The top 5 factors that affect your organic traffic in 2025

Keywords and topics

Optimising your website for certain keywords can help improve its ranking in search engine results and increase organic traffic. Here's how:

• Researching and identifying the right keywords: to attract organic traffic, you need to understand what people are searching for and use those keywords on your website. Tools like Google's Keyword Planner or Ahrefs can help.
• Including keywords in your website's content: once identified, include them naturally, in a way that flows smoothly and makes sense to readers rather than stuffing them in unnaturally.
• Using keywords in your titles and metadata: include your target keywords in your page title and meta description to improve visibility and click appeal.
• Using long-tail keywords: long-tail keywords are more specific and often have less competition than short, broad keywords — for example, "best hiking trails in Yosemite National Park." They can help you attract more qualified traffic.

Why you shouldn't chase the high search volume keywords

Let's say you have a new or low-authority domain and try optimising your website for competitive keywords. In this case, ranking well and driving organic traffic can be difficult, for a few reasons:

• High competition: websites with high domain authority and strong backlinks will have an advantage over newer or lower-authority websites for competitive keywords.
• Lack of trust and credibility: if your website is new or has a low domain authority, it may be seen as less trustworthy and credible, which can impact its ranking.
• Difficulty creating high-quality content: producing informative, useful, well-written content optimised for competitive keywords can be challenging, especially if you're just starting out.

Instead of focusing on competitive keywords, it may be more effective for a new or low-authority website to target long-tail keywords or less competitive phrases, gradually building up domain authority and credibility over time.

What if you have a high-authority website with loads of traffic from Google?

If you have a high-authority website and already have significant traffic from Google, it may be worth targeting broad, high-volume keywords in addition to more specific, long-tail keywords — though ranking for broad terms can still be challenging even for high-authority websites, due to the level of competition.

A few things to consider when deciding whether to target broad terms:

• Relevance: ensure the broad terms you target are relevant to your website's content and audience.
• Conversion rate: attracting a large volume of traffic is important, but so is the conversion rate of that traffic.
• ROI: consider whether the cost of creating and promoting content to rank for broad terms outweighs the benefits.

It's important to use a mix of both broad and long-tail keywords to attract the right balance of traffic to your website.

Content quality considering the searcher's intent

Content quality can influence organic traffic in several ways: high-quality content is more likely to attract links from other websites and be shared on social media, while poor-quality content may be penalised by search engines, resulting in a decrease in organic traffic.

High-quality content

High-quality content is well-written, informative, and engaging. It should be free of spelling and grammar errors and well-researched and factually accurate. To create it, understand your target audience and their needs clearly, and organise your content so it's easy to read and understand — using formatting techniques like headings, bullet points, images, and video to break up the text and make it more interesting and engaging.

Low-quality content

Low-quality content is often produced quickly and without much attention to detail. It may contain spelling and grammar errors, and may not be well-researched or factually accurate. One common source is "spinning" software, which takes existing content and automatically replaces words with synonyms — the result is often difficult to read and provides no real value. Another is "content farms," which produce large amounts of thin, low-quality content purely to generate ad revenue.

Using AI writers

Whether it's a good idea to use an AI writer depends on your specific needs and goals. AI writers can generate content quickly and at scale, saving time and resources — but if you're looking for high-quality, engaging content that effectively communicates your brand's unique voice and tone, an AI writer alone may not be the best choice.

Pros: AI content writers can produce content quickly and at scale, save time and resources, and write across a wider range of topics than a single human writer.

Cons: AI content writers may not produce content as high quality as a human's, may struggle to capture a brand's unique voice and tone, may not understand the nuances and subtleties of language as well as a human, and may produce content that's less engaging and compelling.

User experience

User experience (UX) can affect organic traffic in several ways: good UX design creates a positive experience and drives organic traffic; improved UX can lead to increased engagement and conversion rates, which can lead to higher rankings; poor UX can lead to a high bounce rate, signalling to search engines that the site isn't meeting user needs, which can decrease rankings and organic traffic.

UX elements

• Usability: how easy it is for users to navigate and interact with a website, finding what they need quickly and easily.
• Accessibility: how easy it is for users with disabilities to access and use a website — for example, alt text for images or high-contrast colours.
• Content: should be relevant, useful, well-written, and presented clearly with appropriate headings and formatting.
• Visual design: should be visually appealing, consistent, and easy to read, with appropriate font sizes and colours.
• Loading speed: a website should load quickly, as users are likely to leave if it takes too long.

