For those who are not familiar with the term, organic traffic is the visits that your website receives spontaneously, without you having to use paid advertisements for this. While paid ads are a great way to drive traffic to your website, when you run out of budget, it’s gone.
To have a consistent stream of quality traffic coming to your course site, you must implement a long-term sustainable solution.
The Value of Organic Traffic
The e-Learning industry is projected to reach $243 billion by the end of 2022. If you want to have your share of this market, you must know how to drive traffic to your website.
One of the most significant advantages of organic traffic is that it is free. The only investment required is time to create and publish content.
While traffic from paid ads ends up with your budget, organic traffic is sustainable. As long as your content is active, it directs visitors to your course website.
Also, people tend to trust organic content more than sponsored content. Organic content is seen as authentic. It simply seeks to provide valuable information, with no commercial intent behind it.
Keep in mind, though, that organic content doesn’t drive traffic to your course site as fast as ads. However, by keeping a steady stream of relevant publications, your site’s ranking starts to improve, which results in more visits, leads and growth for your business.
Now that you understand why organic traffic is so important, let’s see how you can drive it to your course website.
5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
People often find it difficult to drive traffic to a website. It is not. You just need to know what to do to attract the right kind of visitor, i.e. your target audience.
Here are some ways to achieve this:
1. Design low-investment growth strategies
To start a new business and have real chances of success, you should design growth strategies that don’t require a lot of investment.
Some free or low-cost growth strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website include:
- Mouth to mouth marketing: Encourage your family, friends, and people who have already studied or worked with you to share your site’s URL, if possible, giving a positive testimony on your behalf.
- Partner with other course creators: Run marketing joint ventures with other course creators to promote each other’s sites.
- Affiliates: Register your course on an affiliate platform and offer part of the sale value as a reward.
The key to creating a low-investment growth strategy is finding people who appreciate your work. If you can motivate them to share your content, you’ll have a free marketing team to drive traffic to your website.
– How to use Affiliate Marketing
2. Do keyword research
Write it down: to position yourself well in search results, investing in SEO is essential.
The search engine optimization (SEO) starts with the keywords research. This means finding out the terms your potential students use to search for content related to your course.
Using these words in your content helps improve your site’s ranking on results pages (SERPs). The closer it is to the first results presented by search engines, the more visits it will have.
Now, if your course site is relatively new, there will likely be more established ones that are already ranking for some of your keywords.
A smart way to fight the competition in these cases is to focus on long-tail keywords, which consist of more than two words. They are easier to rank as they generally have lower difficulty scores than the top ones (single word).
Before choosing your keywords, consider two factors:
- Difficulty Score: This is a metric that shows the average difficulty ranking for a specific keyword.
- Search volume: Search volume is the average number of queries made to a particular keyword.
The words that will help you rank and drive traffic to your website should have a high search volume and low difficulty scores. Otherwise, find keywords that strike a good balance between the two.
– How to research keywords for your SEO strategy
3. Consider search intent
Search intent is an essential traffic generation strategy that many overlook or are unaware of. It refers to the motive behind the search a user performs. Search intent can be classified into:
- Navigation intent: Search for a particular website or webpage.
- Informational Intent: Search for more information about a particular topic.
- Commercial intent: Product searches with the intention of buying something soon.
- Transactional intent: Intent to make a purchase. In this case, it refers to those who visit your website with the intention of enrolling in your course.
Understanding search intent will help you create powerful copywriting that meets users’ needs. This is the type of content that attracts the right kind of traffic to your course website.
With the right keywords and search intent data in hand, all that remains is to create a content calendar that will help ensure consistent publication of traffic-generating content.
Search engines love this and will reward you by improving your site’s position.
– Practical guide for SEO and Copywriting
4. Invest in Link Building
Link building is the set of SEO strategies that aim to build a network of links (backlinks) that lead to a page.
A backlink is a hosted link on one website that leads to another. Backlinks are a vote of confidence that your website offers relevant and reliable content for the user. As a result, the website’s domain authority improves, leading to a higher ranking in SERPs.
Here are some ways to get backlinks to your site:
Start a link building campaign
A link building campaign is the process of contacting other sites that contain publications related to yours by asking them to link to a relevant post on your website. To get high success rates, your post must offer value to the audience of the site you’re contacting.
Post as many guest posts as possible
Guest posts is the act of posting on third-party websites. When posting as a guest, you can either insert a backlink into the post itself or include a link to your website in the author bio section.
Create “link-worthy” content
The best way to get backlinks is to create quality content that other sites will spontaneously link to. This involves developing the best content on a particular topic, publishing original research, using resources such as infographics, citing reliable sources, among others.
Links are essential for tracking and classification of sites in search engines. If you do this correctly, link building may be the number one way to drive traffic to your website.
– Link building: 5 strategies that give results
5. Take advantage of email marketing
Email marketing is another excellent strategy for driving organic traffic to your website.
To leverage this strategy, you should start and increase your mailing as soon as you launch your site. Here are some ways to do this:
- Deliver valuable content: When asking for someone’s email, you must offer something in return, something they value. For example, you can offer your potential customers a free ebook, or access to a webinar where you will teach about something of interest to your audience.
- Insert forms on important pages: Embed sign-up forms and pop-ups on key pages of your website, such as your landing page and blog, to encourage visitors to submit their contact details.
- Give out the first module of your course for free: People love free stuff. Grow your email list by offering a free module of your course in exchange for your email addresses.
To use email marketing to drive traffic to your website, send your subscribers the link to each blog post you publish. You can also send updates on releases and special offers.
– 6 Small Business Email Marketing Tips
Sell Your Online Courses
It takes a lot of effort to create a quality online course, which is why you should drive maximum traffic to your course website to make your effort count.
Investing in increasing organic traffic is the best way to grow your business and increase your income sustainably.
Complete and optimized eLearning platform for SEO, Coursify.me is the ideal solution for those who want to create, sell and advertise courses on the internet.
With perfect integration with the main social networks and content platforms, with Coursify.me you are already halfway through the work of positioning yourself well in search engines and attracting customers.
Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, Coursify.me is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System (LMS).
– Learning Management System: What is it?
To learn more, visit our website, test the platform and understand why we are the best option for your online course.