Big site - how to get more organic search traffic?

[dandee0014]

Here's a question that probably won't have a simple answer.

I'm one of the rarer cases where I get more direct visits to my site than organic search referrals. For example, today (as of the time of this post) I've received 874 direct visits and 758 organic search referrals. The ratio is usually even lower, where my direct visits are about 20% higher than the organic search referrals I get.

My site consists of user generated content, and a very large number of new, keyword-rich, pages are produced by our user base every day. In fact, we're currently at over 800,000 indexed pages.

It blows my mind that I get such a small number of organic referrals every day considering the number of indexed pages...and no single page stands out as one that drives more traffic than any other. My search traffic comes from a huge handful of random, usually long-tail search terms every day.

My links are generally optimized for SEO and I have meta tags, keywords, so I don't know what I'm missing.

What strategies could I employ to get the overall net effect of an all-around lift in my search traffic?

I speak to other sites where the ratio of site visits to search referrals is drastically different, so I'm sure there's a lot of room for improvement.

Thanks so much for any suggestions!

[Jason Johns]

Hi there,

You could do traffic generation on various pages within your site to make them rank higher for your keyword. Though with 800,000 pages that is quite a task!

Are there any major pages within the site you can target with traffic generation?

Do you know where your pages are ranking already?

Really you need to get some incoming links to pages within your site and that will help increase the organic traffic.

Cheers

Jason

[dandee0014]

Jason,

Thanks for the reply. As far as traffic generation on various pages, do you mean you'd just focus on certain pages and build backlinks for those?

There are some pages within the site that'd lead to higher conversions than others and definitely pages I could target. The biggest issue might be the fact that certain obvious terms are already pretty competitive and saturated. Though, looking at the competition, I have to wonder if some devoted work over a period of months might get me to the top for those pages/search terms.

I see competitors with less pages, drawing in hundreds of thousands of uniques per month from SEO and I have to wonder what they're doing that I'm not.

Originally Posted by Jason Johns

Hi there,

You could do traffic generation on various pages within your site to make them rank higher for your keyword. Though with 800,000 pages that is quite a task!

Are there any major pages within the site you can target with traffic generation?

Do you know where your pages are ranking already?

Really you need to get some incoming links to pages within your site and that will help increase the organic traffic.

Cheers

Jason