How to increase organic traffic: 9 steps we used on our own site
To increase organic traffic, fix what is already losing you visitors before you create anything new: recover old URLs that now return errors, give every page a title in the words people search, make thin pages worth reading, make the site fast on a phone, and then earn links from people who already know your work. We ran these nine steps on charusolutions.com in October 2026, in this order. This is what each one involved.
Organic traffic is the visitors who reach your site from unpaid search results: Google, Bing and, more and more, AI answers such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews. It does not include visitors from ads, social media or email. You do not pay per click for it, which is why it is worth the effort, and why it takes longer to build.
The nine steps at a glance
Recover the traffic you already lost
Fix the technical basics
Write titles in the words people search
Give each search one page
Make thin pages worth reading
Answer the questions buyers ask, with numbers
Make the site fast on a phone
Earn links from people who know your work
Measure monthly, and expect a lag
1. Recover the traffic you already lost
Most guides skip this step. On our own site it mattered more than all the others put together.
When we rebuilt charusolutions.com, the old blog and service pages moved to new addresses. Google Search Console then showed 10,500 impressions over three months, and about 9,600 of them, 91%, were for URLs that no longer existed. One old post, about driving traffic with organic website growth techniques, carried 8,295 impressions on its own: 79% of everything the domain earned in search. Since the rebuild it had been returning a "page not found" error.
The fix is a 301 redirect from every old URL to the page that replaced it. A 404 error tells Google to drop the URL and the history attached to it; a 301 passes that history to the new page. Send each old URL to the closest page by topic, not to your home page. Google treats a redirect to an unrelated page as a "soft 404", which is no better than the error.
How to check your own site:
In Search Console, open Pages and look at Not found (404). Any URL there that once had impressions needs a redirect.
If you changed platform or URL structure in the last year, list the old site's URLs (from an old sitemap, or from the Performance report in Search Console) and test each one.
If you followed an old link to our post on organic website growth, you have landed on its replacement: that URL now redirects here.
2. Fix the technical basics
An SEO audit tool crawls your site the way a search engine does and lists what is broken. Ours, in Ubersuggest, scored the site 72 out of 100 with 129 issues when we started. The biggest group was duplicate titles and descriptions: every filtered view of our project list and blog (/projects?industry=retail and so on) counted as a separate page with the same title. Pointing each filtered page's canonical tag at the unfiltered page fixed most of them in one change.
The checks that matter most are the same on almost every site: a unique title and meta description on each page, one H1 per page, a working XML sitemap, no broken internal links, HTTPS everywhere, and pages that load without errors. We cover the seven we check first in Why your website is not ranking, and our free Wix SEO checker tests any page for the most common problems.
Two days of fixes later, the same audit scored 100 with no issues. A perfect audit does not bring traffic by itself, but it removes the reasons a page cannot rank.
3. Write titles in the words people search
The title tag is the blue link in Google's results, and it is the strongest on-page signal you control. Most business sites title their pages in their own vocabulary instead of their buyers'.
Our Wix Studio service page was a good example. Wix Studio is the platform we build on; it is not what people type when they want a website made. Keyword research showed buyers search "wix website design services" (720 searches a month) and "wix website design agency", so the page is now titled Wix Website Design & Development Agency, and Wix Studio stays in the body text.
For each important page, find the phrase a buyer would type (Ubersuggest, Google's autocomplete and the Queries report in Search Console all work), put it at the start of the title, and keep the whole title under about 60 characters so Google shows it in full.
4. Give each search one page
When two of your pages target the same search, Google has to choose between them, and it often picks the weaker one. This is called keyword cannibalisation.
We found three booking pages on our site that had come with the Wix Bookings template and were never ours. One of them, /book/web-development, described a web development course covering HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which we do not run, and it was competing with our Web Applications service page for our most important keyword. We took all three off the site.
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com followed by your main keyword. If more than one of your pages comes back for the same phrase, decide which page should own it, then merge, redirect or re-angle the others.
5. Make thin pages worth reading
A page with a hundred words gives a search engine little to rank and a visitor little to trust. Audit tools flag these as "low word count".
Fifteen of our portfolio case studies were thin: a client name, a screenshot and a sentence. We rewrote each one from the client's live site, covering who the client is, what their customers needed, what we built and what the site does now, and linked every one to the running site. Our booking pages now say who each session is for, what to bring and what you leave with, and our locations and international pages answer the questions buyers ask before they get in touch.
Do not pad pages to reach a word count. Add what a buyer needs to decide: who it is for, what it costs, how it works, what happens next, and proof.
