At Fujisan, one of our core focuses is on continually improving your site’s performance not via advertising, but through organic, SEO-based traffic.

It’s been shown over and over that websites with higher quality organic SEO perform much better in search engines, leading to a wider and more engaged audience.

Here are five practical starting points to increase organic traffic to your site.

Tip 1: Know your audience with keyword research

We’ve spoken before at Fujisan about keyword research more in-depth.

One thing we see a lot with small businesses is that they’ll create a site that does a poor job of addressing the needs of users who will be visiting. Too often, we see small businesses just kind of mindlessly dump out a bunch of content onto their site without actually considering why someone would benefit from that information. The end result is unhelpful and generally low quality.

For everything online marketing, you should always be coming back to the question “How does this help my users (or potential users)?”

But you should also take that one step further with dedicated keyword research to understand: What are users looking for?

There are generally four categories of searches:

• Informational
• Navigational
• Transactional
• Commercial

Informational searches are, like they sound, when someone is searching for more information and knowledge. An example could be “vegan recipes.”

A navigational search is when a user already knows what page they want to see and are simply searching in order to get there. Here, you might see “food network chef michael symon vegan episode.” In this case, they’re using Google because it’s easier than going to the Food Network site and navigating through there.

The transactional search is a user searching specifically with the intent to purchase something. For example, “vegan bakery” would fall here.

Lastly is a commercial search, which is a combination of informational and transactional. Typically, this is when a user intends to buy something but needs a bit more information before they do so. An example could be “best vegan bakeries seattle.”

Keeping these in mind, what is the problem that your product or service is going to solve for users? What is it that your site will provide for them?

Create a list of relevant keywords for your site; a great method is using the search engine as if you were a regular user, and then taking ideas from Google’s further suggestions under the “People also ask” section of the SERP.

Once you’ve compiled a core group of keywords, you can use Google Trends to find popular searches that will help give you ideas on new relevant — and, as always, quality — content for your site.

Learn more about using Google Trends to improve your SEO research.

Tip 2: Do your competitor research

Competitor analysis is a great way to provide greater context for your site’s performance.

Sure, comparison is the thief of joy, but in this case you can learn a lot from competitors. Not only can you see what they’re doing better than you (and perhaps what you already have a leg up on), but you can get ideas for your own content by analyzing your competitors’ keyword usage and rankings.

There are free tools available that will give you a general overview — Moz’s SEO domain analysis tool is a good start.

In general, we recommend reviewing a few competitors — four or five should be good — instead of hyperfocusing on one. This will give you a more complete view of where you stand, what you’re doing well, and what you could improve on.

We go more in-depth on competitor analysis on our blog post here.

Tip 3: Conduct SEO audits

After understanding your audience and your competitors, the next important step to take is to understand your own site. To terribly appropriate Socrates: Know thyself, if you will.

By auditing your own site, you’ll either uncover errors that need to be addressed (very likely) or, failing that, discover that your site is running perfectly and you can now focus solely on the next steps (less likely). Common errors that turn up in these cases include:

• Slow site speed
• 404 error pages
• Missing or duplicate meta tags

While the above are three common findings, that list isn’t even close to exhaustive. There’s tons of different things you can discover about your site during an audit that will negatively impact your site authority and subsequently lower your search engine ranking.

Identifying these is the first step to fixing them and having a solid site structure. This in turn will improve your site’s rankings, which will then lead to more traffic.

To start, there are free SEO site audit tools like SEMRush’s site audit feature that will give you a general rundown of any errors. We also offer more in-depth, full site SEO audits if you want to do a more comprehensive one.

Meanwhile, we’ve written an introduction to the SEO audit that goes more into the process and benefits.

Tip 4: Focus on evergreen content

When it comes to blog posts or really anything on your site, evergreen pieces are what will continue bringing in traffic for a very long time.

As the name implies, evergreen content is that which isn’t topical or dependent on being read within a certain time frame. It’s relevant for years, sometimes even longer. “What the Mariners 2022 playoff run tells us about next season” will become irrelevant shortly. “How the Mariners became the coolest dudes in Cascadian history” is timeless.

You likely won’t be able to create only evergreen content, and that’s okay — sometimes timely pieces are extremely helpful to people and subsequently are worth it on your end.

Whatever your ratio of evergreen to non-evergreen work, you can help optimize your site and blog for SEO. One part of this is simply brainstorming blog ideas that are useful to potential site visitors and ideally will naturally incorporate high quality keywords. That might sound basic, but having good ideas is the first step to everything! Without this, it doesn’t really matter if every other step goes great.

Along with creating quality content — ideally evergreen — it’s important to have a regular schedule for publishing. Obviously, many small businesses don’t have the manpower to post something new twice a week, but it’s less about bombarding users with new content and more making sure it’s a relatively dependable schedule. If you can only post something once a month, that’s fine. Just be sure it’s regular; better to post once a month dependably than nothing for half a year, three in a month, and then go dark for another six months.

We have more on writing pieces that are helpful for visitors and improve your SEO here.

Tip 5: Grow your audience with social media

This is probably something you don’t need reminding of — seemingly everything is social media-based these days to the point of absurdity. Yet still, it’s good to remember some key things.

Social media is just so useful as a tool to engage your existing audience and grow it further.

Similar to the content you put on your site, it’s really important that what you put out on social media is relevant and helpful to users. Otherwise, people aren’t dumb; they’ll realize quickly to ignore you, and the algorithm and your effectiveness (or lack thereof) will reflect that.

Also, it’s better to have a couple active social media accounts than a bunch of them that are stretched too thin. The latter will make your business look amateur and implicitly lower your authority.

Generally, these tips are pretty straightforward. All they need is a bit of critical thinking and creativity. And now that we think about it, that’s a pretty good approach for everything, anyway!