Industry terms can be confusing to the average business owner but when it comes to growing your online presence and brand, there are a few terms and meanings you would do well to learn.

Each of these methods are used in growing your online presence. Some are more useful in circumstances than others but for this article, we’ll be focusing on what is organic traffic and how can we improve the amount your website is receiving

Organic traffic is customers/leads that have found your website naturally through a search engine such as Bing, Google or Yahoo. It’s the complete opposite of Paid traffic and the main goal of any legitimate SEO campaign is to improve the growth of organic traffic over time.

Organic traffic is the best traffic. To put it in terms everyone will understand. Imagine your website is a store on a street. Organic traffic is the natural footfall that comes through into your store just because your store is in a great location or they like what you’re selling.

Organic traffic ties in neatly to search engine optimisation because a well-optimised website will rank higher than non SEO websites. A well-ranked website on search engines is the equivalent of building your store on the high street instead of down a labyrinth of hidden alleys.

So really organic traffic is free traffic which is the best kind! Let’s go back to the brick & mortar comparison of earlier. Imagine your store wasn’t very well located and you had to use – Paid traffic. Imagine having to pay every customer to come to your store. Unless you knew in advance that a certain percentage would buy or that your products had a huge profit return, this isn’t really a good business plan for anyone.

Likewise, with organic traffic, you’re growing your business brand online naturally, it’s free advertising! Especially useful if that’s the intended use of your website – for example, you only have the business location and contact information on the website and it has no other purpose.

Users searching for your business name or branding and finding it online in search engines is all very good and well, it shows your marketing has been working.

What you really want, however, are new customers through search engines, users who are searching for terms or keywords related to your industry and finding you amongst the results. Bonus points for making the 1st page on any of these results. You can check the success of these through your Google search console account & google analytics if correctly setup.

Truth be told, growing organic traffic doesn’t happen overnight. It never does and any SEO company promising you overnight results is likely using black hat SEO techniques, which will get your website banned off search engines. Realistically a good SEO campaign for growing your traffic takes around 4-12 months to implement and track results.

It’s important to understand good results take time, good SEO is vital for your business growing online overtime, as unless you have an unlimited budget for your marketing or a foolproof conversion rate and a niche traffic sector, paid traffic is more of a quick fix or for maximising sales.

Have quality landing pages, optimised for SEO with well-described relative meta description titles & descriptions. You should adopt white hat SEO strategies by designing your meta & title descriptions for human audiences – Not search engines.

Boost your domain authority by having more relative websites link to your website. This will not only give more traffic through ‘referral traffic’ but it’ll also increase your domain ranking on search engines. You can do this through guest blogging or affiliate schemes.

Link your social media accounts to your website. Having active social media accounts linking to your website will result in more traffic and help validate the legitimacy of your website.

Engage in content marketing, create quality blogs worth sharing, upload videos to multiple video sharing websites and link them back. Embed youtube videos on your site with your blogs.

Get an SEO site audit to ensure your website doesn’t have issues dragging down your website’s ranking, such as 404’s from dead/ out of date links on your website. Get competitor analysis done to see how your competitors who rank highly for certain keywords are managing it.

Ensure your website is fully SEO optimised, this means optimised for speed. Use a website such as GTMETRIX to test this. Also vital is your mobile optimisation, Google won’t point mobile traffic towards your website if it’s poorly designed. Ensure each page has it’s own meta title, description and a strategy in place for tracking the success of these and you’ll have a successful time of it.