How To Drive More Traffic To Your Website For Free
Getting Started
Have you been wondering how to drive more traffic to your website for free?
It can be frustrating when you’ve tried implementing every “fool-proof” method to generate more website traffic, and your numbers just aren’t improving.
But the truth is, you don’t have to be an SEO expert or a marketing whiz to drive more traffic to your website. And the best news is, all the methods we’re going to walk you through today are free!
So if you’ve been discouraged by this portion of online business, we’ve got good news for you: we’re going to show you how to drive more traffic to your website for free in 2019.
Why Is Website Traffic So Important?
In the world of online business, website traffic is the single most important factor of success.
If you have a great website and a great product, but you can’t get anyone to your site, you won’t make conversions.
Website traffic is important for a lot of reasons, not all of which equal conversions.
Knowing how much traffic your website is generating can help you determine how successful for your marketing platform is. It can help you gather insight about your audience and their behaviors when they engage with your site. It can even help you understand your search engine credibility, and how well you’re performing in search engine results pages.
Setting Traffic Goals
Specific goals will help you determine if your website is attracting enough site visitors, if you are turning enough site visitors into leads, and if those leads are quality leads that are going to convert.
Knowing ahead of time what your expectations are for the performance of your website will help you determine if you need to be investing a ton of energy into attracting more site visitors, or if your website is performing at a satisfactory, competitive rate for your business.
Identify Your Problem Areas
There are a couple of things you should consider before researching how to amp up your website traffic.
One of the important things to know before attempting to increase your website traffic is your motive.
What is your motivation for wanting to increase your website traffic?
There are a few great reasons you should be looking at implementing new practices to increase your website traffic:
1. Not Enough Overall Traffic
If you have a great website and you provide a great product and/or service, but your website isn’t generating any traffic, you definitely have a problem. Your company needs to be attracting enough traffic to bring in the number of leads you need to consistently hit all your sales goals.
2. Not Enough Leads
This can occur when your website gets lots of web traffic, but you’re struggling to turn those site visitors into a quality lead or conversion. This is likely an issue with targeting the right kind of website traffic, which we will discuss later on in this post.
3. Not Enough Quality Leads
This problem also arises when you’re generating traffic, but not targeting the right kind of traffic. You don’t have any problems generating leads, but not enough of those leads are “sales qualified.”
4. Not Enough Sales
If you have a lot of great, qualified leads coming in, but those leads aren’t turning into conversions.
Having your traffic, lead, and conversion goals established ahead of time will help you answer these questions and determine what your problem areas are, and where you need to focus the most amount of energy.
It will help you to determine what success looks like for you and your business, and will allow you to have a measurable goal to work towards as a company. are a few great reasons you should be looking at implementing new practices to increase your website traffic:
The Right Kind
Of Traffic
So: let’s talk about your website traffic. One factor of web traffic that is often overlooked is making sure you’re attracting the RIGHT KIND of traffic.
It can be encouraging to look at your analytics and discover your site traffic numbers have greatly increased.
But an increase in traffic doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in conversion rate.
A traffic increase only helps you if the traffic is primed to buy your product. You need to be attracting the kind of traffic that is going to engage with your website, interact with your pages, and become loyal customers.
Generating quality traffic, the type of traffic that is going to convert on your website, is produced by providing the right content and experience for your ideal customer.
How To Drive More Traffic To Your Website For Free
So, how do you drive more traffic (the right kind of traffic!) to your website for free?
We should note here, these methods are free of COST, but generating traffic for your website will take time and energy on your part.
Websites are not a set-it-and-forget-it entity. If you’re going to turn your online business into a success, it’s important that you understand that you will be required to invest a good deal of effort into continually innovating your website to make sure you’re keeping pace with the industry.
Driving traffic is no different: it takes work to generate quality traffic for your site.
The following methods are foolproof: they WILL work if you’re continually investing energy into them and giving them the time they need to perform.
1. Optimize For SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is the process of getting more organic website traffic from search engine queries.
In plain English, it’s the process of optimizing your online content so that search engines like to display it as a top results for searches of a certain keyword.
