10 Best Organic Traffic Channels for Small Businesses in 2024

Ryan Patrick

• 6 min read
10 Best Organic Traffic Channels for Small Businesses in 2024

Whether you are a small business owner or a large company marketing team, learning the best organic traffic channels is crucial for marketing your products or services.

Many entrepreneurs want to draw more traffic to their sites, frequently exhausting themselves by pursuing every tool or trick that guarantees an overnight traffic boost. You must know organic traffic isn't instant and may take some time to get the desired results.

In this blog, Incorpuk explores the definitions of organic traffic channels and the best organic channels available for your small business.

What is an Organic Traffic Channel?

An organic traffic channel means the visitors who arrive at your website through unpaid natural research results on search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing. Ads, direct visits, social media, or referral links do not drive this traffic.

Instead, it is generated through a website's search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts to rank higher in search engine result pages.

Organic Traffic Channel vs. Paid Marketing

In organic traffic channels, you are not required to pay a third-party platform such as Google paid ads or Facebook to get views. This is simply free traffic.

Paid marketing campaigns provide the advantage of quickly increasing your visibility. In contrast, organic marketing requires effective content promotion and adherence to social media algorithm best practices to connect with your audience.

Conversely, paid marketing needs you to spend money for every reach, whereas organic traffic marketing lets you leverage your skills and creativity to attract new leads and clients.

The main difference lies in their results. Organic leads may convert up to 14 times higher than paid marketing. This is because organic leads are usually further along in the buying process and are already interested in your products and services.

Organic Traffic Channels for Small Businesses

Here are some organic traffic channels for small businesses.

1. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO is an essential long-term strategy for all businesses. Appearing in Google search results for relevant key phrases can generate targeted, consistent traffic to your web content, including landing pages, blog posts, and more.

This channel is common in B2B businesses, which generate about 70% of their revenue from SEO. Most business-to-business companies focus on SEO because it yields a higher ROI. It's also a cost-effective alternative to pay-per-click (PPC) and the competition posed by social media algorithms.

To achieve the best in SEO, use the best SEO tools, such as StoryChief's AI Keyword Generator or Ahrefs. These tools assist in targeting a strategic combination of key phrases and long-tail keywords by evaluating their competition score and estimated monthly search volume.

2. Social media organic traffic

Did you know 93% of marketers engage in social media marketing? But that shouldn't be a surprise since over 5 billion people use at least one of the social media channels regularly.

That's why marketers ensure they post their content on social media, where their target audience spends much of their time browsing. They also encourage their email list to follow them on social media or use hashtags and audience engagement techniques to expand their social media following.

Social media organic traffic helps maintain brand recognition through organic posts, engagement, and promotion of more extensive content like e-books and webinars.

When posting organic content on social media, avoid posting content with links to outside URLs. Social media platforms want to keep their audience on their apps, so creating organic content pleases the algorithm, ensuring your post keeps showing up.

3. Email marketing

Another organic traffic channel is email marketing. Most entrepreneurs use email marketing during the lead nurturing phase to convert prospects into customers. They offer lead magnets to gain email addresses, and then they follow up by regularly providing subscribers with valuable content.

You can promote the email content without using a lead magnet. For example, you could create a landing page showcasing positive reviews of the email newsletter and use the page to convert more visitors to subscribers.

4. Lead magnets

Lead magnets are vital for organic traffic. Although they aren't a channel, this disadvantage will be significant, not to mention that they impact the success of other channels.

You may use lead magnets to convert blog readers and social media followers into leads. That's why they're considered part of the marketing funnel. Social media content drives, while lead magnets turn organic traffic into leads, and those lead to customers through email marketing.

You can have lead magnets in different forms, such as:

  1. E-books
  2. Video Course
  3. Checklists
  4. Templates'

5. Webinars and live events

You can hold live events in person or in a virtual hybrid. These channels require more effort than other organic traffic channels but can be a great way to share more advanced content with the audience.

A webinar typically takes 30–90 minutes to cover a single topic, while a live event may host various speakers and several sessions. To attract more organic traffic, ensure you take centre stage. Share the content that solves your audience's problem; otherwise, your participation will have no impact.

