Your Content Can Help You Cultivate Organic Traffic… Here’s How

A major point of your website is to attract prospective clients to your business, educate them about your services, and entice them to contact you for more information (or even sign up!). Of course, for this to happen, these prospects must first visit your website, contributing to the all-important metric known as traffic.

This is where your content can prove its worth. Let’s discuss using it to attract as much organic traffic as possible.

First, let’s define what makes web traffic “organic” in the first place.

What is Organic Traffic (and Why Is It So Valuable)?

To understand organic traffic, we must first grasp how search engines operate. There are effectively two ways to get your content in front of a searcher’s eyes… in other words, at the top of the results page. First, you can pay to boost it and have it appear nearer to the top, and second, you can use search engine optimization practices to push it upwards. Traffic resulting from the latter approach is known as organic traffic and has significant benefits.

For instance, organic traffic…

1. …costs less to acquire. Beyond the investment into creating the content you share, organic traffic has no associated costs.
2. …helps foster relationships. By directing people toward your website and services and the value they offer, your content can reinforce your position as a trustworthy and reliable partner.
3. …tends to match what you offer. Since your site visitors found your website by searching for a term you ranked well for, you are more likely to have the information they are trying to find.
4. …is scalable and sustainable. Not only can you tweak your content and make it more relevant to keep visitors coming to your site, but you can augment it and add more using SEO-focused topics that you also want to rank for and draw attention to.

While there are technical means of improving your organic search—fixing issues in how your website is constructed, for example—quite a few focus on the content you share on your website and beyond.

How Content Can Be Used to Encourage Organic Traffic

Let’s explore how creating quality content can help draw searchers to your website.

Creating Content that Demonstrates Your Expertise

First and foremost, your content must show that you have the knowledge and experience needed to be a trustworthy provider. Otherwise, how will it motivate your audience to investigate you once they’re looking for more?

One method that helps you endorse your capabilities and reach a higher rank on search engines is to write a pillar page, or a piece of content that gives an overarching view of a topic more or less in its entirety. This is followed by content that dives into separate considerations of that topic, linking them all together appropriately.

Whatever strategy your content follows should focus on educating your audience about the topics they are interested in and searching for and answering the questions they bring to the table.

Engaging with Your Audience Through Your Content

Your content is also your most direct way to invite your audience in. You can expand on it by opening up discussions in public forums, sharing it on other platforms, and generally welcoming conversations by including a prompt for the reader to start one.

Your content is a great way to start a dialogue, from the calls-to-action in your blogs to your social media posts and conversations you hold in the comments… just as long as these posts are helpful and not overly salesy.

Identifying and Utilizing the Appropriate Keywords

Let’s say you wanted your business website to rank for a specific kind of widget. It pays to do some research to determine what your target audience is seeking out and craft applicable keywords to match. If your audience is searching for the “best widget for sprocket,” you should write content describing why your widget is the best for that specific sprocket.

Various tools are available to help you accomplish this, including ones that identify the keywords you should be using and those your competitors are using successfully.

Crafting Content that Matches Searches

When researching your optimal keywords, you should also consider how your existing content relates to the keywords you want to rank for. This helps you identify opportunities to tighten up some of this content to optimize it further.

Touching on these critical topics and addressing common questions not only helps you rank closer to the top of search results but does so in a way that encourages an interested audience to trust you and your expertise.

Giving Old Content New Life

What if you’ve produced some content that has performed admirably in the past and want to capitalize on it further? You can do so relatively easily by converting it into a different format and updating any information that is no longer accurate. This way, you can take content that works well and generate new content that also works well, drawing other interested prospects to your website.

Using Additional Platforms as Inbound Launchpads

Finally, a hugely effective way to increase your content’s reach and encourage more traffic is to share it on platforms other than your website. The more spread your content—and, as a result, your business’ voice—has, the more likely an interested party will find it and investigate.

Giving your audience the ability to share your content on their social media profiles can also help your word spread. You just have to earn it by providing quality content and valuable information.

Need Help Planning a Content Strategy for Your MSP?

We can help. Our team offers a variety of content-focused services, all designed to help you maximize your business’ visibility and impact on both the search engine crawlers and your audience.