Increasing Unbranded Organic Traffic

[RG_SEO]

What do people think is the best way to increase unbranded organic traffic specifically? We have worked on on-page optimisation / keywords / some social media, but there has been no noticeable increase over the last 6 months.

Do you think increasing unbranded traffic is an objective worth pursuing?

[Travis-W]

Unbranded organic traffic is the name of the game!

Personally I do not even waste time on trying to obtain BRANDED organic traffic, that all comes on its own.  The only time I try and affect our branded search results is if I am trying to push down a negative review or some unflattering page.

[jesse-landry]

Well yes of course it's worth pursuing it is what SEO is all about, is it not? It is essentially the method with which you introduce new visitors to your brand and familiarize them with your product or service.

Your question isn't as simple as you are making it out to be here, unfortunately. But if you want a simple answer, I'll give you an acronym: SEO. Determine the keywords you want to rank for organically that would be relevant and bring people to your site that would actually be interested in what you offer. Target those keywords, build links, build content, deliver. If this doesn't really make sense I would suggest reading up some more on beginner's SEO and just get a basic understanding of the trade, but essentially you need to rank better for keywords that:

a) people are searching for and
b) are relevant to your site.

(Hint: to do keyword research, check out your Google Webmaster Tools!)

Hope this gives you a good starting point and be sure to stick around this community; there is a vast wealth of information here and if you stick around and read a lot of threads, blogs, and watch some webinars you will find yourself becoming and SEOxpert. Yup. I just made that term up.

SEOxpert FTW!

[EGOL]

What do people think is the best way to increase unbranded organic traffic specifically?

Publish new content.

Every page that you publish for a new keyword opens a new traffic channel.

If you publish regularly and your content is good allow people to subscribe to your feed.  If you can attract a following then every time you publish new content thousands of people will show up the first day to consume it, some of them will tweet and share, and some of those will also subscribe.

Content publishing is like rolling snowballs down a hill, they get bigger as the travel.

[RG_SEO]

Thank you all - basic stuff I know. All three of your answers put together answer my question so excellent stuff.

It's interesting that even when I've moved onto more complicated SEO concepts a simple issue coming out of the blue is the one that throws me. Maybe this shows that sometimes it's best to keep things simple?

[ProjectLabs]

You also need to attract/build links to your site. If other sites are covering the same topics as you are and they have higher link authority they will push you down the search results. Also make sure that the topics that you are covering are not super competitive, otherwise you have little chance of showing up on the first page of search results without building sufficient link authority. If you have the Mozbar installed, you can enable the SERP overlay and see if sites ahead of you in the SERPs have greater link authority (PA and DA).