When you’re building your web pages, make sure you’re keeping common SEO practices in mind: make sure the content on your pages is keyword rich. Spend some time adding alt text to all of your images. Check the speed of your website, and how well it is optimized for mobile devices. use of image alt text.
All of these little fixes can greatly add to the success of seeing your website rank well in search engine results.
As a digital agency that specializes in SEO, we often get the question, “does SEO really work?” Is it worth the time and energy invested into it?
The short answer is, yes. In order to drive traffic to your site your website will need to rank well in search engine results.
If you want our longer, comprehensive answer, check out our blog post that outlines some of our most effective SEO practices, and how long it will take you to see the results you want.
2. Create More Quality Content
Content is key for your site. Creating more high-quality content will improve your SEO rankings, and help drive more traffic to your website (For more tips on building an SEO strategy, check out our blog post here).
Website content doesn’t just consist of the verbiage on your web pages. It’s important for you to be frequently generating supplemental content other
than just your website and landing pages. The more frequently you produce quality, long-form content (such as blog posts), the more content Google will be able to scan to determine your authority in your field.
If you’re creating content that is actually useful to your ideal site visitors, you will not only establish credibility with Google, but your target audience as well.
A blog can seem like a daunting task, especially to those of us who aren’t writers. But blogging has been proven to be one of the most effective ways of adding content to your site. In fact, websites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages in SERPs than websites without a blog.
Quality content certainly isn’t limited to blogs, though.
It can take the form of how-to guides, articles, question and answer posts, ebooks, and more. The opportunities for creating great content for your site that will attract lots of visitors is virtually endless.
3. Use Relevant Keywords
When building your website and creating content through blog posts, articles, or even social media postings, make sure you’re using keyword rich content.
Researching keywords is another great way to increase your SEO score, but it’s also a great way to attract site visitors directly to your website. If you are writing content that answers the questions that your ideal audience are searching for daily, you are providing relevant information to them that will make you a trusted source in the future.
4. Build Backlinks
A backlink takes place when one website mentions another website and links to it.
While they seem like they might be insignificant or unimportant pieces of SEO, this method of creating and generating backlinks for your website has been proven to be vital to a website’s performance, especially with Google search engine rankings.
In fact, backlinks may be the single most effective way to boost your digital marketing ROI.
These backlinks are links from outside domains, essentially citing you as a valuable resource. Each backlink acts as a kind of “vote” for your webpage.
The more backlinks you receive from reliable, trusted websites, the more authority you will appear to have, and the better your website will perform in search rankings and visibility.
If you’re unsure of how to get started with your link building strategy, check out our blog post detailing our top tips and tricks here.
5. Make Use Of Social Media Marketing
In this digital age, social media has become one of the greatest resources for free marketing in the industry.
Not only is social media a great place to share about your brand, but it’s also a way to personally interact and build a relationship with your audience.
You can also use social media to distribute your awesome new blog and article content on a platform that is easily accessible to your ideal audience.
It will be helpful to also do some research in your industry: what are some of the conversations that are taking place about the product or service you offer? What are the relevant hashtags that your target audience is looking for? Explore what kind of aesthetic your ideal audience is attracted to, find Facebook groups to join, and spend time building those valuable relationships that could turn into important leads in the future.
Final Thoughts
The most important thing for you to remember is that you don’t have to be an authority on search engine optimization, content strategy, or creative writing to provide interesting and informative content for your audience, and provide the answers to the questions they’re asking.
If you continue to think of your customer first, and find ways to produce the type of content they need, you will quickly become a valuable resource.
By implementing these few practices into your online business strategy, you should start to see great improvements to your website traffic in just a few months.
Need Help
Getting Started?
We get it, building a whole new strategy for managing your website traffic can be tricky and more than a little bit overwhelming.
Once you’ve implemented these practices, it is also important to monitor your results to make sure your new strategy is working effectively.
If you’re not sure where to start in the process of getting your website optimized to attract more website visitors, let us know how we can help.
We offer free quotes and consultations, and we manage all parts of SEO from website optimization to content creation.
Don’t wait to get started building the online business of your dreams. Get started today!