Any business owner or marketer would love to have customers, but how do you get more customers? If it were easy everyone would have more customers. One way to get more customers is more traffic to your website. Their thinking, “I already have a website, do I need to do something more?”
The answer is, “Definitely, yes.” Fortunately, there are many ways you can increase your website’s traffic. This article brings you the top 25 ways to boost your website’s traffic for free. Or you can pay a professional online marketing agency to do the heavy lifting for you. If you go it alone, try any or a combination of these methods and enjoy more customers coming your way.
1. Advertise to Attract Visitors
Advertising is an obvious way to get your target customers to look at you. There are many ways to advertise – paid search, display advertising, and social media advertising among the best ways to attract customers, establish your brand, and position your site in front of your target customers.
The idea here is to pick and adjust your strategy to match with your goals such as increasing site traffic or getting more conversions. Remember that every advertising strategy has its advantage and disadvantages, so you need to consider what strategy to use carefully.
2. Social Media
Just because you have a good-looking website with great content does not mean that customers will come flocking to you. It’s crucial that you are proactive and take the effort in increasing your traffic. One excellent way to do that is through social media channels for promoting your content.
There are several social media platforms to use for that. Twitter and Google+ are among the best. With Twitter, you can make short and snappy content with links that are incredibly tempting to the audience. On the other hand, Google+ and other social media channels allow more personal promotion of your content.
3. Add Video Content in Your Strategy
Text content is good, but that’s not enough. You need both video and text, along with images, infographics, etc. to attract new visitors to your website. With these, you can make your site more engaging and have higher retention of visitors. Adding video proves to be an excellent way to attract the attention of your audience for a boost in traffic.
4. Know More About Your Competition
If you don’t know anything about your competitors, you are terribly disadvantaged. You should use software such as BuzzSumo to know more about the competition, like their social performance and content. This gives insights on what topics resonate well with customers, so you know what content will bring you traffic.
5. Host and Attend Webinars
It’s great to learn, and webinars are one of the best ways to share information and wisdom to your audience. If you combine it with an effective marketing campaign, webinars offer a great way to boost your site’s traffic. To promote your webinar, send emails or post ads through social media. Aside from hosting, attending webinars is good for networking as well.
6. Combine the Strategies for Maximum Impact
There is no marketing strategy that works on its own to help increase the traffic to your website. The best thing to do is combine the strategies to create a campaign that can offer you maximum impact. By mixing them up, you can employ each strategy’s benefits into one.
On that note, one of the best tactics is varying your content’s length and format. If you do this, you can make your web content more appealing to varying readers. In addition to intermingling shorter blogs together with long contents, use infographics, images, and videos as well to drive more impact.
7. Write Enticing Headlines
The key to having your readers read your content is a beautifully, irresistible headline. If you want to attract the attention of your target audience, it starts by writing a headline that at one glance will get them to read what you have to say.
If you have a compelling headline, even if your content or blog post is incomprehensible it will certainly not go unread. With that, one of the things you need to do is perfect your skills in writing a headline. Practice writing a headline ten to twenty times and carefully examine which one is fit to publish.
8. Guest Blogging is Still In
You probably think guest blogging is dead, but it’s not. What you want for your website is an authority, relevant links, qualified traffic, sales, and motivated leads. That’s what guest blogging can offer you, plus more.
A guest post from a reputable site can provide your website the benefit of increase blog traffic. At the same time, it helps in building your brand and making your name in your niche. However, you have to remember that spammy tactics can bring you grim penalties so proceed carefully.
9. Have Others Guest Blog on Your Site Too
If you guest blog on other sites, it’s a great idea to invite others to do the same on your site. Invite other bloggers with the same niche as yours to post blogs on your website. If you are in the same niche, they are likely to share their blogs with you.
Usually, these guest blogs have links in them, which could bring readers to your website. To ensure this, it is important that you post only original and high-quality content. Don’t do anything spammy especially when Google is extremely strict in its standards.
10. Don’t Forget Referral Traffic
Referral traffic refers to visitors that come to your website from other sites except for major search engines. Getting more referral traffic should be one of your goals but it’s not easy to persuade other sites to link their content back to you. Instead, you should create content that asks to be linked to.
It’s important to have referral traffic because it sends potential visitors to your site coming from reliable websites. In turn, your content gets to new people, which gives your site the chance of converting a visitor to become a lead and sales.
11. Don’t Forget On-Page SEO
A lot of people think that SEO is dead, but it’s not. There are some SEO changes in the past, but search engine optimization remains a valuable practice. If you want search engines to read your website easily, don’t forget its on-page SEO. Make the most of a photo, text, and video.
You can also use internal links to connect with new contents. Meta descriptions are also an important SEO practice you shouldn’t forget. A great thing about on-page SEO is it does not take a lot of time to do. With only a little bit of optimizing for a search engine, you can effectively boost your site’s organic traffic.
12. Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that are more specific, which your visitors will most likely use when they’re about to purchase or using voice search. Using long tail keywords can provide huge benefits if you know how they are used.