6. Digital PR

Digital PR involves the team's effort to get your CEO and other company officials featured on external websites and platforms.

The most popular forms of PR include appearing on a podcast, participating in a virtual event, being featured in an online publication such as Bloomberg, or publishing a guest post on a website.

By doing this, you will access another company's organic audience, helping you reach a new audience.

Guest blogging is an effective digital PR strategy. It enhances brand awareness and reputation on popular platforms while generating backlinks that improve SEO.

7. Podcasts

Podcasts are another excellent way to gain organic traffic to your website. They hit several business goals simultaneously, especially when interviewing your target audience.

Here are the advantages of hosting a podcast:

  1. Produce high-quality content featuring real-world stories
  2. Engage target buyers by requesting interviews
  3. It expands target buyers' reach when interviewees post their featured links
  4. Create content you can reuse for lead magnets, social media, and blog posts

8. Content partnerships

This is similar to digital PR but more strategic. In this case, companies work together to produce high-quality content that both audiences can share. The companies may also share the leads generated from the content with each other.

Today, many companies from distinct industries collaborate to create engaging content and experiences that satisfy their audiences' needs.

9. Customer testimonials

Customer testimonials also generate organic traffic and attract new customers; when customers browse your products, they look for testimonies from others who have already bought from you and have first-hand experience.

10. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is another excellent organic strategy. It enables you to leverage organic customers, coaches, influencers, and small business owners. E-commerce businesses and SaaS companies widely use this strategy.

Tips for Developing an Organic Traffic Strategy for Small Businesses

Without an effective strategy, you will be trying to herd cats. Here are tips for developing an organic traffic strategy:

1. Research your customer needs and your competitors' content

Starting with research is crucial to understanding the market landscape. You can also survey your customers by interviewing them.

Here are queries you may include in the survey:

  1. What is your primary goal regarding [topic]?
  2. What are your main challenges related to [topic]?
  3. Have you used resources like websites or companies to address these challenges? If so, which ones?

After gathering the information, analyse it; you can use it in the future when planning content.

Remember also to conduct your competitors' research and analyse the following:

  1. Their preferred organic channels
  2. The themes and topics they cover on organic channels
  3. Their SEO ranking
  4. Any information about their success
  5. Their content performs best in terms of engagement

2. Choose your organic channels

The next step is to choose your organic channels, such as Twitter or SEO blogging, to drive traffic to your funnel top. Afterwards, you could use lead magnets to turn the traffic into leads.

Start with a few channels and expand after getting sufficient resources. If your marketing team is overextended, generating leads organically will be challenging. Organic channels require significant care and attention to succeed against search and social algorithms.

3. Develop your organic content themes

create at least five topics that would solve your audience's problems. Ensure all your content ideas revolve around these topics. You can do this by conducting SEO research to know the topics your competitors are handling.

Also, ensure to incorporate ideas for bottom-of-the-funnel content. What information do potential customers require just before making a purchase? They may seek to witness your product in action or compare it with your competitors.

4. Enhance the internal collaboration process

You must look at the internal processes before generating leads and new clients in organic marketing.

Here are questions to ask yourself:

  • Are you using a massive number of disparate systems daily?
  • Are you doing unnecessary manual work?
  • Are you struggling with productivity?
  • Are marketers getting lost in the process?

5. Enhance the organic marketing funnel

After releasing your organic content regularly, optimising your funnel is advisable.

To optimise, consider the following:

  1. Whether you require more middle-of-funnel content
  2. Whether enhancing visitors' guidance towards your lead is necessary
  3. Whether you need to improve your ability to convert the website traffic and draw them further into your sales funnel

Final Thought

To succeed in a competitive market, a small business owner needs to understand the organic channels that would boost their business without incurring much cost as a start-up. As a small business, you may seek a quick fix for increasing traffic to your site. Although there are numerous options, such as paid ads, PPC, etc., organic growth produces a higher ROI than they do. So, identify the organic channel that best works for your business, start growing your organic traffic, and reach your target audience. If you have any questions about organic traffic channels for small businesses, kindly contact one of our experts here.