Why More Website Traffic?
Website traffic is both an important indicator and driver of business growth. It can help you to:
• See how well your marketing is working
• Gather insights about your audience to make decisions
• Improve your SEO and search engine credibility
• Generate more leads, increase conversions, and get more customers
Yet achieving these benefits requires driving traffic to your website the right way, and a focus on driving quality traffic. In this post, we’ll cover free ways to drive traffic to your website in a way that impacts your bottom line.
Free Traffic vs Quality Traffic
Traffic to your website helps to improve your rank which in turn generates more traffic, but you want to make sure that the increase in traffic is associated with an increase in engagement as well. If your traffic is increasing but your conversion rates are decreasing, you’re not bringing in the right traffic.
There are a number of ways to optimize your website for conversion—such as by including calls to action and lead capture forms in the right places, providing the information your visitors are seeking, and making navigation easy and intuitive. But the first step is to be attracting the right visitors to your site in the first place. Your goal when it comes to website traffic is to be driving more qualified visitors to your site. That is, those who are most likely to convert into leadsand customers.
Channels that Drive Quality Traffic to Your Website
There isn’t one set-it-and-forget-it tool that generates free and high-quality website traffic to your website. Rather, there exists a mix of channels that work together to drive visitors. Some require effort, some require time, and some require money. Some of the strategies and channels that drive traffic to your website include:
• Online directory listings
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Email
• Social media
• Online ads
• Blogging
In the next section we’ll go into more detail on the most effective (and reliable) ways of increasing website traffic for free.
Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic from Google
1. Create a Free Google My Business Listing
Did you know that an optimized Google My Business listing gets 7x more visits than an incomplete one? Don’t forget that your listing links to your website, so this is a great way to get more traffic to your website.
Keep in mind also that Google is getting smarter and smarter with results. If your listing provides all of the information a potential customer needs to make a decision, they might forego your website and contact/visit your business directly—even better than a website visit!
Are you missing out on traffic?
Complete Google business listings average 7x more clicks than empty ones. Use our free tool to find out what your profile is missing in 30 seconds or less.
2. Perform On-Page SEO
There are many SEO tactics you can perform on each of your website pages to increase their rank in search engines and get more visitors. This includes producing high-quality content that your audience is searching for, and writing concise meta descriptions for your pages. The meta description appears below your URL in search results. Knowing what a page is about and what will result in a click makes users much more likely to do so. On-page SEO tactics such as these are free, but do take some time. For more help with on-page SEO, check out this blog post: Google Ranking Factors: On-Page vs Off-Page SEO.
Other Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Here are ten additional steps you can take to increase your website traffic.
1. Get Listed in Online Directories
Another way to increase traffic to your website is to get listed in free online directories and review sites. For most of these sites, your profile will have a link to your website, so actively updating these listings and getting positive reviews is likely to result in more website traffic. In addition, many directories like Yelp have strong domain authority on Google. There’s a chance that your business’s free Yelp page could rank high for relevant searches.
2. Build Backlinks
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Backlinks from complementary businesses or industry influencers will not only get your business in front of a larger audience, but it will also drive qualified traffic to your website. In addition, Google picks up on backlinks and will increase its trust in your business if it sees other trusted sites pointing to yours. More trust from Google leads to higher rankings, which leads to more traffic. Get noticed on Google for free with quality backlinks.
3. Post to Social Media
Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around, and plays a role in driving traffic to your website. Use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote blog posts and other useful pages on your website. This way you can turn your social media audience into website visitors, and draw traffic from their networks if you post shareable content.
Creating useful content is free, and is not as hard as it may seem. You are the expert in your product/service; your job is to simplify it for your audience.
4. Include Hashtags in Your Posts
By adding hashtags to posts that promote your website pages and blog posts, you can extend your reach beyond your network and get discovered by users searching for your products and services. The more eyes on your links, the more free traffic you’re getting to your website.
5. Use Landing Pages
Landing pages are another free source of traffic to your website. These are pages specific to your offers, such as for redeeming a discount code, downloading a free guide, or starting a free trial. They contain the details users need in order to move forward and convert, and focus on one specific call to action, making it more likely to happen. Because landing pages are so specific, you can get very targeted in your messaging, increasing the traffic coming to those pages.
6. Target Long-Tail Keywords
While short-tail keywords are often searched more frequently, it is more difficult to rank for them on search engines. Targeting long-tail keywords, on the other hand, gives you a better chance of ranking higher (even on the first page) for queries specific to your products and services—and higher ranking means more traffic. Plus, as search engines and voice-to-text capabilities advance, people are using more specific phrases to search online. There are many free tools available to help you find keywords to target, such as Answer the Public.
7. Start Email Marketing
Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Provide useful information and links to pages on your website where they can learn more, such as through blog posts and landing pages for particular offers. Just make sure that you don`t continually bombard your readers with emails or your customers will either disengage with, delete, or unsubscribe from your emails.
Also, put careful thought into your email subject lines. These heavily influence whether or not a user opens your email. If your emails never get opened, they can’t supply traffic to your site!
8. Guest Blog
Having an industry influencer publish a blog post on your site or turning an interview with them into a blog post can help to drive traffic both through organic search but also via that influencer promoting the content to their audience (see the backlinks section above). This can also help to add more variety to your content and show your visitors that you are active in your field.
Alternatively, you could ask the influencer to mention your business in their own review or round-up post. This method is still free, but you still need the collaboration with the influencer to be an exchange with mutual benefit.
You can also be a guest blogger. Identify complementary businesses in your area whose audience is relevant to your business. See if you can contribute a post to their blog with a link back to your website. Make sure your content is relevant and useful to their audience so that it’s more of an even exchange.
9. Engage Online
It’s free to be active in online groups and on websites that are relevant to your business and community—and it helps you to obtain more traffic. Comment on blogs and social media posts, answer questions people are posting, and participate in conversations about your industry. The more you engage with your community, the more exposure and profile visits you get.
If your social media profiles contain a link to your website, then you’ve turned your engagement into another channel for website traffic. Just be sure to engage moderately and in a sincere way, and avoid including links to your website in your comments—lest you appear spammy and hurt your online and business reputation. Increased traffic should not be the goal of your engagement, but rather a secondary result.
10. Learn from Your Analytics
Google Analytics is free to use, and the insights gleaned from it can help you to drive further traffic to your website. Use tracked links for your marketing campaigns and regularly check your website analytics. This will enable you to identify which strategies and types of content work, which ones need improvement, and which ones you should not waste your time on.