If you have many competitions, using only the general keywords will not likely get your pages at the top of an organic search. This is where long tail keywords work, which allows consumers to find the products they are looking for in a more reliable way.
13. Post Your Content to LinkedIn
Today, LinkedIn is more than just a tool to find another job. The biggest professional social media network in the world, it is in its own right a valuable publishing platform. That makes it important that posting content to LinkedIn be one of your tactics in increasing website traffic.
By posting content to LinkedIn, you can enjoy a number of perks such as a boost to your site’s traffic, increase profile standing within your niche or industry, reach to a bigger and previously unreached audience, and become an authority on your topic.
14. Using Schema Microdata
Using schema or another microdata format will not necessarily boost your site’s traffic on itself. But the idea is with this markup, it will be easier for machines to find your website. Schema, as well as other microdata formats, has been around for years.
However, there are few sites that use, much less know what it is or what’s it for. Take the time to know, and you will find amazing benefits that schema microdata and other structured markup formats can offer you. Among those benefits are improved click-through rates thanks to better site snippets.
15. Pay Attention to Your Internal Linking Structure
The number of links that goes back to you is not the only thing that determines your site’s strength. Along with that, the structure of your internal links could affect your site as well. Internal linking is vital, and the fact is even the most experienced digital marketer forget about how important it is.
It’s not only important for your SEO strategy but also for driving traffic to your site. On that note, be watchful of any opportunity for internal links and learn about how you can create the best internal linking structure that will increase traffic to your site.
16. Interview the Thought Leaders of Your Industry
Interviews are not only at the top of the food chain. If you didn’t know, you would be surprised there are many people – industry thought leaders – are willing to talk and share their insights if only you ask them. If asking them personally is not an option, you can send them an email about requesting an interview.
Ask if you can talk to them and publish it on your blog. This will help your brand name get recognition and boost your credibility. At the same time, it is a great help in increasing traffic to your site. More than likely, your interviewee will share the interviews as well and that further magnifies its reach.
17. Email Marketing is a Powerful Tool to Attract Customers
Many businesses focus on attracting customers using content marketing. However, there are traditional methods like email that still deserve attention. Today, however, you can use email marketing to send an email blast to your customers to know them about your business.
You just need to be careful not to attack your audience with persistent emails on every update about your business. In addition to email marketing, you should also utilize the word-of-mouth marketing technique together to help better increase your traffic.
18. Have a Responsive Website
Internet browsing is no longer just done in desktop today. Most people use their mobile devices in searching the Internet, and that makes it important to create a responsive website. If your visitors need to pinch and scroll while accessing your site through their mobile device, that’s not good.
It’s like telling them to move on to another. To ensure they stay with you, make sure that your website is responsive, accessible, and viewable no matter what type of device is used to access it. Your site must be accessible whether it’s with desktop or smartphone.
19. The Faster Your Website Loads, the Better
People don’t like to wait even seconds for a page to load. They will happily move on to another website if yours is taking its time. That’s not good for your site’s traffic, so you have to fix it by increasing the speed of your website. You have to make sure that your pages’ technical aspects are updated and optimized. If they are updated, then your site loads faster making it better for your visitors.
20. Have Your Site Adopt the Feeling As If a Part of Community
People always want to be able to speak their minds, even with the products and services they use. They’d like to be heard, and by adopting a sense of community on your site, you can encourage your target audience to visit. To do this, use third-party solutions for a good commenting system. You can also create a dedicated forum where your visitors can ask you questions and feel a part of a community.
21. Get Involved in Conversations
Surely, you’ve visited other sites that are related to your business before. Don’t just visit but join in the conversation as well. While commenting doesn’t necessarily create an instant boost to your traffic, it gets your name out there. People hearing about you can subsequently result in more traffic driven to your site.
22. Assess Your Site’s Analytics Data
One of the most important sources of data for your site is Google Analytics. In here, you can find almost any conceivable characteristic of your website, including visitor demographics. Keeping an eye on your site’s analytics data will help you better make a plan to boost your traffic.
The Analytics Data is where you can find relevant information that will help in formulating your content and promotional strategies. It allows you to know what part – pages and posts – on your website is most popular, as well as when, where, and how site traffic comes from.
23. Be Social Media Active
As mentioned before, you need to have content on social channels as part of your marketing campaign. But that’s not enough. You also need to participate actively in the community you created. Do customers leave comments on your FB account? Do they have questions? If they do, answer them and engage in conversations with them.
24. Promote Your Content on Aggregator Sites
One of the best places to get referral traffic is by submitting your content on Reddit and similar aggregator sites. Now, these communities are full of members who are extraordinarily familiar with disguised spams looking like legitimate links. However, it won’t hurt to promote your content here. Audiences from aggregator sites are extremely helpful in increasing your chances to be noticed.
25. Join Conferences
No matter the industry you are in, there are conventions and conferences you can attend. Joining these events will be great for promoting your business. It’s even better if you can speak at these conferences. It will be a great way for you to build yourself as a leader in your niche or industry. This gives your site added exposure as well.
So these are the best ways to boost the traffic of your website. Try them out and see how well it improves your traffic, leads, and sales.