The New York Times recently ran a story about actors, athletes, politicians, TED speakers, comedians and so-called influencers who purchase followers for their Twitter accounts, and who use amplification bots to retweet their missives.

The Newsweek website was caught purchasing fraudulent traffic as well.

Why?

In the case of Newsweek, it allowed them to earn millions in ad revenue from the United States Government, specifically, the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau. In the case of celebrities and ‘influencers’, fake followers offer the possibility of being paid by companies to wear their clothes, drink their drinks or what have you.

Since being exposed, celebrities have mostly denied any knowledge of such fake follower purchases, laying blame on their former managers or ‘rogue’ employees. In some cases, fake followers of celebrities comprised over 60 percent of their followers! The cold shower of reality must be deflating.

However, this is just a temporary solution. If you’re looking for a permanent solution, organic traffic should be your go-to practice.

Doing it Right — The Importance of Building Organic Traffic

One of the main reasons why most well-meaning SEO companies stress the importance of only organic traffic, and not paid or promoted content, is because the paid versions are not sustainable.

Organic traffic means that the post or the content that you published on your site will continue to drive traffic tomorrow, next month and even the next few years. This is the reason why it’s worth the effort, also keeping in mind you’ll never see as high a ROI from paid traffic.

How to Build Organic Traffic?

When it comes to building organic traffic, there are some good ways and some better ways. There are also awful ways that should be avoided at all costs. Let’s look at a few ways to increase your organic traffic the right way.

1 – Create the Best Content

Creating content just for the sake of creating and adding content because you know publishing articles regularly is good for SEO is certainly the wrong approach. It won’t get you very far. In fact, it may harm a website’s reputation in the long run. A website is the face of most businesses — It better create a good impression when a potential customer visits.

Publishing low quality blog posts read by the visitor often leads to a quick exit. Besides, great quality content always ranks better in search engines, which in turn, will drive more organic traffic to your website! Good content is also the kind of content that people would like to read and share with their friends and followers.  So, creating content that is useful for your target audience should always be your aim.

2 – Go After the Low Hanging Fruit

Everybody wants to rank on the first page for their main keywords! The problem is that they are highly competitive. To rank for these broad keyword phrases requires months of time, everyday devotion to various aspects of the website today, competitors tomorrow, algorithm changes the next. Where does it end? It doesn’t!  So instead of spending your time to achieve something that may take a lot of your time and efforts, and may not even be attainable, why not go after the low hanging fruit – the long-tail keywords.

For instance, if you’re a SEO agency, don’t even try and go after ‘SEO agency’ as your keyword. Chances are that you’ll never be able to compete with the big names out there. Why not try narrowing it down? You can be more specific and include the areas you serve. For instance, ‘SEO agency in ‎Pottstown, PA’. You can even get more specific by narrowing it to down for your target audience. For example, ‘SEO agency for entrepreneurs in ‎Pottstown, PA’. This will attract a lot more targeted traffic than just ‘SEO agency’ as your main keyword. In the day and age of voice searches, these are the keywords that will get you much better results.

3 – Write Consistently

Certain studies indicate the best times and days to publish a blog post — Usually when you are at your busiest. No joke. Instead, writing and updating your website consistently is key to getting organic traffic to your website.

To help you start, publish a blog post once a week minimum. Ideally the more the better, but, if you’re running a business at the same time, it will be difficult to publish more without hiring some good writers. (Hureka Technologies has some). 😊 No doubt, search engines love websites that are being frequently updated. More importantly, users also love it.

Your main focus should be to please the visitors of your website, not the search engines.

A website that’s updated frequently tells the users that you’re serious about your business and providing helpful content. This makes it worth it for them to invest their time into following your progress. Regular updates keep people coming back. In this way, your content will be shared and linked more often… hopefully. Regardless, these are all ways of increasing your organic traffic.

4 – Don’t Upset Google

Unfortunately, some SEO agencies like to test the limits and see what they can get away with. It’s known as black hat optimization and can get you banned. What you need to do to be re-included to Google is an article in itself! Always remember that increasing organic traffic should be done ethically. Being delisted can burn your brand to the ground

Four tips to follow to avoid penalties.

1. Don’t build/buy cheap links.
2. Never ever pay for inbound links.
3. Don’t even think about using exact-match anchor text.
4. Avoid publishing stolen, scraped or low-quality content.

5 – Guest Blog for Traffic, Not SEO

If you want to publish guest posts on other sites, don’t do it only for inbound links. This is because the value of such links is going down. On the other hand, guest blogging for traffic is still a viable strategy. While the inbound link that you’ll get at the end of a guest post may not hold much SEO value like it used to, but the exposure your content will get to a new audience is certainly worth investing time in guest blogs.

That said, there are certain best practices that you MUST follow while guest posting.

• Don’t go after just any sites that accept guest posts. Always aim for good authoritative websites that have good quality content and a decent amount of traffic.
• Always choose websites in your own niche. Going after popular websites is useless if you’re not able to reach your target audience.
• Promote your guest posts like you would your own post. This shows the other websites that you really value the opportunity to post on their blog.
• Last, but not the least, check back regularly and respond to comments. Ideally, you’d want their visitors to become your visitors. And responding to the comments is a great way to build that rapport.

It’s quite evident then that building organic traffic is not easy, yet it should be preferred over paid traffic or followers that opened this months’ article. This is the reason why most SEO companies are opting to increase organic traffic and are working on strategies that will help them do that.

If you have any thoughts or questions about building organic traffic, contact Hureka Technologies for a quick consultation.