Consumers are making more purchases online now than ever before. But they’re also using the internet to inform their buying decisions, find solutions, and engage with brands.
This means that there are ample opportunities to connect with potential customers across different online channels, direct them to your website, and grow your audience.
In fact, when you boost your website traffic, you may not only attract new leads, but you may also consolidate your relationship with existing clients.
Furthermore, the more traffic and engagement your pages obtain, the more likely they are to show up in relevant Google searches in the future – because the bots will see that your content is valuable to users.
This can lead to even more exposure in the SERPs, and boost your traffic even further.
And this is a key part of making sure that your company is successful and profitable online.
In this article, we highlight 10 tricks and tools on how to boost website traffic for free. If you want to drive more people to your site, make the most of your existing traffic, and build up your brand, then these are website traffic boosters you need to have in your arsenal.
Boost Website Traffic for Free: 10 Ways
1. Utilize Modern SEO Strategies
SEO is among the most effective ways to bring organic traffic to your website.
You should start with researching and using relevant keywords into the headline, copy, and metadata of your website.
However, to be successful, you should consistently work on all 4 pillars of SEO.
Search engines judge results based on relevance, and if you can rank on the first page of results for keyword searches in your industry, then you’ll be able to boost your website traffic substantially.
SEO is a kind of a science, though, and the methodologies that work best are constantly changing. That;s because the rules and regulations of search engines are evolving.
You can remove a lot of the guesswork from your SEO efforts by using a WordPress plugin for SEO, such as Yoast.
It is easy to use and helps you ensure that the website copy and content you create is well-optimized. It can also help analyze your existing pages and content, guide your writing process for best searchability, and automatically optimize your meta tags.
2. Think Long-Tail Keywords
Using keywords can boost your website’s visibility in search results and help more people discover your pages that offer the solutions they’re looking for.
However, nowadays, search algorithms strive to help users find exactly the information they’re after.
Therefore, general keywords are less likely to land your website in a coveted first-page position anymore.
To boost your traffic and ranking, you should consider using long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords, more often than not, include question search terms, specific searches, subtopics, and phrases that are closer to natural language. They are defined by a lower search volume and, often, but not always, by a low difficulty.
However, while these types of keywords have a lower search volume (i.e. less people are keying them in search engines), are, potentially, much easier to rank for. As a result, they can become a great traffic booster.
Plus, they help increase the time people spend on your pages, especially if the content they find matches their intent.
All you have to do is to zero in on exactly how your target customers are searching for the products and services you offer.
To that end, consider implementing keyword research, and cross-referencing it with your customer feedback and relevant data about how your audience is phrasing their searches.
The closer you can get to their natural language in searches, the more traffic you are likely to bring to your pages.
3. Stay Top of Mind Through Retargeting
Retargeting is a great way to boost your traffic by bringing people back to your website when they’ve visited it but did not end up converting.
If you’re already using Google and Facebook ads, then this is a key strategy to stay top of mind with customers as your ads follow their online activity and appear where they’re spending their work or leisure time online.
You can use tools like Google Ads Remarketing or Facebook Remarketing to manage your placements individually, but there are also tools like AdRoll that help you manage your remarketing efforts across all the platforms you may be using it.
4. Automate Your Email Marketing
Website traffic and email marketing have a mutually amplifying relationship.
Your email marketing campaigns are a powerful website traffic booster, and your website traffic that results in successful opt-in form, conversions, and/or purchases, helps you grow your email list – and boost traffic even further.
In today’s business landscape, email marketing is made easy by automation tools.
Solutions such as MailChimp and Sendgrid can help you manage all your email campaigns with a suite of tools designed to help you on every step of the way – from creating and sending marketing campaigns to measuring their effectiveness.
Once you find the sweet spot in your email marketing, you can even automate many of your email sequences to maximize your time and ensure you’re always driving quality email traffic to your website.
5. Dominate Social Media
No matter what industry you’re in, chances are that the majority of your potential customers are spending a large amount of their time on social media, catching up with the newest trends. They’re already there, so it’s your job to make sure that it’s your business that they’re engaging with.
