gain more organic traffic when your budget allows.

Start Building a Successful Organic Traffic Pipeline Today!

While these steps are straightforward to understand, the process of deploying them typically is not. The time and dedication that a strong organic traffic strategy requires is an understandable concern for smaller businesses that need to start turning a profit as soon as possible. For these reasons, marketing strategies such as PPC campaigns or email campaigns will always be valuable.

However, the overarching goal for every business should be to improve your organic traffic and your ROI. This will never be possible without a dedicated content creation strategy that serves customer needs and fulfills a void left by your competitors. With the way the ranking algorithm goes, there are no real shortcuts around implementing best SEO practices and posting on a consistent schedule.

As long as you implement these steps when creating your content, you can expect to see a steady increase in your website’s organic traffic in time. Particularly, emphasizing questions and looking for long-tail, transactional keywords will ensure that those organic clicks result in better conversion rates.

Additionally, never produce content in a vacuum. Every marketing strategy worth its salt is driven by analytical feedback. Ensure that your team is utilizing tools like Google Analytics to keep an eye on how your content is performing. Increases in page traffic, average session duration, and even additional pages visited can be strong indicators that your content is performing well. If you aren’t getting results, double back and observe what your competitors are doing and what you can improve before abandoning your work altogether.

Don’t lose heart if your organic traffic pipeline isn’t earning the ideal results just yet. Every great online brand starts where you are. Do your research, formulate a plan that incorporates these steps, and happy writing!