5 Ways to Double Your Blog Organic Search Traffic in The Next 90 Days

Michael B. Akinlabi

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

9 min readSep 4, 2017

To become a successful blogger, quit your boring day job and be financially independent, you need traffic.

To increase sales for your e-commerce store or startup, you need traffic.

To build a personal brand that gives you reliable income on a consistent basis, you need traffic.

The importance of website traffic can’t be exaggerated.

Web traffic is the number of people who visited your blog and read its pages.

Real web traffic doesn’t just visit your website. They read your web pages. They engage with your content. They share your blog posts on social media.

It’s impossible to make sales without traffic.

Imagine you own a retail store at a location people rarely visit. Your chances of success would be very low.

Now, imagine your retail store is located at a place a lot of people see every day. There’s a high chance that a few people would stop to buy your merchandise.

Many people use search engines every day. The two biggest search engines are Google and Bing. I love Google.

As at the time of writing this article, I’ve used Google more than 20 times today, and it’s only about midday.

See search engines as a busy place people visit.

Google, alone receives over 3.5 billion searches per day.

Internet Live Stats reports that over 3 billion searches have been made today, and it’s only 8:32 AM EDT.

By showing up for lots of Google searches, you’ll drive higher traffic to your website.

Of course, creating more high-quality content on a regular basis will help you show up for lots of keywords on search engines.

But there are smarter and penalty-proof ways to double your organic search traffic within 90 days.

1. Suggest link replacements

Backlinks are the most powerful search engine ranking factor.

When a link from a page on a particular website is passed to another page on another website, search engines see it as a vote.

It’s an endorsement that tells search engines that the site receiving the link can be trusted and deserves to rank better. (I assume that the site sending the link is also trusted and ranks well on search engines).

There are over 150 million blogs on the web. Bloggers link to other blogs and websites a lot. It’s part of their DNA.

You won’t get many of these bloggers to link to you. But you can convince a few of them to link to your website.

How do you do that?

Because bloggers link out a lot, you can suggest they replace some links to other websites with yours.

This strategy may look simple and challenging, but I’ve used it to acquire hundreds of high-quality backlinks in the past few months. They boosted the organic search traffic to my niche sites.

All you need to do is follow active bloggers who publish content on a regular basis and link out a lot. A blogger should be in an industry or niche related to yours.

When a blogger publishes a post that links to an average article, reach out and tell them about a better resource they should link to instead of that.

If you’ve created an epic piece of content that you think deserves a place in their article, you can ask them to replace the link with yours. It’s simple, effective and requires hard work and organization.

You need a Google Spreadsheet to record the bloggers you follow. You also need to follow them on Twitter, Facebook (or wherever they are active) and be a regular commenter on their blogs.

For example, Happy Body Formula (HBF) is a blog about healthy living.

HBF recently published an article titled “10 Sheet Pan Egg Dishes That Will Change Your Mornings.”

Inside this article, they linked to various recipes from different blogs.

Assuming you’ve written a high-quality recipe that is related to one of the resources they linked to, you can contact them, asking for the link to be replaced or supplemented with a link to your page.

This type of backlink is powerful because it’s natural and penalty-proof.

You can use it to generate links to any kind of business. Whether you’re running a luxury yacht charter company or a local restaurant and creates content on a regular basis, tap into the power of link replacement and your rankings will improve in search engines.

2. Elevate pages that are close to ranking number one

If you have a decent number of content pages on your website, some posts are probably receiving more traffic from search engines than others.

For most bloggers, 5–20% of their blog posts are generating 80% of their traffic from search engines.

When you pay closer attention, you’ll see that your high-performing articles rank closer to the first pages or number one positions on Google for their respective keywords.

I use Search Analytics inside the Google Search Console and Ahrefs’ Organic Keywords to know which pages are ranking closer to the first positions on Google search results pages.

If a page is ranking closer to the number one position for a keyword, improving the page could raise its ranking position and increase the traffic it brings from search engines.

They are many ways to improve a high-performing web page to generate more traffic from search engines.

My favorite method is updating the content on the page to improve its quality. Replace outdated information on the website with new and fresh information.