To that end, you should have social media accounts on all the major platforms with consistent branding and messaging across every profile so that your potential customers can recognize you no matter where their social surfing takes them.
Post engaging content, spark interesting discussions, and – pay attention here – make sure you’re also offering customer support through your social media channels.
Consumers are becoming social shoppers, and they also expect quick responses to their questions to make quick impulse purchases.
This presents you with a unique opportunity to offer social support and not only boost your website traffic, but also foster brand loyalty.
6. Demonstrate Value in Online Communities
Online communities are another good opportunity for boosting your traffic, but require you to spend time creating a favorable reputation in any community you join.
The key tip for succeeding in this tactic is to spend time to, first, get to know the community with its rules, culture, types of communication, and needs.
This way, you will be able to provide genuine value. Doing so will elevate you as a regular contributor and build trust.
As a result, when you share a link to your website, more people are likely to pay attention, rather than dismiss it as self-promotion.
Make sure you heed the rules of any online community you join and adhere to them strictly. You can do just as much damage to your brand as you can good in these communities so it’s important to know what will tarnish you in the group or even get you banned totally.
Furthermore, you should consider creating your own brand community, where you provide unique value to your customers, share tips and product knowledge, publish limited offers, and so on.
This can become a valuable source of high-quality traffic and boost your website’s online presence.
7. Get Creative with Content
You’ve probably heard time and again that content is king. You might even think it’s bordering on cliché – but that’s because it’s absolutely true.
In fact, content is the top most source of website visitors for businesses, and it can do miracles for your traffic. Furthermore, as it is well-loved by the search engines it can boost your traffic even more, and can be extremely beneficial to your SEO brand-building and overall digital strategy.
However, for your content to deliver results, it has to be high-quality, well-written, and SEO-friendly.
Furthermore, keeping up with your content needs can quickly become overwhelming if you’re trying to create it all yourself. If you can’t yet justify a professional content writer in your budget, this can improve the quality of your content, and boost your ranking.
8. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging can work well for you in two different ways.
First, you can search out reputable sites in your industry and submit guest posts for their blogs. There are plenty of companies looking for help with great content, and if you have the expertise and unique ideas to contribute, you’ll likely be able to land some spots.
Guidelines differ from business to business, but you’ll, generally, have the opportunity to link to your website in your guest bio. If your content impresses readers, it will bring them to your site to learn more about your business.
This method works in reverse as well.
Open up your blog to guest contributors and create your own content submission guidelines you want them to follow. This helps keep your content fresh, helps you build industry connections, and can help bring traffic to your site as well.
9. Repurpose Content
While you should endeavor to keep your content as fresh and regularly updated as possible, there are hidden opportunities in your archives as well.
You can repurpose old content by updating it and sharing it again, or you can make it look different and share it across different channels to help people see it with fresh eyes.
Being imaginative and giving your existing content a facelift can help you bring more traffic to your site without a lot of extra work.
For example, you can go through your top blog posts and then transform that information into a new format.
Create an infographic, turn it into a presentation, write a short ebook to give away as an opt-in download, create a quick script and make a YouTube video, go live on your Facebook page and deliver the information in a fun, engaging way.
Using this tactic, you can easily turn one piece of content into a variety of different mediums that will engage people according to their preferences and, as a result, boost your website traffic.
10. Leverage Your Presentations Via SlideShare
Another quick way to drive traffic to your site is to load all your presentations into SlideShare.
Make sure your presentation titles align well with your top keywords and searches, and you’ll help even more people find your business. Search engines smile favorable on presentations which can help you rank higher in search results and establish you as a trusted leader in your industry.
Also, you should consider using the Linkedin integration, and share your presentations with your followers there. Make sure to provide a link to your website, to guide the traffic home.
Bottom Line
Boosting your website traffic can help benefit your business in many ways, and there are many effective methods for bringing more people to your pages.
These tips and tricks can help figure out which methods make sense for your company and give you ideas on how to get started.
Author Bio: Jeni Rogers is a researcher and regular contributor to TrustRadius, where she shares her knowledge of the latest trends in B2B news and software.