15 Fast & Proven Ways to Increase Organic Traffic

The only problem is this requires time.

However, you don’t necessarily need to reinvent your content strategy or wait six months to see results. Chances are, your site already has untapped potential. With the right SEO tweaks and a little strategic effort, you can turn that potential into real organic traffic, starting today.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through fifteen proven techniques we’ve used ourselves at Ahrefs to squeeze more traffic out of existing content. No fluff, just practical tactics that work. 

If people searching for your topic want fresh information, you'll lose traffic and rankings if you don't update your page. Google will simply rank pages with fresher content above you.

On the bright side, this traffic is usually easy to reclaim. All you need to do is replace the old with the new and remove any stuff that is no longer relevant.

For example, people searching for industry statistics don't want facts from years ago. That's why our curated lists of industry statistics usually get a boost in traffic when we update them. And it’s less than a day’s work to revisit the stats and replace them if needed.

Here's how to find pages with the biggest traffic drops over the last six months in Ahrefs:

From here, you can eyeball the list of topics where searchers expect fresh information and update them. Our page on "top Google searches" is a good example because searchers don't care what people searched for in 2021. They want to know what's popular today.

This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to increase SEO traffic on an existing website.

Search engines increasingly evaluate how comprehensively a piece of content addresses a topic. That’s where topical relevance optimization can create fast wins. In a nutshell, topical relevance means covering all the critical subtopics, entities, and angles that users expect to see when they search for something.

My colleague Louise Linehan put this strategy into practice using Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper, and the results speak for themselves. By targeting underperforming articles and enriching them with missing subtopics, she boosted traffic by an average of 72% across updated pages. 

Here’s how she did it:

Check out the video below and the case study to see how you can do the same:

Dead pages are pages that no longer exist on your site. If they have backlinks, this is a huge waste of link equity.

Usually, backlinks are slow and hard to get. After all, they’re one of the strongest ranking factors. But with this technique, you’re in control of the backlinks—so you can give your SEO a boost fast.

Next, redirect these broken pages to relevant live pages on your site. If a page has been removed by accident, consider reinstating it. The whole process goes like this:

Not sure how to do a redirect? Read our guide to redirects for SEO.

Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another.

One of their main roles in SEO is that they aid the flow of PageRank (aka “link equity”). This means that you can use internal links to give pages on your site an SEO boost.

For example, we’ve linked from our free backlink checker tool to some of our articles on link building with the aim of boosting their rankings.

The key to improving organic traffic with this technique is to link between relevant pages. Ahrefs' Site Audit identifies these automatically:

Pay particular attention to the source page, keyword context, and target page columns. These tell you which page to link from, link to, and where on the page to add the link.

For example, there are a few relevant internal links we can add to our list of SEO statistics:

Search volume tells you what people searched for over the past year, but it says nothing about direction. A keyword at 500 searches a month climbing 200% year over year is worth more to you than a flat keyword at 2,000, because you can rank for it before the SERP fills up with pages from sites bigger than yours.

Keyword difficulty and growth rate are the two columns that matter here, and hardly anyone sorts by the second one.

Here's a live example. In Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer I took "ai agent" as a seed, pulled matching terms in the US, filtered to a maximum Keyword Difficulty of 20, and sorted by 12-month growth:

"How to build an ai agent" is the standout: 4,200 searches a month, difficulty 12, still growing 84% a year, and 4,900 in traffic potential because it pulls in the cluster around it. A year from now, that keyword will not have a difficulty of 12.

Here's how to find low difficulty keywords with growing search volume:

Three checks separate a durable trend from a spike:

People want content in their native language when they search Google—even if their search is in English. Google knows this, and uses the searcher’s location and language preference to personalize results.

For example, when I search for "link building," I get Polish results. This is because Google knows I'm in Poland.

Despite us having a guide to link building, Google doesn't rank it for me because it's in English. By translating it into other languages, we could improve its reach and earn more organic traffic.

This is what we did for many of the posts on our English blog.

For example, the Spanish translation of our post about affiliate marketing brings in an estimated 8K organic visits each month.

If you want to follow in our footsteps and increase SEO traffic by tapping into other markets, the best way to get started is to translate your top-performing content. The idea here is that if people are searching for a topic in one language, there are probably people searching for it in other languages.

Here's how to find your top-performing pages in organic search:

You can then ask ChatGPT how someone who speaks another language might search for the topic:

From there, you can simulate a local search for the topic in Google with Ahrefs SEO Toolbar and look at the estimated traffic to the top-ranking pages. This will help you to understand roughly how much traffic potential the topic has in that language and locale.

