By Dan Duke — The term "organic traffic" refers to all the visits to your website that result from clicks on search engine results for which you have not paid. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which is generated, for example, by Google Ads or sponsored entries on a search engine.

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Organic traffic doesn't pile up recurring pay per click (PPC) costs, like Google Ads or ads in other search engines, but it's not free either. To generate organic traffic to your website, you need to offer relevant content. This is because search engines use AI to recognize whether content is relevant and will fully answer a search query. If your content achieves this, it may be ranked highly and show up on the first page of SERPs. If your content is not relevant, search engines probably won't offer it up as one of the top results, and it will have little chance of generating organic traffic.

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In short: relevance increases the visibility of your content. More visibility, especially on the first page of search results, leads to more clicks. More clicks on unpaid links means more organic traffic for your website.

How dependent is organic traffic on Google ranking?

Organic traffic depends almost entirely on Google rankings. When you do a search, you might see the top few results labeled as "Sponsored" or "Ad." However, research indicates that about 94% of all consumers skip those paid placements to look for the unpaid links below. Organic traffic comes from clicks on those unpaid links. Content marketers also know that very few people go to the second page of search results. Therefore, to increase organic traffic, it is necessary to appear in the top 10 or so search results whenever possible.

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The competition for those top spots is fierce, and a huge content marketing industry is dedicated to nothing other than search engine optimization (SEO). This is the name given to the efforts made to place content at the top of search engine results. Much of that effort involves satisfying certain formal and technical requirements of Google and the Google search algorithms.

How can I boost Google rankings to drive organic traffic?

The field of search engine optimization is all about helping your blogging efforts  generate more organic traffic. It's a complicated, multi-faceted undertaking. Let's look at the different types of SEO measures that can lead to success.

Content SEO

Content optimization focuses on the quality of the content offered. The first step in producing relevant content that can generate organic traffic is to find the right topics to cover.

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Keyword research is at the heart of relevant content. When Google looks for content to answer a search query, a keyword-rich article will have more credibility than an article with few of the keywords. How could an article answer a query about, for example, organic traffic, without using that phrase and many related words?

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At Rellify, we provide clients with a Relliverse™, an in-house, customized AI subject-matter expert that identifies their best content opportunities. Using deep machine learning, we analyze a client's website and its competitors' sites and then cluster the data by main topics, level 1 subtopics, level 2 subtopics, and level 3 subtopics, taking into account millions of data points.

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This competitive analysis helps clients to quickly create highly personalized and relevant content that resonates with their target audiences. We supply a list of focus keywords for articles — often the long-tail keywords that are more specific than general terms and thus reflect the user intent behind online searches.

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Let's look at some other aspects of content optimization.

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• On-page SEO refers to the optimization of individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings. It involves elements like content quality, keyword use, meta tags, alt text, and internal linking. Its effectiveness can be measured through SEO metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic, bounce rates, and page speed.
• ‍Off-page SEO involves factors outside a website that affect its search engine rankings. It centers on building high-quality backlinks from other reputable sites, online brand mentions, and social media marketing. (Social media marketing will help build social traffic — users who come to you through social networks and platforms.) Off-page SEO can be measured through metrics like link building, domain authority, referral traffic, and social signals, which collectively indicate the website's credibility and popularity on the internet.
• Local SEO is part of off-page SEO. It focuses on search results for location-specific queries, helping businesses attract customers from their geographic area. It involves strategies like optimizing Google My Business listings, using local keywords, and acquiring customer reviews.
• E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Google wants to make every user experience satisfying by immediately providing exactly what a searcher wants. Part of how it achieves that is an emphasis on E-E-A-T. This type of content exudes relevance. It builds the credibility of your website and brand. It can attract highly coveted backlinks from other reputable websites. It has long-lasting value because the information it provides is not "of the moment," it is evergreen. It has the potential to generate organic traffic for years.
• ‍‍Vigilance is an often-overlooked part of generating organic traffic. Even the most evergreen of content needs to be updated from time to time. Perhaps a new study has been done that could make an important point in your article. Some information might need to be updated. Or the keywords simply need to be refreshed. Regular monitoring and updating of website content is vital. You can use tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor how your content is doing. Rellify's AI-powered platform makes this an easy task.

Technical SEO

‍Technical SEO focuses on satisfying certain formal and technical requirements of Google through site architecture, structure, content and more. The goal is to help search engines and website users quickly find what they are looking for. Here are some technical SEO issues you might need to address.

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• Maximize site and page speed. This helps to improve the user experience.
• Find and fix crawl errors. Crawl errors occur when a search engine tries to reach a page on a website but fails. If the page isn't reachable, it's not indexable and won't be ranked for SERPs.
• Fix broken internal and external links. Problems with internal linking (links between your own web pages) and external linking (links between your website's pages and other sites' pages) frustrate both users and search engines. To fix broken links, update the target URL or remove the link if the destination page no longer exists.
• Avoid duplicate content. While doing periodic website audits, look for duplicate content, which may arise from scrapped or copied content or the replication of pages from faceted navigation when multiple versions of the site are live.
• Migrate to HTTPS. Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), the secure version of HTTP, is a technical SEO ranking factor. HTTPS protects your visitors’ data their web browser interacts with your website.
• Use a clean URL structure. Overly complex URLs can cause problems for crawlers. Whenever possible, clean up and shorten your URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.
• Optimize the XML sitemap. Sitemaps are files that webmasters can create and submit to tell search engines about web pages they would like crawled and indexed for SERPs. Check the index coverage report in Google Search Console to discover and fix index errors related to your XML sitemap.
• Optimize your robots.txt file. Robots.txt files guide Googlebot and other search engine robots on how to access, crawl and index your website. Include the location of your XML sitemap in your robots.txt file and make sure your robots.txt file does not block pages that you want found by the public. Google’s robots.txt tester can tell you if your file is working.
• Add structured data or schema markup. Schema markup and other structured data give Google context about the importance of a page and helps your organic listings stand out in SERPs.
• Use responsive design. Mobile-first indexing is a significant ranking factor, so mobile optimization is a critical aspect of technical SEO. Responsive design allows a web page to look its best whether the user is on a smartphone, laptop or any other device.

Pros and cons of organic traffic

As you can see, organic traffic does not come easily. Let's review the positive and negative aspects.

Advantages of organic traffic

• Higher user trust in organic search results compared to paid results.
• Generation of continuous and free traffic.
• Gaining expert status in a specific field.

Disadvantages of organic traffic

• It takes weeks or possibly months to build organic traffic with quality content.
• It requires a great deal of expertise.
• SEO strategy must be constantly adapted and content must be monitored and updated, otherwise there is a risk of losing organic traffic.

How to build organic traffic

‍Google uses AI to decide what content is placed in a position to generate organic traffic. Shouldn't you use AI to create meaningful blog articles that have a shot to rank at the top of SERPs?

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At Rellify, no aspect of content creation is left to chance. We use a unique, award-winning approach to content marketing backed by AI. But we go further by giving you the option to employ human intelligence and creativity along the way. Or, if you like, we can supply you with expert services and create content for you.

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Get your content at the top of search engine results. Pull users to your site with a high click-through rate. Turn people searching for answers on the internet into customers and then advocates for your business. Contact Rellify today to revolutionize your content strategy and create meaningful content that engages your target audience.