It’s easy to get caught up in SEO tactics while forgetting that anything we do – technical SEO, link building, content marketing – has an impact in Three ways.

If it drives organic traffic, it follows one of these mechanisms.

When we start with impact in mind, it’s easier to prioritize objectives and tactics.

Everything falls into place.

The goal of understanding these five ways we can drive organic traffic is to flip our thinking from, “What SEO tactics should I apply?” to, “How can I increase traffic through one of these 4 ways?”

1. Rank Higher for Already-Ranking Keywords

One of the easiest and most common ways to drive more SEO traffic is simple: rank better for the keywords upon which you already rank.

We commonly focus on low-hanging fruit and keywords that rank on page two, but all too often forget about pushing keywords from position #4-10 into the top 3.

SERPs follow a power law, meaning the top position is exponentially more valuable than the second one.

The returns from moving a keyword from #2 to #1 are higher than moving it from #3 to #2, which is higher than moving a keyword from #4 to #3.

The higher you rank, the more traffic you get.

This is no news but is often forgotten when it comes to investing resources in SEO.

More traffic comes with larger expectations.

The higher you want to rank, the more checkmarks you need to tick, your content must be of higher value to users, your brand must be more authoritative, and your experience better.

Requirements vary by query.

To understand how to rank higher for a keyword or a set, we need to compare our content and domain on multiple dimensions against the top-ranking result(s).

Sites that scale with inventory, such as social networks or ecommerce sites, should look at patterns of queries that rank on positions #4-10 (or #11-20) and see if they have a common disadvantage against the top results.

2. Rank for More Long-Tail Keywords

Content that already ranks well for its primary keyword can also rank for more and longer-tail keywords to drive more traffic.

Additional keywords content ranks for can be related to the main query, variations, or simply longer and more specific.

Commonly, an increase in ranking keywords can have various reasons:

1. The content got more backlinks.
2. The content was expanded.
3. The content was updated/refreshed.

In each of the three cases, the change indicates to Google that the content is relevant or authoritative for more queries.

3. Rank for Net-New Keywords

Most of the time, we focus on driving organic traffic while forgetting the other four.

While ranking for net-new keywords is arguably the most effective driver of organic traffic, it also takes the most effort.

You can find net-new keywords in several ways:

• Identify keyword gaps with competitors.
• Look for keywords related to the ones you already rank for.
• Think of topics/keywords you don’t cover yet.
• Get suggestions from tools.

Note that it typically takes Google a bit of time to really understand it when launching net-new content.

New content has a “ramp-up time” for unfolding its full potential, during which Google assesses and ranks it higher or for more keywords.

That ramp-up time depends on several factors like the link profile or content quality.