Matty Dalrymple, ALLi Campaigns Manager

We’re probably all familiar with paid advertising meant to drive readers to a website or other platforms, called “traffic.” But before investing in ads, authors should optimize for unpaid, organic traffic.

For most authors, organic traffic is generated in three ways:

organic search: Visits coming through search engines, such as readers searching for your author name or book title;
organic social: Traffic coming from unadvertised posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, or Goodreads; and
events: Traffic coming from your author or book events, online and off.

These depend on effective search engine optimization (SEO). When optimized, each can be a powerful way of building your following, reaching new readers, and staying connected with your current fans.

To capitalize on the benefits organic traffic can bring, you need to be willing to invest not dollars but time to understand the SEO landscape, optimize your platforms, and continue to refine your metadata over time.

So how do you encourage those visitors to come to your site?

Whatever stage you’re at as a self-publishing author, the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) can help you ensure you’re signposting visitor pathways to your online presences correctly and clearly.

Beginner authors: Optimize your online home base

Optimizing your website for organic search is very similar to optimizing your metadata on retail platforms. Those platforms’ algorithms rely on your book title, author name, genres and subgenres, keywords, and categories to point the right readers to your books.

In the same way indie authors can tweak their books’ metadata to optimize clicks, reads, and sales, you can tweak your website’s metadata to optimize its effectiveness. Include terms in your website that will lead the right people to it. Writing Suspense? Be sure the word “suspense” and other related terms are included on your site. Targeting recent retirees? Include that explicitly on your site.

Revise and refresh your data so that the site doesn’t appear “stale” to search engines. A regular blog post or podcast page is a great way to do this. If you don’t blog or podcast, add new pages and change things up regularly.

If you’re building your website yourself—perhaps via an easy-to-use website builder—this will be easy to do. If you have someone build your site for you, make sure they have the expertise needed to implement SEO and that they are familiar enough with the author business that they will be able to do this effectively.

Even if someone else builds your website, you should be able to modify it for SEO since you don’t want to have to go back to the developer every time you want to tweak your data.

As with book metadata, results won’t be immediate; it takes some time for search engines to find and reflect new data.

You’ll find lots of information about how to implement SEO in these easy-to-follow ALLi guides:

Emerging authors: Leave no reader unlinked

If you’ve taken the steps needed to implement SEO effectively on your website, as described above, consider other platforms you can optimize, such as social media.

Do all your social media posts include hashtags, alt text for images, and a link back to your chosen destination? Even email offers an opportunity for organic traffic; do you have an email signature that includes a clickable link to your website and your primary social media platforms?

Make it as easy as possible for anyone to find you and your work online. Leave no reader unlinked!

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are often an important part of social optimization. Use ALLi’s guide to ensure you’re including the right calls to action on your website and social: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/calls-to-action.

Experienced authors: Retrace your steps and bring in the experts

Optimizing for organic traffic is not a once-and-done activity, so even experienced authors need to revisit their SEO data and practices periodically. Take some time to retrace your steps regularly and check that your SEO is in good shape.

As your sales grow, seek opportunities for relevant and trustworthy sites to link back to you, thus raising your search engine status. High authority sites like TV and radio channels, mainstream media, and popular blogs and podcasts have the most weight.

If you have some budget and feel your SEO game needs sharpening, consider bringing in an SEO expert to update your core site and teach you a few key skills to further lift your visibility. Ensure anyone you work with has experience with books and authors, so they can focus their attentions on the right audience.

Building organic traffic requires time and ongoing commitment, but it offers a good return on your time investment by helping readers more easily find you and your books.

Matty Dalrymple, ALLi Campaigns Manager