Organic traffic for community growth
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who come to your website, online community, or forum through unpaid search engine results. In other words, these users find your site by using search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, rather than clicking on paid advertisements.
Organic traffic is considered "free" because you don't directly pay for each click or visitor through advertising.
Generating organic traffic to your community involves a combination of strategies that are designed not only attract potential new members, but also retain existing members. Here are some effective methods to increase organic traffic:
Original, good quality content
- Create high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience.
- Encourage user-generated content by posting discussion topics on popular topics and/or themes, as it helps increase activity.
Seeding in posts on topics that are currently trending is also great way of creating content that is topical and of interest to your members.
Google Trends is a great source for this - just access Google Trends, type in your health topic and scroll down to find out what people are currently searching for.
Engaging with your community
Research shows that the response time to a member’s first post has a big impact on whether they will post again. Based on this data, we highly recommend that you aim to respond to people’s post within 24hrs for the initial stages of your community.
N.b. as your community grows and you have more active members, posts will naturally get more responses without admins/moderators having to respond