For example, the top-ranking post about free keyword research tools in French gets an estimated 714 organic monthly visits from France—so it might be worth translating:

Sometimes the best-performing content for a keyword isn't a blog post. If you write an article for a query where searchers want to do the thing rather than read about it, you can be the most thorough page on the internet and still stall at position 8.

This is the single most expensive mistake in the tactic list, because the fix is usually a page you already own rather than new content. We got 516% more traffic to one landing page in under six months by correcting it, which I'll come back to below. More on the underlying principle in our guide to search intent.

Take "text to speech". 341,000 searches a month in the US, difficulty 89, and 328,000 in traffic potential. It's a huge, obviously commercial topic, and there's an enormous amount you could write about it: how the technology works, which voices sound best, accessibility use cases, API pricing comparisons.

Google doesn't rank any of that. Here's the actual top 10:

Traffic figures are each page's total estimated organic traffic across all its keywords, not traffic from this one query.

There is no blog post in the top 10. There is no blog post in the top 30 either, with one exception at position 18 (IBM's explainer), and it pulls an estimated 2,000 visits against ElevenLabs' 44,000. Every other slot is a page where you paste text and hear audio.

ElevenLabs' entry is the one to study. elevenlabs.io/text-to-speech is a product landing page with the tool embedded directly in it, and it pulls an estimated 44,300 monthly visits from the US while ranking for 779 keywords, 318 of them in the top 3. That single URL is a top-3 result for hundreds of variations of "convert text to audio" because it does the thing the searcher came to do.

One more reason this format is getting more valuable: 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational-intent keywords, and the Shopping category has the lowest AI Overview rate of any industry at 3.2%, according to our study of AI Overview triggers. The queries where a product page wins are largely the queries Google isn't already answering for you.

Start in Keywords Explorer with a seed term from your niche, then use the intent filters in the top bar to exclude informational intent. That strips out most of the "what is" and "how does X work" queries and leaves the commercial and transactional side of your topic, which is where tool-shaped and product-shaped demand lives.

That said, plenty of keywords carry several intent flags at once. "Text to speech" itself is tagged both informational and commercial in our data, and "best air fryer" is informational, commercial, and transactional simultaneously. So the filter narrows your list. It doesn't classify it for you, and a keyword worth 328,000 in traffic potential can sit on the wrong side of a strict filter.

That's why the next step matters. For each remaining keyword, confirm what the SERP actually wants, in one of two ways.

Read the SERP manually. Open the SERP overview and count page types in the top 10. If five or more results are tools, product pages, or category pages, that keyword doesn't belong to an article.

Or use the AI identify intents feature, which reads the SERP for you and names the distinct intents behind a keyword, along with which positions serve each one.

Product pages are harder to earn links to than a good article, so expect the ranking climb to be slower. And if you have no product that genuinely answers the query, don't build a thin fake one to chase the SERP. You'll get outranked by the tools that actually work.

If you’ve already made videos that got good engagement — views, likes, comments — chances are, they will do well in search. 

Repurposing your best-performing videos into blog posts helps you tap into search traffic that would’ve otherwise missed you entirely. 

For instance, one of our best-performing blog posts started as a YouTube video and was then repurposed as a blog post. By repurposing it, we built over 5.3k organic visits each month and 2.3k backlinks on top of 313k views on YouTube.

If you can make your titles more compelling to the searchers, you can get more clicks even if your rank stays the same. This technique is about improving organic traffic by focusing on conversion optimization rather than ranking improvements.

With this technique, you’re going to see the biggest lift in content that already brings you traffic. You can find these pages in the Top Pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer or Google Search Console click data.

For us, our list of free keyword research tools gets the most traffic:

Here's our current title for that post:

Let's see if ChatGPT can come up with something more interesting and enticing. Here's the prompt I'll use:

I don't love all of these, but "Boost SEO for Free: 9 Essential Free Keyword Research Tools" sounds like a slight improvement on our current title. It might be worth us switching it out and monitoring if there's any increase in clicks.

Schema markup is code that helps Google understand the information on a page, which can be used to show rich results (also known as rich snippets).

As you can see above, results with schema are more visually compelling, and because of that, they can often earn more clicks.

There are basically two ways of adding schema to your pages:

Either way, it's always best practice to validate your code. Again, two options here:

If two or more pages target the same keyword and the same search intent, they may hurt each other’s organic performance.  

