Organic traffic and the costs of its acquisition

Many people associate organic traffic mainly with huge publishing expenses for several thousand dollars a month for the purpose of obtaining links. Link building is important, but it is not the only thing you should do. Many things can be done inside the website, and link building itself does not always have to be associated with huge expenses. What is certain is that if we neglect the onsite factors – link building itself may not give the desired effect.

Content creation and optimization

When generating organic traffic, the main costs are:
– our time (I assume that with the current slowdown of the economy and lower turnover of companies, there is more of it to be spent),
– content cost (you can send specific guidelines to a copywriter or write content using resources in your company).

If we are able to create content ourselves, it is a huge saving. We know that content is worth building and that it can be done at a lower cost. But what to write about? How to plan the created content? You can use many tools, including free ones.

Content creation – where to get ideas?

Before we start creating content, we need to plan it skillfully – that is, develop the subject, structure of the document and create a list of keywords that must be in the content. A common problem is the lack of ideas for generating content. I will not elaborate here on how to research competition in paid tools or on graphs and keyword relationships. After all, the intention of this article is to indicate ways that do not involve expenses.

Google Search Console

A huge treasury of free knowledge is Google Search Console – a tool that can be implemented for free and collect data on the visibility of our website.

How can this tool be used? You should analyze the data in the “Effectiveness” tab and search mainly for:
– phrases that, despite the far position, have quite a lot of views,
– phrases that have a lot of views and are located just outside TOP10.

We can narrow down the data to words that contain a specific word or string of characters. Thanks to this, we can both create content (in a situation where we mentioned a certain issue alongside other content – it is worth building a dedicated content that describes it accurately) and optimizing the current content.

Regardless of whether we are creating new content or trying to optimize the current one – remember about the most important elements:
– carrying out a TOP10 analysis for a given word (context of the content already created, length or optimization method),
– title meta optimization,
– appropriate keyword saturation,
– including the most important keywords in the first paragraph.

But what if we have not written about a given topic and there is no mention of it in GSC? One of the cheap, but unconventional ways, is to use customer inquiries or industry knowledge.

The client will also help you with SEO

It is worth carefully analyzing our clients’ questions and taking note of the latest trends in a given industry. During my work, when I send clients suggestions for topics (which were generated in a paid tool based on a keyword association), I often get a response that clients actually mentioned it during their inquiries. A real challenge for a person who does not have access to paid tools is to verify which queries have search potential.

In the case of reducing the costs of activities, we can use, for example:
– keyword planner (when we have an active Google Ads campaign – we have access to information on the number of monthly searches),
– a free counterpart, which usually has limits on the number of polls per day.

Or maybe take advantage of the knowledge of others?

One popular way to create content on your site is to provide guest posting. It is worth looking for people in the industry who have knowledge and would like to share it on the pages of another portal. We do not have to take money from the author for the possibility of publishing content with a link to the website – often it is enough to pay in the form of a substantive article, which can also generate traffic from search results.

Another factor influencing our visibility may be the author’s reach in social media and broadly understood popularity. If a recognizable person publishes content on our website and it reaches many recipients – recipients can start looking for information about the portal, which also increases organic traffic from brand traffic.

Link building – not always expensive

The subject of link building itself is very extensive and highly dependent on a given industry and the competitiveness of phrases. Nevertheless, at the beginning of cooperation with a client, I always try to be alert to the great potential of such inexpensive and unconventional linking methods. There are many methods for such cheap linking, and these are just a few of them.

Check your previous publications

Customers often mention that they published substantive content on the most famous industry portals or used the services of a PR company that published content on behalf of the client. If you have a list of such publications, for each of them:
– check if there is a link in the publication (preferably without the nofollow attribute),
– if there is no link, add to the “contact” list,
– write a request for the possibility of placing a link to the URL of the page.

Some websites may refuse, some will demand payment for the link, but in many cases it is enough to develop a list and one template e-mail.

Guest articles – sharing knowledge pays off

The scheme of operation in this case is the same as in the previously described sharing of space for experts’ statements. The only difference is that this time we express ourselves on external websites and share our knowledge. In return, we receive a link and potential brand traffic. If the portal on which we publish our content has a large group of recipients – some of them may search Google for information about the author and search for his website.

A unique offer is also a chance for a link

As a business owner, you know your offer perfectly well and know the target group. If your potential customers form communities and have associations or clubs – it is worth establishing not only offline cooperation, but also asking for a link. One example of a tailored offer is schools that offer driving lessons for people with disabilities. All it takes is a quick research and we find a page where driving school websites with such an offer are available.

Internal linking – often untapped potential

Many people hearing the phrase “linking” associate it with acquiring links from other websites. The techniques of cheap external linking have been discussed above, but there is also information about the potential of internal linking. Through internal links (where we have full control over the anchor text of the links), we can also influence the position of keywords.

It is important to analyze which subpage is responsible for visibility for a specific keyword and not to mix up internal links in the target addresses. A common mistake in portals’ editorial offices is linking to various thematically related articles using the same keyword. This misleads Google and increases cannibalization by boosting a few similar articles.

You must create a map of internal links:
The keyword in which we insert the link Internal link address
Keyword – 1 / subpage-X /
Keyword – 2 / subpage-Y /
Keyword – 3 / subpage-Z /

Any further internal linking should follow this pattern.

You probably think now that such internal linking and browsing the site is a lot of work, not to mention the cost. There is also a certain way for this. Internal linking can be automated – with the use of related articles modules or through the scheme of inserting internal links according to a certain key.

You have probably seen the module of similar content more than once on many websites, but it is worth making sure that the mechanism of generating these links works according to a certain key – after similar keywords or thematic connections between articles assigned manually in the CMS.

Automatic linking in the content is used less frequently, but it works in a very simple way. We determine that when a specific keyword appears in the content, a specific link to another subpage will be inserted there. It is also worth adding the condition that such a link has not been added higher in the content, which will limit the number of these links on one subpage. Such a solution can be implemented on individual orders from the programmer, or in the case of more famous CMS systems, look for ready-made solutions.

Summary

The Paraphrase-Online.com Team hopes that with this article you already know that there are many ways to increase organic traffic on your website – not necessarily at the expense of a lot of cash. You can use your own and our clients’ knowledge on many levels. In addition, a whole range of activities related to content planning or its creation can be performed within the organization. Therefore, do not hide behind high costs and start working on the website visibility on Google today.