6. Answer the questions buyers ask, with numbers
Look at the questions your buyers type into Google and ChatGPT. For an agency like ours they are almost all about cost: what a website costs in India, what custom software costs, what automation costs for a business of a given size.
AI answers and Google's featured snippets quote pages that give a straight answer with a number in it. Our guide to what a website costs in India gives price bands instead of "it depends", and we published the same kind of page for Wix Headless pricing.
A pattern that works for each article: answer the question in the first two sentences, explain what changes the answer, give a real example, then add a short FAQ. Google and AI tools can lift the answer directly, and readers who want depth keep reading.
7. Make the site fast on a phone
Google ranks the mobile version of your site, and Core Web Vitals are part of how it judges page experience. The one to watch first is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long the main content takes to appear.
Our biggest win was removing something nobody used. A Google Tag Manager container with no tags in it was loading on every page. Taking it out, while keeping Google Analytics, cut unused JavaScript from 265 KB to 72 KB.
What did not work is just as useful. We tested putting all the CSS inside the page and, separately, loading Analytics only after the page finished. Neither improved mobile LCP, and the CSS change made it worse, so we reverted both. Our pages were limited by how long the server took to build them, not by the CSS. Measure every speed change before and after with PageSpeed Insights, and keep only what moves the number.
8. Earn links from people who know your work
Links from other websites are still a main way Google judges whether a site can be trusted. The easiest links to earn come from people who already know you: clients, suppliers, partners and associations.
We build websites, so the obvious source was our clients' sites. Only 3 of the 47 live sites in our portfolio credited us. With each client's permission, a short "Website by Charu Solutions" link went into the footer, and within a day 14 of those sites linked back. Every link uses our name as the link text, never a phrase like "best web development company", which Google treats as manipulative.
Next come profiles on the directories your buyers and AI tools actually read. In the AI answers we track for our topics, Clutch was the most cited source, at 27% of citations, so a Clutch profile with real client reviews is both a link and a route into AI answers. A Google Business Profile, a LinkedIn company page and the directories in your own industry follow.
What not to do: buy link packages. About forty of the links pointing at our site come from auto-generated "link directory" pages. They count in the tools' backlink totals, but Google gives links like these little or no weight.
9. Measure monthly, and expect a lag
Organic traffic moves slowly and the tools report it late. Ubersuggest updates its keyword data once a month. Search Console shows real impressions and clicks, but a new link can take two to six weeks to be discovered at all.
Our own numbers so far, from Ubersuggest's September data: the number of keywords we rank for went from 7 to 8, and estimated monthly visits from 18 to 35. Those are small numbers, and they were measured before most of the work in this article.
Track three things each month: impressions and clicks in Search Console, how many keywords you rank for in the top 10 and top 50, and how many websites link to you. Compare each month with the one before, not with your competitors.
What we would not spend time on
Publishing filler posts every day. Ten thin articles on one topic compete with each other (step 4).
Repeating keywords. Using the words buyers use, once, in the right places, works better than repeating them.
Buying backlinks. "500 links" packages are the links Google ignores or penalises.
Chasing a perfect speed score. Fix what slows real visitors down; the score is a guide, not the goal.
Frequently asked questions
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is the visitors who reach your website from unpaid search results, such as Google, Bing and AI search answers, rather than from paid ads, social media, email or typing your address directly. In Google Analytics it appears as the Organic Search channel.
How long does it take to increase organic traffic?
Technical fixes and redirects can show in Search Console within a few weeks, as Google recrawls the pages. New content and new links usually take three to six months to move rankings on a young domain. Recovering old URLs is often the fastest win, because the search history already exists.
Can you increase organic traffic without backlinks?
Yes, up to a point. Recovering lost URLs, rewriting titles, filling thin pages and answering specific questions can all grow traffic without new links. For competitive searches, links from trusted sites are usually what separates page two from page one.
Does social media increase organic traffic?
Not directly. Visits from social media count as social traffic, not organic search. Social posts help indirectly when they lead people to search for your brand, or when someone who sees your work links to it from their own site.
Why did my organic traffic drop after a website redesign?
The most common reason is that page addresses changed and the old ones were not redirected, so Google dropped them along with their history. That is what happened to our own site. Check the Not found report in Search Console and add a 301 redirect from each old URL to its replacement.
Want this done on your site?
We run these steps for clients as part of our SEO and digital marketing service, with the same team that builds the site, so fixes ship instead of sitting in a report. Try our free AI and SEO tools on any page, or book a free discovery call to go through your site with an engineer.