If you have a website, one of your marketing strategies will be increasing visitors to your site. After all, more traffic increases your brand’s voice and in turn, can mean more sales and an increase in revenue. Here we look at the many ways in which you can increase organic traffic for free or very little cost.
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Free ways to increase organic traffic
There are many ways to increase organic website traffic, often these methods cost nothing but time. This section explores how you can promote your website and generate more leads.
Using content marketing to get more traffic
Content marketing can help a business to generate leads and demand, which makes it one of the most cost effective forms of marketing. Here are some easy wins to getting your business started with content marketing.
Get a blog – Content marketing in the form of a blog can help drive traffic to your website. Every blog you produce is one more page for a search engine to index, thus one more opportunity to reach your target audience. Blogs can be both informative (just like this one) and are a great way to attract an audience to your products and services. If you are going to writes blogs then it’s a good idea to ensure you understand keyword research . This will not only help you figure out what type of content your audience is searching for, but also give you a stronger chance of ranking for those search queries.
Produce evergreen content – What is evergreen content? Evergreen blog posts are types of content that will be around for a long time; hence the name evergreen. If your marketing resources are limited, it’s a good idea to focus on creating evergreen content rather than reactive pieces on trending topics that will likely become less relevant over time.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t revisit or update “evergreen” content, even with blogs that have a long shelf life it’s still worth revisiting and checking that the information in the post is up to date.
Suggested further reading: What is Evergreen Content?
Guest Blog – You don’t always have to write the content yourself; you could have someone guest blog on your site. Before you have someone guest blog, make sure that their work is of a standard that suffices and agree on any terms and conditions upfront to avoid any issues further down the line.
Alternatively, offering to do a guest post on other sites shows you as an industry leader and authoritative voice. Always make sure that your content links back to your site, thus earning you some backlinks as well as traffic to your site.
Suggested further reading: A Guide to Guest Blogging
Keep content fresh – All the content you produce should be checked periodically for any issues such as broken links and images. Some content can also become dated and need refreshing. You can update stats and news information to keep your content relevant.
Create vibrant visuals – Visuals are another great way to be found on a search engine. Visuals can be used to complement blogs (such as the ones included in this blog), or you can have visuals that show your product off.
Visuals also show up in Google searches and they link to your website. From the below example, you can see that LOCALiQ has an image in position 4 of the search result for the search term “swot and pestle”. However, the written article is in position 9 on the same page. You see the image before you see the text piece, which could mean that the user clicks the image before the text content.
Screenshot from Google using the search term “swot and pestle”
Use SEO to get more traffic
If you want to improve website traffic, one of your goals must be to appear higher in search rankings. This is where SEO comes in. Any changes you make to your SEO efforts can take time, so it is important to keep tracking changes and metrics.
External links – Backlinks are other websites that link to your content. Websites with a larger number of backlinks tend to feature higher in organic search. The more backlinks, the more Google believes that the content is high quality.
Internal linking – Internal linking is essential for SEO and keeping people on your website for as long as possible. Your blog piece should have at least 1-3 internal links. They can be as simple as linking to your contact us page, or you can link out to other related content.
Implement schema markup – This won’t make you rank higher on its own, but what it does do is ensure you get rich snippets which include reviews. If you have a lot of positive reviews, this can lead to improved click-through rates as you are a trusted business.
Keyword research – A thorough keyword analysis is an essential tool to help you with website growth. This means going after some business-specific keywords (brand name), to keywords relevant to your industry, and looking for some long tail keywords. These are the low-hanging fruit that has a small monthly search volume (MSV) but can help you build your presence online.
Suggested further reading: Tips for Conducting Effective Keyword Research
Improve your page speed – Use Google’s PageSpeed to gain insights into your website’s page speed. Address any issues highlighted here to ensure your website is in the best health.
Make sure your site is responsive – In the age of mobile-first design, your page should always be optimised for mobile. Part of this is ensuring that your website is responsive and able to be viewed easily across devices.
Use social media to get more website traffic
There are plenty of social media channels available and you want to be where your potential (and current) audience is. You can also use different channels for different types of content; videos on YouTube and TikTok, and images on Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram. Although with Facebook and Instagram, there are plenty of options for video. Whatever you are posting, make sure that you post natively wherever possible.
Promote your new content on social media – You should be proud of the content you produce and in turn, you should want to show it off. Using social media channels to promote your content is a quick and free way to help push people to your website.
Use hashtags – Now used on all social media platforms, hashtags are great for businesses who want to get their content to more users. By using hashtags, a user may see your content even if they are not following you.
If you are not sure what hashtags to be using, use tools such as keywordtool.io or hashtagify to help you generate some. We also recommend that you keep a hashtag bank of commonly used ones to make your marketing easier.
Create a Linktree account – Instagram does not allow users to add clickable links in captions. A link tree in your bio allows you to include links to your content. Make sure you update these regularly especially if you have new content or offers on.
Engage with your audience – If you continually post links to your content without engaging with your audience, then you won’t get much traffic. You need to engage your audience to build trust. You can do this by asking questions of your audience and if you have a link to your content, include a question in the post such as “have a read and tell us what you think”.
Use email marketing to increase organic traffic
Emails are a great way for a brand to prospect a client. If you want to build a mailing list, you need to entice the reader. What will you give them for signing up for your newsletter? Many brands offer a (time-sensitive) discount or a downloadable resource.
Once you have someone signed up, you should send regular emails. These emails can contain links to new content, new stock or promotional sales. Always ensure that they are interesting and are a benefit to the customer. See our monthly newsletter.
Suggested further reading: The Benefits of Effective Email Marketing (+Tips on How to Grow Your Mailing List)
Use local listings to increase organic traffic
Local listings are another great way to ensure you get traffic to your website. The more places your business appears, the more likely you will get traffic to your website. We highly recommend that you get your business listed on Google Business Profile (formerly Google my Business). This ensures that your brand appears when someone searches a town or city name or even uses “near me” in their search bar.
Make sure you include as much information as possible about your business on all local listings and include as a bare minimum:
- Business name
- Address
- Telephone
- Directions (on Google)
- Opening hours
- Reviews
- Images
Suggested further reading: What are local listings and how can you use them to market your business?
Paid ways to increase traffic
Paid campaigns are a great way to increase website traffic as they allow you tighter control and audience segmentation.
Paid social – Run paid campaigns on any social media channel to increase clicks to your website.
Suggested reading – Why You Should Run Paid Social Media Advertising For Small Business
Paid Search – Run ads to appear in search. You can use search, display, shopping, and even app and video ads.
Suggested reading – The Complete Guide to Google Ads
We hope that you have found this blog useful and that there are some exciting new ideas which you can implement to drive more traffic to your website. There are plenty of links included too which give a more in-depth analysis of a solution.
If you want any help with any aspect of your marketing, you can contact us today. Why not also sign up for our free newsletter which offers tips, tricks and industry insights every month.
Prepare for SEO take off 🚀
Take the first step to ranking higher with our free SEO audit.
Get a complete overview of optimisation opportunities and uncover the actions you need to take to scale the SERPs.
