How to Recover Organic Traffic After Google’s March 2024 Update

Struggling with lowered site traffic after Google’s March 2024 update? You’re not alone—millions of site owners just like you are experiencing significant drops. Fortunately, we can help!

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid search results. Not to be confused with direct traffic, organic traffic is often considered the most important, largely consisting of those actively seeking information, services, and products related to your business.

How Can I Drive Organic Traffic on My Website?

  1. Optimize Your Website for Humans First, Not Search Engines
  2. Identify and Fix Issues with an SEO Audit
  3. Improve Quality and Relevance With a Content Audit
  4. Use Strategic Keyword Research
  5. Build a Web of Content With Internal Links

Optimize Your Website for Humans First, Not Search Engines

Although SEO is a big part of bringing organic traffic to your site, don’t get carried away.

To drive organic traffic, we must create content that will bring value to our audiences. Using data like dwell time and number of pages visited, Google determines whether or not visitors find your site useful. Even if you follow every SEO best practice, it doesn’t guarantee your audience will enjoy your content!

Bad content will always get less engagement and generate fewer leads. Search engine algorithms continue to favor visitor-centric content, so don’t forget to provide real value to your site’s visitors. If content is optimized for Google but not real human beings, it won’t bode well for your ranking. 

Use Strategic Keyword Research

Keywords are critical to boosting any website’s organic traffic. Actually, they make up your entire organic strategy!

The right keywords will drive organic traffic to your website, but the wrong keywords can hurt your efforts. Think about the pain points your potential customers might be facing. How can you provide solutions?

Keyword research demands continuous effort to ensure peak performance for all critical keywords. With a digital marketing specialist like Starkmedia, you can use keyword research to discover exactly what your audience wants. 

Identify and Fix Issues With an SEO Audit

SEO audits provide insights into how we can increase your website’s organic traffic.

Everyone should review their on-page SEO strategies from time to time. This includes meta descriptions, the structure of internal links, and heading tags (H1s).

What Should I Look For During an SEO Audit?

  • Is your site indexed properly?
  • Does your sitemap have errors?
  • Are there any broken links on your site?
  • How about missing meta titles or descriptions?
  • Is your site optimized for mobile?

Improve Quality and Relevance With a Content Audit

A content audit helps us look at a site and decide if content should be deleted, simplified, updated, or expanded upon.  

When trying to drive organic traffic, it can be tempting to focus only on creating outstanding new content. However, we can find new uses for old content with a little creativity. Rather than immediately discarding outdated web content, consider transforming it into something new and relevant!

Build a Web of Content With Internal Links

Adding internal links to your site is one way to increase organic traffic and optimize for UX.

Effective internal linking is a simple but powerful way to keep visitors engaged. The more we utilize internal links, the easier it becomes for visitors to navigate. The more natural and fluid we can make our visitors’ experiences, the more time they’ll spend on our site!

Starkmedia’s SEO pros can identify internal linking opportunities for you, and work with you to build an effective organic traffic strategy.

PS: It’s always important to use internal linking on new pages, but don’t forget to check if any existing pages have opportunities to link to more of your site’s pages!

Increasing organic traffic requires a strategic mix of SEO, engaging content, and UX optimization. By refining your approach, you can create a solid digital strategy to increase organic traffic, bringing lots of new visitors to your site. 

Contact Starkmedia today to embrace these strategies and watch your organic traffic grow!