How to Increase Organic Traffic: Identify Your Sources, Then Improve Your Content and Technical SEO

To increase organic traffic, start by identifying your search traffic sources, choosing topics that meet users’ needs, updating existing content, and fixing technical issues on your website. This article focuses on clicks to a website from unpaid results on search engines such as Google and Bing, not organic reach on social media. These approaches offer ways to improve, but they do not guarantee higher rankings or more traffic.

Distinguish Traffic Sources Before Deciding What to Improve

Search, social media, and advertising can all bring visitors, but their results should not be lumped together. According to the categories in the supplied material:

• When users search for a question and click an unpaid result, that counts as organic search traffic.
• Visits through links in posts on Facebook, Instagram, and similar platforms count as social traffic.
• Visits through paid search ads do not count as organic search growth.

The first step, then, is to use analytics tools to check how many visitors come from organic search and which search sources they come from, rather than looking only at total website traffic. Sharing articles can diversify traffic sources, but more visitors from social media do not mean SEO has improved.

Choose Topics Based on User Needs, Not Just Popular Keywords

To attract search visitors, content must answer the questions they are looking to resolve. Ahrefs’ collection of case studies notes that glossaries, FAQs, and basic definitions can serve informational search needs; for some of these keywords, pages that only describe products may struggle to rank.

For example, a cybersecurity website could explain basic terminology and address common questions rather than only introducing product features. This is a choice of content format, not a promise that every website can replicate the case studies’ results. When selecting keywords, also check whether there is search demand and whether the level of competition is realistic for your website’s current position. Do not invest in a topic simply because it is popular.

Improve Existing Pages Rather Than Simply Publishing More

A 2026 Ahrefs article suggests that when content becomes outdated or search results change, updating and consolidating pages with declining traffic can sometimes restore traffic faster than writing new articles. For long informational articles, it may also be worth considering a table of contents or a summary of key points.

ElizabethRule on Local Search Forum shared that traffic to a client’s article increased almost immediately after a summary was added. However, this is an observation from a single case: it does not prove that the summary itself caused the growth, nor is it an official Google rule.

Improving content does not necessarily mean adding words.In a 2024 SearchPilot test on e-commerce category pages, removing SEO content from the footer led to a significant increase in mobile organic traffic, while the impact on desktop traffic was negligible. This does not support removing content across the board. Instead, it is a reminder that articles and product category pages should not be treated with the same content approach.

Remove Technical Barriers So Content Is Easy to Find and Read

Beyond content, check for broken links, loading speed, mobile usability, and website navigation. The technical SEO guide in the supplied material argues that fixing these issues helps search engines discover pages and improves the user experience.

If your website already has articles but loads slowly or has broken links, add these issues to your improvement list rather than simply publishing more. Technical improvements help make content discoverable and easy to read; they do not guarantee traffic growth.