Every second, Google processes more than 40,000 queries. This means people are running more than 3.5 billion searches a day. For your website to rank high on relevant Google searches, you need to optimize for all kinds of ranking factors—with organic traffic being a major one.

The more traffic your website receives, the higher it will rank on Google’s algorithm. Here are a few tips to generate web traffic and improve your website’s performance using SEO.

Familiarize yourself with Google’s Search Engine Results Page

Google’s Search Engine Results Page is always changing; these days, it includes advertisements, videos, local businesses, etc. In addition to website links, they have added 16 more features in the last few years.

The list of the 16 main features on Google’s results page is as follows:

• Ads
• People who ask
• Carousel results
• Local pack
• Image pack
• Videos
• Shopping results
• Scholarly articles
• Tweets
• Knowledge panels
• Reviews
• Knowledge cards
• Top stories
• Site links
• Featured snippets
• Local teaser pack

It’s now more difficult than ever to get your website to rank higher on Google’s results page because more ads are being displayed there in disguised form. You can differentiate between organic and Pay-Per-Click ads with the small Ad label on the left corner. A maximum of four ads can be displayed on the top of the results page before organic websites are listed.

Furthermore, more knowledge panels and image and video packs are now being featured on Google’s results page, making it difficult for websites to get organic traffic on their pages.

The importance of organic traffic

Organic traffic cannot be bought; it’s generated when the Google algorithm ranks your website among the top ones for specific keywords.

When a person searches for something on Google, the algorithm uses several techniques, including scouring the content of countless websites and indexing them to see which ones match the query best.

You need to aim for the maximum amount of organic traffic because target users will come to your website with a specific purpose in mind. If your website can provide them with a relevant solution, they’re more likely to hire your services or buy whatever product you are offering.

Know your target audience

This brings us to our first tip: to know your audience and carefully understand their needs and expectations.

If you’re launching a startup business, you need to sit down and think about which section of the market you want to target. It’s crucial to building a niche in the industry, and you can do this by understanding who your target audience is and how they think.

One way to research your audience is to use social media and note down users’ interests and what appeals to them. Conducting surveys is another helpful way to find out more information about your audience.

Use the knowledge you gather to advertise popular keywords on your website, which will bring more organic traffic to your page and highlight your product/service to the right audience—those who are more likely to buy it.

Make original and high-quality content

You can bring a potential customer to your website using link building services and hiring SEO experts to ensure your site ranks among the top searches.

But the only way to make customers stay and buy a product or a service is to invest in high-quality, original content. Meaningful and useful content will keep your consumer’s attention and maintain their focus on your brand. It will also increase each customer’s dwell time—how much time they spend browsing your website.

If you create quality content, users will bookmark it in their internet browser, and this will also increase your website’s ranking. 72% of marketing experts suggest that good content is the key to increasing your website’s SEO ranking.

Google changes its search algorithm more than a thousand times every year. There is no possible way to keep track of all of these changes and updates, so the most effective way to improve your website’s SEO performance is to produce original content.

If you’re not using value-additive content unique to your brand, your organic ranking could fall drastically. Also, users build trust and devotion in a brand that stays true to itself and its messaging from the beginning.

Capture your viewer’s attention

A picture is worth a thousand words. Use images that match your content and provide the reader with visual appeal. High-quality images are bound to capture your audience’s attention, and they are more likely to read the content if they like the pictures.

You also need to check each image’s size and format it correctly, so it enhances your organic performance. If images are too high resolution, they will take more time to load and decrease your search ranking, so optimize images by resizing or compressing them.

Another way to captivate the audience and make sure they dwell longer on your website is to display cohesive content that is well-connected and flows neatly. Using headers to separate the content into digestible sections increases its readability for the audience and ensures they will spend more time going through the write-up.

Keywords are the key

The key to having a higher search engine ranking is to use keywords and strategically place them throughout the content. You can list down popular keywords which are more searchable on Google’s search engine and incorporate them into your content to increase traffic and boost your organic performance.