This scenario is called cannibalization; a bad case of multiple rankings. Technically, it’s when a search engine constantly exchanges ranking between multiple pages or when multiple pages rank simultaneously for the same keyword but are similar enough to be consolidated.

If you solve any possible cannibalization issues, your content may rank higher and, as a result, you get more organic traffic. 

The fastest way to uncover potential cannibalization issues is to perform a sitewide check with Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. 

Next, click on the ranking history button.

Next, click on the ranking history button. You can spot keyword cannibalization if your ranking history for a keyword resembles this pattern: 

For example, we noticed that swapping pattern for the keywords "seo case studies" and "seo case study". Despite each case study having a different URL, the repeated use of "case study" in their titles and URLs seemed to cause keyword cannibalization. 

This issue meant that whenever we published a new case study, the older one would drop from the SERPs and be replaced by the new one. To resolve this, we created a basic pillar page that included internal links to all our case studies. 

That pillar page quickly reached the top 10 and remained a stable top 3 ranking. Some of the case studies even ranked as site links.

If you’re a local business, the fastest way to get more clicks on your website, clicks on the directions to your place or clicks on your business phone number is to make your Google Business Profile shine. 

And if you already set up your business name, category, address and all of the basic information in your Google Business Profile, the next on the list of the most impactful local SEO ranking signals is your Google Rating which is based on your reviews (according to a recent study by Whitespark). 

Now, if you have happy customers, the hardest part is already done. Now, all you need to do is kindly remind them to leave a review. You can put up a sign, add it to the receipt, print a QR code on your packaging, or send them a special link via email or chat. 

To illustrate, here’s how one of my favorite restaurants asks for reviews: a simple hand-made sign in a place you can’t miss. 

Reviews are most powerful if they are received on a constant basis. So don’t make this a one-off review gathering campaign, encourage your customers at all times! 

This is probably one of the slowest strategies to carry out, but it could lead to the highest traffic gains.

One of the smartest ways to drive ongoing organic traffic is to transform parts of your product into free, SEO-optimized tools. This tactic is especially powerful for SaaS brands, but it’s also effective for service providers and e-commerce platforms. To create simple tools and put them online, you don't even need to know how to code these days — AI tools like Replit can do the heavy lifting for you. 

At Ahrefs, we've done that multiple times: Backlink Checker, Keyword Generator, and Keyword Difficulty Checker, Website Traffic Checker, the list goes on. Here are some of the results: 

Why does this work so well?

But before you start, make sure the tool you want to create has traffic potential. If you're using Ahrefs, here's what to do: 

Deleting pages to get more traffic sounds like a trick. It isn't, but it also isn't a general-purpose tactic. Pruning works on two kinds of site: very large ones, and ones carrying a lot of genuinely low-quality content. If you're neither, skip this and go refresh something instead.

When it does apply, the results are hard to ignore. SEO consultant Francesco Baldini audited a vehicle valuation platform where most of the crawl budget was being spent on programmatic pages generating no visits and no conversions. His team cut the site from 4,860,000 pages to 1,500. Organic visits rose 160% and conversions 105% within weeks.

At Belkins, SEO lead Eugene Zatiychuk removed 400 pages, close to two-thirds of the site, targeting duplicates, cheap and AI-generated writing, and content aimed at the wrong audience. Traffic climbed from about 3,000 organic visits a month to nearly 10,000.

Three mechanisms explain results like those:

Deletion is the last step, not the first. For each candidate, work through the options in this order:

That decision process is a content audit, and we cover it properly in our guide to content audits.

Avoid these 3 common content pruning mistakes: 

Deleting the links. A page with no traffic can still hold referring domains. Delete it without a redirect and that link equity evaporates. Check referring domains before every deletion.

Doing it all at once. Eugene at Belkins deleted one subfolder per week from January to March and watched the impact between batches. If traffic drops unexpectedly or key pages get orphaned, small batches make it easy to roll back. Big ones don't.

Skipping the stakeholders. On a large site, those pages belong to somebody: product, sales, a business unit. Bryan at IBM booked a week of meetings before touching anything, and went in aiming for 80% of what his team wanted, not 100%. As he put it: "If the room turns on you, game over."

Also worth knowing before you present this internally: attribution is hard. Pruning almost always happens alongside other SEO work, and nobody's going to pause content production for a quarter to isolate it. Measure before-and-after, then look for changes fast enough that other initiatives don't plausibly explain them. That's the realistic standard of proof here.

