Welcome to How to Make Money as a Content Creator, the course that covers everything you need to start earning money online doing what you love. I’m James Caran, content creator at WayAway and Travelpayouts. In today’s lesson about getting visitors to your content, we’ll talk all about Organic traffic.
We’ll uncover: what it is, how to get visitors to your page this way, why you need to create content that’ll beat the content of your competitors and different ways to optimize your content in order to make it easily accessible to your target audience when they’re searching!
There are millions of people on the internet these days. And, lucky for all of us, you can search for just about anything online! When looking for answers to life’s big questions, where do we turn? Oftentimes we look to a search engine like Google, Yandex, or Bing!
These search engines take a specific request and filter through tons of online content to find the best answers to show us, which means, in order for your content to get onto the screens of your target audience, you need to be very specific with your content. Search engines need to know that your content is exactly what people are looking for and that it will provide searchers with the best answers to their questions.
You can make this clear to search engines by “optimizing” your content for search. This is called: Search Engine Optimization, you’ll notice it referred to as SEO. Optimizing your content and website for organic search involves many activities, from creating top-quality content and using relevant keywords, to improving the technical aspects of your website. To help you get started with SEO, we’ll share a few simple tips you can use to help search engines understand that your content is exactly what users are searching for. Let’s dive in.
First, to get a spot at the top of organic search results, you need to create top-quality content that beats what your competitors are creating. For this, find and analyze their content, see what’s missing and what gaps there are to fill in and create content that will significantly improve on it. This means that your content needs to be of better quality, provide more value, and give better solutions to users’ problems.
Next, understand what terms people use when searching for answers to their questions. These terms (or keywords) can be one word, a phrase, or even a question, which are known as “long-tail keywords.” There are online tools like MOZ, SEMrush, and AnswerThePublic, which you can use to find keywords related to your topic and niche. We’ve included links to these tools in our resources section! There, you can also find useful links on how to do keyword research. Check them out.
Also, watch module 2 lesson 1 about getting ideas for your content – we discuss some additional key elements to help you get started with keyword research!
Once you’ve understood what keywords people are searching for, use these keywords in your content. It’s incredibly important since it allows search engines to quickly scan your content and know whether it meets your users’ query or search needs. You can use keywords in the body of text, page titles, URLs, meta descriptions, file names that describe your visuals, and so on. To learn more about the ways you can integrate keywords into your content, check out the resources section.
A quick note here before we move on. Don’t stuff your content with keywords, no matter how tempting it may be — this won’t help your rankings but can create an awful experience for users. Instead, always put your readers first, use keywords sparingly and make sure they fit naturally within your content.
The next tip is: break your text up with headings. It’s important because they help users understand your content and serve as signposts that guide them through your page. This makes your content more user-friendly and people are likely to spend more time reading it which will help your SEO. You can use H1 through H5, but you can often get away with using H1 – H3. It’s also a good idea to include keywords in H1, H2, and H3. However, make sure to use keywords that are relevant to your content and don’t overdo it.
Also, whenever it makes sense, use lists, graphs, and tables to structure and visualize your data. This will help search engines understand that there are different types of content on your page. What’s more, such elements break up your page and make your content more scannable, which creates a better user experience and is great for SEO.
Following these tips will help you get more visibility in search and will better your chances of ranking on page one in Google. Not to mention, it helps your readers digest the information with a clear structure!
Another great way to improve your organic traffic numbers is to get backlinks. Backlinks are links that direct a user to your page from another website or resource. Backlinks signal to search engines that another website or resource finds your content valuable, credible, and useful enough to link to, which is great for SEO! However, backlinks can be difficult to control when just starting out, so we’ll cover some ways to get them in Lesson 2 when we talk about Referral traffic!
Another type of link that is important for SEO is an “internal link”. These are links that send users from one page of content to another, all under the same domain! These are different from backlinks in the way that 1. They’re in your control, and 2. Users remain in your territory. When users flow between different pages of your website, moving from one article or video to another, this sends a very clear signal to the search engines – one that says “this creator’s content is engaging and people spend a lot of time here!” So encourage your viewers to stay on your pages by using internal links to group your content on relevant topics together, or by creating content that expands on certain topics.
For example, let’s say you create a listicle about the Best 10 Destinations in Japan for Couples. Remember in Module 2 when we spoke about the Travel Customer Journey? This article supports your customers in the dreaming stage, they know they want to go to Japan, but maybe they’re not sure where, or what to do. You can be the “go-to” source of information for all things Japan, starting with this article! List the different cities, and within each destination – send users to other content you’ve created that dives more into the specifics of each place! You can send users to your handy guide toward selecting the best hotels in Kyoto, activities to plan and tours to book in Tokyo. This helps you create a great user journey with internal links, and solve some customer questions!
Our final tip for getting organic traffic is by encouraging audience reaction and engagement! Search engines look at different ways users interact with content, as it shows people appreciate your content enough to stick around and seek more!
Some ways to boost engagement with your content could be to:
Whatever the case, whenever users take time to signal that they enjoyed your content, and it was helpful to them, it will increase your chances of gaining organic traffic! So take your time to encourage these communication opportunities!
Let’s take a look at what we’ve learned in this lesson
There you have it! Our tips for increasing traffic naturally to your content through organic traffic! Up next, we’ll dive into the ins and outs of our next traffic source: Referral Traffic. You can start optimizing your content to increase your organic traffic with the tips we shared today!