While UX is a ranking factor, it's just one of many factors search engines consider — content relevance and quality, external links, and technical SEO also play major roles.

Outreach, networking, link building

With countless marketing strategies that cost a fortune, bringing in new users can be both time-consuming and expensive. Investing effort into outreach tactics like blogging and online networking — engaging existing audiences with posts and content — can provide great opportunities for boosting organic visits through link building.

Backlinks

One of the ways Google determines the relevance and authority of a website is by looking at the number and quality of external links pointing to it. If a website secures many high-quality backlinks, it may be seen as more relevant and authoritative. However, if a website acquires backlinks by buying them or participating in link schemes, it may be seen as trying to manipulate its rankings, which goes against Google's guidelines — and Google may penalise this behaviour.

• Outreach: by reaching out to other websites, businesses can build relationships and potentially earn backlinks, improving search rankings and increasing organic traffic.
• Networking: building relationships with other businesses, industry experts, and influencers can help gain exposure and potentially earn backlinks.
• Link building: building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites improves your position in SERPs and increases organic traffic.

Contacting website owners or admins for related sites ranking for related keywords can help you build relationships, earn backlinks, and improve your search engine rankings — not every website will link back, but it's worth reaching out to see if there are opportunities.

Referral traffic

Getting a backlink from another website can increase your referral and organic traffic. This traffic, known as referral traffic, can be significant if the linking website has a large audience. It also signals to search engines that your site is a credible, authoritative source on a topic, which can improve visibility in search and increase organic traffic. Businesses must focus on earning high-quality backlinks through legitimate means — creating valuable content and building relationships — since buying backlinks goes against Google's webmaster guidelines.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimising a website's technical aspects to improve its visibility in search results and increase the organic traffic it receives. Seasoned software developers often make outstanding technical SEO managers — their knowledge of coding and algorithms allows them to optimise website performance in ways others can't. Technical SEO, content, and UX are closely interconnected, and improving any of these aspects can positively impact the others.

Several technical factors can affect a website's organic traffic:

1. Site speed: a slow-loading website can deter users and increase bounce rates, decreasing organic traffic.
2. Mobile-friendliness: more users are accessing the internet on mobile, so a non-mobile-friendly site may rank lower.
3. Crawlability and indexability: search engines need to crawl and index a website's pages to understand its content — technical issues that prevent this can decrease organic traffic.
4. URL structure: a clear, easy-to-understand URL structure helps search engines understand a site's content hierarchy and improves ranking chances.

Other technical SEO factors that can affect organic traffic:

• XML sitemaps: help search engines discover and crawl a website's pages more easily.
• Canonicalization: specifying the preferred version of a page (via rel=canonical or 301 redirects) avoids potential penalties from duplicate content.
• Meta tags: describe a page's content and help search engines understand its relevance to a query.
• Structured data: a standardised format that helps search engines understand the content and context of a page.

Some technical SEO factors overlap with content and UX because they all contribute to a website's overall quality and effectiveness. Fast loading times matter for technical SEO and contribute to a positive UX because users are more likely to stay on a site that loads quickly — a low bounce rate and higher conversion rate are signals Google rewards with more organic traffic. Mobile-friendliness gives a technical advantage (easier for search engines to crawl) and a better UX for mobile users. Clear URL structure and well-written meta tags help both search engines and users understand a page's content and context.

In conclusion, the top 5 factors likely to affect organic traffic include the quality and relevance of a website's content, the user experience it provides, the technical SEO of the site, the website's authority and reputation, and the presence of high-quality backlinks. By focusing on these factors and continually improving them, websites can increase their organic traffic and visibility in search engine results pages.

SEO isn't for the faint of heart — if you want to stay ahead, your digital game must be on point, always one step beyond the competition. Google is constantly updating its algorithms to ensure it provides users with the most relevant and high-quality search results, which means it's constantly adapting to new types of content and techniques people use to improve their rankings. This is why it's often said that "it depends" in the world of SEO — because the specific circumstances of a website and the competition it faces can have a big impact on its performance.