Technical SEO has a prioritization problem, not an information problem. Run any audit tool, and you'll get hundreds of flagged issues, and most of them don't matter. The common ones are common precisely because they're mostly harmless.

We looked at 1,002,165 domains to see which issues actually appear. Missing meta descriptions turned up on 72.9% of sites. They don't affect rankings, and Google rewrites them 62.78% of the time, even when you do write one. Meanwhile, a genuinely serious problem, a canonical tag pointing at a broken page, showed up on only 2.6% of sites. The full study is here.

So an audit report sorted by volume is sorted exactly wrong. Here are the issues worth your afternoon, roughly in order.

Indexability problems. A page needs three things to be indexable: no noindex tag, no crawl block in robots.txt, and a self-referencing or valid canonical. Break any one, and the page can't rank at all. Canonicals pointing at broken or redirecting URLs are the version to hunt for first, because nothing else you do to the page matters until it's fixed.

Broken pages. 4XX and 5XX responses drop out of the index, waste crawl budget, and, if anything links to them, throw away link equity. When you pull this report, add the referring domains column: a broken page with 30 referring domains is a redirect you should do today, and one with zero is just cleanup.

Orphan pages and thin internal linking. A page with no internal links pointing at it is reachable only via your sitemap or a backlink, and gets no link equity from the rest of your site. Two-thirds of sites (66.2%) have at least one page with a single dofollow internal link. Either link to it properly or accept that it doesn't matter and delete it, which is the previous tactic's job.

Pages buried too deep. Link value drops with every hop. Anything more than about 6 clicks from the homepage is getting a thin trickle. The fix is a link from a page closer to the homepage, not necessarily a navigation slot. We could have put our SEO glossary in the main nav for a ranking bump and chose not to, because it isn't what most visitors are looking for. It got a link from the beginner's guide to SEO instead, which is one click from the homepage.

Mixed content on HTTPS. You have a certificate, but individual resources still load over HTTP. People burn days updating references one at a time. You don't need to. One Content Security Policy header fixes all of it:

Duplicate versions of the whole site. If http://, https://, www and non-www all resolve without redirecting, Google sees four sites. Type all four into a browser and check that each lands on your canonical version. This takes 30 seconds and is worth doing before anything else on this list.

Core Web Vitals. The goal isn't to be the fastest site on the internet. It's to score "good" in all three categories. Pull the real numbers from Google Search Console rather than a lab tool, because Google ranks on field data from actual Chrome users. Our guide to Core Web Vitals covers the fixes.

Pages over Googlebot's 2 MB limit. Google confirmed in February 2026 that Googlebot processes only the first 2 MB of raw HTML and ignores the rest. Rare, but nasty when it happens: the browser renders your page fine, and Googlebot silently stops reading partway down. Content, links, and structured data near the bottom of the page never get indexed. Heavy embedded CSS and JS are the usual cause.

You can audit your site for all of these for free. Sign up for Ahrefs Free, verify your site, and let Site Audit crawl it. Then work the All issues report, which splits findings into errors, warnings, and notices, and click the question mark next to any issue for fix instructions.

[post_nav_link link_text="What not to do if you want to increase traffic" section="what-not-to-do"]

Just as it's important to know what to do in SEO, it's also important to know what not to do. Here’s a list of SEO missteps that might not just stall your growth or get you deindexed altogether. 

Just because a topic is trending doesn’t mean you should write about it. Sites that mix unrelated niches (like tech tutorials and celebrity gossip on the same domain) send confusing signals to Google and risk losing all topical authority. Stick to what your audience comes to you for.

Dumping tens of thousands of pages on your site sounds like growth, but if the content is thin, duplicated, or irrelevant, it's a fast track to an index bloat problem. Massive page growth with no guardrails is a red flag to both users and Google.

Having a high domain rating (DR) doesn’t mean much if your backlinks are coming from spammy sites, ccTLDs, or footer-stuffed pages. Worse, if you rely on templated backlinks from subdomains no one visits, you're inflating numbers without adding value. Read more about link rot here. 

Just in case, it never hurts to run a site audit to check for any technical issues that may hinder your site’s rankings. I’d recommend it, especially if your site was recently redesigned or you inherited the site’s SEO after someone else. 

The simplest possible solution is to use a tool like Ahrefs' Site Audit to find serious issues. The site audit is fully automated, so you can run it in the background when you’re busy with other stuff.

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