The one thing you absolutely must do to drive more organic traffic to your website

Last Updated on July 28, 2019 by Nathaniel Tower

This post is going to be so stupidly simple that it’s going to blow your mind. If you want to drive more organic traffic to your website, there is one thing you absolutely must do above all other tactics:

CREATE MORE CONTENT!

Wow, it felt really good to get that off my chest.

Seriously, it’s that simple. If you had the choice between investing in content creation, SEO, or social media, you should put the majority of your money and time into content creation. What do I mean by content? I mean blog posts, articles, web pages, and anything else involving the written word. Video is great, too. So are images. But when it comes to driving organic traffic, text is still number one.

Yes, you also need to have SEO basics in place, and you should share your stuff on social media. But SEO and social media are completely worthless if you don’t have great content.

Organic traffic isn’t down; it’s just down for websites with stale content

You may have heard recently that Google is sending less organic traffic to websites. You may be starting to believe in conspiracy theories that claim Google is stealing all our organic traffic and forcing us to pay for more ads or to give up on our websites entirely.

Don’t believe either of these lies. Yes, Google wants businesses to spend money on ads. It’s how Google makes a lot of its money. But it’s also how a lot of businesses make a lot of money. That’s another topic though, and I suspect most people reading this post aren’t in the position to drive a lot of revenue through Google Ads (this blog, for example, doesn’t use Google Ads at all because I would have nothing to gain from it).

As far as Google sending less organic traffic, I don’t see it. I have access to Google Analytics for hundreds of websites. Guess what? They have almost all seen an increase in organic traffic this year. This very website you are looking at right now has seen a 123% increase in year-over-year Google organic traffic. That’s some major growth right there.

How did I make that magic happen? You guessed it. I created more content!

How much content should you create?

So how much content do you have to create in order to drive more organic traffic to your website? Unfortunately, there is no magic number. But there are a few different theories behind this.

One stat goes something like this: websites that blog at least six times a week drive 1,000 times more revenue than those that don’t.

Great stat. Except that whole thing about correlation not meaning causation. Many of those websites cited above already kick ass independent of those six blog posts per week. It’s not necessarily the new blogging that’s driving the revenue. And pumping out shitty blog content certainly isn’t going to help drive much of anything.

On the flipside, some people will tell you not to worry about quantity at all. Just focus on quality. It’s better to do one really good post a quarter than to do 10 shitty posts a month.

I’m not on board with that either (although I’ve been pretty lousy about creating content myself as of late).

The truth behind quality vs. quantity

Here’s the real truth: it takes a mix of quality and quantity. If I had to favor one, I would actually choose quantity. Here’s why:

One post a quarter definitely isn’t enough. Six posts a week might be too much, but that isn’t necessarily true. And I’d certainly take the latter over the former.

No matter how many pieces of content you create, some of them are going to succeed and some of them are going to fail. Creating one piece a quarter is the equivalent of putting all your eggs in one basket. If that post fails, then you have wasted a lot of time and opportunity.

On the other hand, if you post six times a week and five of them get no traffic at all, then you have at least three positive takeaways:

• You have one post that gained some traction. That’s a lot better than having nothing to show for your efforts.
• You have a lot of other content you can improve and repurpose in order to drive better results.
• You have plenty of opportunities to learn from your mistakes. You can evaluate those five posts that failed and figure out why they failed. Then you can turn that into future success.

I’m not at all advocating for throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. I’m not suggesting you should crank out a bunch of bad stuff just for the sake of hitting some arbitrary number of content pieces. What I am saying is that you should spend more time creating as much good content as you can. After all, content is king, and I promise you that no one is going to overthrow the king any time soon.

Do you want more organic traffic to your website? Then create more good content. I’ll be following up soon with another post giving suggestions for how to pick the right topics to drive more organic traffic to your website. In the meantime, please check out this post on selecting topics people will actually read. And don’t forget to share this post on your favorite social networks.