There are many ways you can increase website traffic for free. Yet it’s surprising how many of these free tips are not taken by business owners. Increasing organic traffic to your website is the first step in bringing new leads to your business.
Good quality, organic traffic means people come to your website and spend time there. They consume the content, often return later, and take advantage of some of the offers you make available on your website.
Sound good? Let’s explore some things you can do to increase the volume of quality traffic to your website for free!
A key tool to increase web traffic is called search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is the practice of optimizing your website so search engines can properly track your website and provide that information to your consumers.
Strategies to Increase Web Traffic for Free
Today’s marketing is all about growing your circle of influence, as measured by the traffic to your website. Many businesses rely on word of mouth to bring referrals and new customers.
When a referral is being made, which is often offline, what is the first thing the interested listener does? Visit your website of course! Below are some of the key methods that will definitely drive traffic to your website:
1. Utilize Social Media to Reach More People
Think of social media as a form of free marketing, if done correctly. With social media, you can reach a large target audience with a simple thought or image. To do this properly, and for free, the goal is to optimize the value of your posts alongside the time of day you are posting.
If you can provide high-value at a high-volume time, you should notice a significant increase in your social media activity and website traffic.
By properly utilizing social media, you can increase the click-through rates to your website, bringing your social followers to your website. By creating social media accounts and actively posting, you are creating a digital footprint, which you can track through Google analytics.
2. Use Hashtags to Target Your Content
Adding hashtags helps extend the reach of your social media posts, categorize your content, and attract niche audiences. By using targeted keywords relevant to your products or services, posts are more likely to reach your target audience.
Be sure to follow the hashtag etiquette for each site and keep an eye on your Analytics to see what hashtags drive the most traffic to your site. Use hashtags that are short, memorable, and on-brand. Additionally, try creating a few branded hashtags that are unique to your business.
3. Perform On-Page SEO Optimization
Take time to improve the optimization of your website pages by making sure you are using the Yoast plugin. It’s free and easy to use.
Yoast provides an SEO rating for your content and tips on how to improve your on-page SEO. The Yoast tool provides tips on improving your headlines, meta-description, keywords, and even copywriting.
- Your website content must be able to capture your audience’s attention. Consider this: 8 out of 10 people will read a headline and bypass the rest of your ad and text For that reason, an effective copywriting strategy is critical to grab your reader’s attention and to drive web traffic.
Take time to work on your on-page SEO, and you will see increased traffic to your website and improved rankings in search results.
4. Increase Back-links To Improve Brand Authority
An essential part of SEO is building back-links, links from one website to another. Google views websites with a strong link profile as being more trustworthy and authoritative. Not only do the links themselves drive traffic, but they boost your SEO rankings and increase organic traffic.
Your internal linking structure also affects the power of your link profile. Internal links can help boost your SEO rankings and create a more user-friendly experience on your website.
5. Have a Content Marketing Plan and Share Engaging Posts
Content marketing is a crucial tool for improving SEO rankings to increase organic traffic. Great content is informative, engaging, and keyword-rich. With valuable content, you encourage users to continue visiting your website and to share your content with others.
While blog posts are the most common form of content marketing, you can appeal to different audiences through:
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
- E-Books
- Case studies
- Templates
- Checklists
- Interviews
It’s important to have variety in the length and format of your content. Don’t forget to add compelling headlines that stand out on search results pages and drive more traffic to your website using carefully selected SEO keywords.
6. Write a Guest Post for Other Websites
Guest blogging on other websites builds your brand authority and establishes your voice as a subject matter expert. You can write these blog posts, or if you’re short on time, a digital marketing agency that has a strong content creation team can ghostwrite for you.
Each piece of content is an opportunity to bring traffic to your website and social platforms, as well as strengthen your position as a leader in the market.
7. Create a Content Schedule
When it comes to increasing organic traffic to your website, there is no better way than to develop high-quality and high-value content. In fact, the only way to get ranked on search engines is through developing more and more content embedded with high-volume keywords.
Because of this, we believe that one of the best ways to begin creating a constant stream of content is through a “content game-plan” or content strategy, as part of your content marketing.
The goal with this is to write down all the different content ideas that you can use for your website. From there, create a map of when you can write the content and begin scheduling the posts out over the month.
For best practices, it’s recommended you write enough content for a few months in advance, while also doing quality-keyword searches, ensuring your keywords are still trending.
8. Leverage the Power of Email Marketing
One of the best sources of website traffic that is often overlooked is your email base. Those who have subscribed to your email list are interested in what you have to say.
Email can go way beyond telling them about deals and specials. Creating blog content that educates your audience on your products and sharing a link to the content via email are great ways to increase traffic to your website.
This can also spark interest on their part for making another purchase of your product or services.
9. Paid Ads
The paid traffic method is used to quickly drive traffic to your website. The first benefit of paid ads is that you can do it on search engines like Google Ads or Bing ads or you can do social ads on platforms like Facebook ads or Pinterest Ads. The choice of platform depends on your product or service. Paid ads are a proven method since it is easy to measure and track the results. Other advantages are that you can control the budget, scale it when you like, and the analytics tools help you to understand the target audience behaviour and trends.
10. Hold Contests and Promotions to Build Your Rapport
Running contests and promotions is one way to increase site traffic. By creating a special landing page with the promotion or offer, you can track and measure engagement for the campaign.
Having fun with a contest or promotion allows you to express your brand personality and shows your community another side of your company. A contest is also a great way to build your email list!
The more your business can promote your contest through social media platforms, free or paid advertising, word-of-mouth, online engagement, blogs, or any other method of advertisement, the more people will sign up.
This gives you more quality leads that you can market and engage with, even after the contest or promotion is finished.
11. Utilize Online Directories & Review Sites
Consider review sites like Yelp and Google Business to be digital forms of word-of-mouth marketing. These referrals can be a great source of free traffic to your website.
Additionally, review sites and directories have strong domain authority on search engines. This means your business’s free page on their site could begin ranking in relevant searches. Actively update these listings to ensure your contact information, address, and links to your website are up-to-date.
12. Research Your Competitors
When improving your strategy, it’s crucial to understand what marketing tactics your competition uses. Subscribe to their email list, stalk their social media, and skim their blog to see what type of content and advertisements they are creating.
A digital marketing agency can help conduct competitor research, saving you time and effort while still providing valuable insight into improving your strategy.
Let’s also look at some of the common mistakes that can lower your traffic and you want to avoid.
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