How Content Marketing Helps Increase Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the lifeblood of any healthy inbound marketing strategy. What most strategists don’t realize is content marketing can unlock your site’s organic search potential, but that requires a sturdy plan and a clear understanding of how organic traffic works.

Want to learn how to use content marketing to increase organic search traffic? You’re in the right place.

In this blog post, we dive into how strategic content marketing can increase and improve your site’s organic search traffic.

How to Increase Organic Traffic with Content

Before launching into strategy, let’s make sure we understand the role of organic traffic. Organic traffic is the number of your website’s visitors that come from a search engine. That usually means somebody searches a keyword or phrase, and your website pops up. 

Wondering how organic traffic affects your marketing efforts? 

It’s simple: The more often your website comes up during a search, the more likely visitors will be to land on your site. In turn, those visitors will see more of your content, trust your brand more, and have more exposure to whatever it is you’re selling. 

Fortunately, if you use a strategic content marketing plan, you can drastically increase your organic reach. Here’s how to bring in more organic traffic:

Write to Your Buyer Personas

If you want content to connect with readers, craft pieces to fit the people that matter most to your business: your buyer personas. First, develop buyer personas. Next, cater your content to them. Your content should be about topics that your target audience cares about. 

Your personas are typically in one of three different stages when they’re searching for content:

• Awareness stage: They’re experiencing symptoms of a problem or opportunity.
• Consideration stage: They have defined or given a name to their problem or opportunity.
• Decision stage: They have decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach.

The content should meet your audience at their stage of the Buyer’s Journey. 

Although writing to your buyer personas doesn’t magically increase your organic search traffic, it does boost the chances that your content will be shared on other websites and social media. With every share, your content increases in value and receives a greater amount of references and inbound links. All of those components are key to ranking higher in search engines and increasing your organic search traffic.

Research and Use Organic Search Keywords

Keywords should be the backbone of your content marketing strategy. With a little research, you can dig up the keywords your potential customers care about. 

Not sure where to start?

Begin by using a keyword tool to find terms that your buyer personas are searching. You’ll want to identify long tail keywords that have high search volume but aren’t too difficult to rank for, as opposed to single keywords.

For example, using the keyword “marketing” isn’t a good idea. Yes, it has a high search volume, but it’s almost impossible to rank for in search engines. Instead, using a long tail keyword like “inbound marketing case studies” would be more effective. It still has a relatively high search volume, but it’s not nearly as difficult to rank well in search engines because there’s less competition for the term.

After you have found long tail keywords that you can rank for and that your personas are searching, create compelling content titles with those keywords. Make sure that the title inspires your audience to read the content but still accurately describes what’s on the page. With that, you’ll set the table for content that will drive more organic traffic to your site.

Build Meaningful Content

Keywords are an important part of boosting organic traffic, but if you want content to rank well, it needs to be valuable. If organic keywords are the backbone, the content around them need to form the body of an elite athlete.

Why? Because Google’s algorithms don’t just scan the web for individual words. Instead, Google rewards valuable, useful, and relevant content with higher search rankings. Context matters.

Not sure what types of content to focus on? Here are a few that you can create to increase search traffic:

• Blogs
• Pillar pages
• E-books and white papers
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Videos

When it comes to building content, the opportunities are endless. Just keep in mind that your keyword strategy should never be static. Be sure to check on how keywords are performing at least monthly to find new opportunities.

With that, all you need to do is nail down a strong content marketing strategy, and you’ll have the ingredients for more organic traffic and more business. 

Want to learn exactly how to build a marketing strategy that delivers? Download the Busy Inbound Marketer’s Guide to Increasing Website Traffic and get started.

This blog was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated since.