How To Drive Organic Traffic To Your Online Academy?

Looking to drive organic traffic to your website? You’ve come to the right place.

Organic traffic is a classic case of valuing quality over quantity. You can spend a whole lot of money on paid ads to get traffic for your website but achieving high scores in a metric called user intent will always be doubtful. 

Besides, ads show up when people don’t even want to see them, and people hate ads so much that they have ad blockers installed on their browsers. This can only mean one thing, for long-term business results and growth, online education businesses need to invest in building organic traffic to their website. 

Why organic traffic?

In layman’s terms, organic traffic is simply the website traffic you get for free from search engines. They are absolutely not paid for directly; unless (for example) you hire someone to do your SEO. The following are some of the points that validate the importance of organic traffic – 

They are cost-effective

One of the most direct advantages to drive organic traffic to your website is that it is free. The only expense will be that of content creation. Given you have the capability to create your own content, you will only be paying in the form of time you spend on creating them.

They are sustainable

Sure, paid ads are a great way to get some quick traffic. But, as soon as you stop spending money on ads, the traffic stops too. Organic traffic on the other hand is sustainable. As long as your content is there on the internet, it will keep diverting traffic to your website.

They are authentic 

People are and always will be skeptical of sponsored content. Organic content on the other hand is perceived as being authentic because there are no commercial strings attached to them explicitly. Once you start getting organic traffic, you can expect them to be steady. This will ultimately lead to the long-term growth of your business. 

How to drive organic traffic to your online academy? 

Getting free traffic for your online academy’s website must be tough work, right? Luckily it is not as difficult as you would imagine. Here are some of the ways in which you can drive organic traffic to your academy – 

Think like a startup

Don’t try to copy what the big fishes in the online education industry are doing – start small and do what small businesses do. When building your online academy build its foundation in such a way that it is primed to scale your website traffic. To begin with, you should ideally outsource tasks that are repetitive, tedious, laborious, and require expertise. 

Your academy is probably bootstrapped and for it to grow, carefully planned growth strategies that do not require a lot of investment are needed. Some of them include: 

• Word of mouth marketing: This is the gold mine of marketing. Create exceptional value so that people talk about your course to their peers. You can also share your academy’s URL with your family, friends, and other people in your network. 
• Partner with other course creators: Know someone who sells courses that are related to yours? Then it might be a great idea to cross-promote each other’s websites.
• Network with Influencers: Network with relevant influencers on social media and tag them in your posts. Do it in such a way that they appreciate your post. 

Find your keywords 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to driving organic traffic to your online academy’s website. To do so, finding keywords that are right for your course is the key. This means finding and using keywords prospective students use to search for content related to your course topics.

The better your SEO efforts are, the higher you will rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). And the higher you rank; the higher will be the volume of quality website traffic. If your website is new, it will be hard to compete with more established websites for keywords. But there is a smart way around this. Focus on long-tail keywords. These are keywords that have more than one word. Ranking your web pages for long-tail keywords is relatively easier as they have lower difficulty scores than single-word keywords. 

Remember to consider the following factors while doing your keywords research:

• Difficulty score 
• Search volume 

Further Reading: SEO Guidebook: Meta Description or Meta Keywords

Write and design to satisfy 

What many marketers neglect altogether is search intent. Search intent can be classified under: 

• Navigational intent: Refers to users who are looking for a particular website or web page. 
• Informational intent: Refers to users who are looking to get more information about a particular topic.
• Commercial intent: Refers to users who search for research purposes and may have an intent to purchase soon.
• Transactional intent: These are people who are searching with the clear intention to buy your course.

Understanding search intent will help you optimize your website copy and blog content to meet the user’s needs. Collect data on users’ interactions with your website by mobile analytics tools. This data combined with keywords will enable you to create a calendar to consistently roll out organic traffic generating content. 

Plan your content in advance and be the first to publish something new. Search engines will reward you for your efforts by ranking your web pages well. 

Build links

A backlink is a hyperlink from another site to your website. A backlink is an affirmation from another party that your website’s content can be trusted to provide the most updated and authoritative content about a specific topic. This leads to an increase in your web pages’ domain authority and an increase in better rankings on search results pages.

Below are some of the ways to build links for your website. These are followed by some of the top link building service agencies worldwide

• Create an outreach program: Reach out to publications and websites asking them to link a relevant blog post to your website. To get a better success rate, make sure your content provides value to the publications’ audience.
• Guest Posting: This entails posting blogs on other websites. You can add a link to your website on the blog post itself or give it in the author bio section.
• Create link-worthy content: Create content that is so deep and updated that people will naturally link to your website. Also, try creating infographics and PowerPoint presentations to achieve this.

Use webinars 

This is a great way to attract and engage potential customers/students and also to generate organic traffic to your academy’s website. Why? Because they are already looking for something new to learn. Why else would they attend/sign-up for your webinar? 

Leverage a webinar platform to host webinars your audience will enjoy. Promote it by: 

• Sharing in on social media 
• Have someone with a good social media following as a guest speaker to tap into their audience too
• Send out webinar invites to an email list. You can even ask your partners to send it out to their audience.

How Learnyst can help?

You can create your own custom website for your online academy on our Platform. SEO should be the least of your worries as all your webpages will be optimized for the best SEO results. You can easily select keywords relevant to your academy and pin them to your website so that your prospective students can easily find them. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what we can do to take your online academy to greater heights. Get in touch now!