Add more interesting content to the page. Improve the page’s design.

Tweak its title tag to make it appealing.

The meta description is another important element you should tweak.

Tweaking the title tag and meta description of a page won’t have a direct impact on its ranking position in search engines, but it will receive more clicks from search users.

A higher click-through rate could increase the page’s position in search engines.

Improving pages that are already performing on search engines will give you better returns than concentrating on low performing pages.

If a page is ranking in position number 4 for its keyword on Google, you should improve the page to increase its ranking to position number 3, or even 2. Doing that will increase your organic search traffic too.

3. Focus on low competition keywords

Most blogs and websites aren’t overly authoritative, yet they find their way to get their share of traffic from search engines.

Your blog doesn’t need to have a domain authority (DA) of 50 to get a huge amount of traffic from search engines.

It’s easier to rank for low competition keywords than competitive keywords. All you have to do is write high-quality content, and maybe, get a few backlinks.

If your site has gained some authority, you can easily beat the competition for these keywords.

Tools like Moz’s Keyword Difficulty and Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer will help you gauge the competitiveness of a keyword before targeting it.

For example, the keyword “SEO Consultant” looks competitive for my digital marketing agency website.

Instead of targeting this keyword, I may want to focus on low competition keywords.

By writing high-quality content that targets lots of low competition keywords, you can increase your site’s organic search traffic.

For example, the insurance industry is extremely competitive and advertising is expensive. Instead of targeting high competition keywords that contain 2 to 3 words, an insurance agent or broker could target low competition keywords that answer questions like “why use an insurance broker,” and “how to find an independent insurance agent.”

4. Enhance your website by offering a free tool

The most effective and fastest way to gain thousands of backlinks within a very short time is to develop a tool and let visitors use it for free.

Neil Patel uses this approach to drive hundreds of thousands of backlinks to QuickSprout.

Here was how the Quick Sprout home page looks like a few years ago:

Today, Neil still uses the strategy to build backlinks to his website.

Think of a tool your visitors will find useful. Create it and let them use it for free.

Prospects will talk about your tool on social media. Bloggers will link to your website without you asking them to do that.

Moz releases some of their tools for free.

For example, they let you make unlimited use of Open Site Explorer as long as you’re a Moz member, which is free to join.

They also let you use Mozbar, their Chrome extension for free.

No doubt, these tools are generating lots of social shares and links for Moz. And more social shares and backlinks will only lead to higher visibility on search engines.

Don’t forget that even Moz started as a blog. So, because you’re a blogger doesn’t mean you can’t leverage this powerful tactic to increase your organic search traffic.

Or, maybe you’re an e-commerce business owner. You can do it too.

And even Shopify releases free tools.

You can also release a free tool that enhances your business and help prospects convert into customers.

Go Smart Solar is a solar energy company that offers both residential and commercial solar services. Go Smart Solar created a free tool that helps potential clients calculate the cost of solar panel installation and maintenance based on their needs.

Free tools like these not only help convert visitors into customers. They’ll also help spread the word about your blog, product, service or brand, which would boost your site’s authority in search engines.

5. Boost your profile on social media

Social media may not have a direct impact on your site’s search engine visibility.

But it could get people to start searching for your brand or blog name and also get the whole world talking about you. That could indirectly increase your search engine rankings.

For example, if you can increase your LinkedIn followers from 1,000–5,000 within a few months, you can expect the number of monthly searches for your name and business to rise in Google.

The more people discover you on other platforms, the more they’ll search for you in search engines.

And also, when web users are finding your personal brand on social media, they start visiting your site as direct visitors instead of going through search engines.

Search engines will notice that.

If the number of your direct visitors is rising, it tells search engines that interest in your brand and blog is improving too. That is a good signal to send to search engines.

For example, Circle Surrogacy, a surrogacy and egg donation agency with headquarters in Boston is active on most social platforms. They currently have about 2,000 followers on Twitter. By increasing the number of followers on the platform to 10,000 and getting more active, the agency could increase its branded organic searches.

Increased activities on social media can also raise the average number of backlinks you gain per month.