The one thing digital marketers and online business owners struggle with is increasing website traffic. Traffic sets the foundation of which direction you’ll be moving in with your blog. It can potentially influence your conversion rates and help you become an authority in your niche.
I mean, if no one was there to read your blog post, did you even write it? If no one bought your product, does it even exist?
Now, that might be a bit of an exaggeration but you know it’s technically true. If you’re not able to share your ideas with anyone then they might as well not be real. This is why traffic is important and why we’ve put together this post.
Here, you’ll find 10+ proven ways to increase website traffic for free. Whether you have 100 people visiting your website per day or consider yourself lucky to get 10 on a good day, you’ll find something in this list to grow those numbers.
We’ll look at how you can:
How to Use This Listicle: Read through each tip and then click on the Resources and Tools to implement it on your own site!
Table of Contents
Increase Website Traffic Through Your Content
Tip #1: Improve Your SEO
Optimizing your content for search engines is valuable and if you haven’t spent time understanding it then you’re doing your online business a disservice. It’s important to concern yourself with creating content that gives search engine robots a cue to what it’s all about since they directly influence your site’s ranking.
You shouldn’t have to go out of your way to implement SEO tactics. For starters, when you set out to write a post, you can make sure you’re adding meta descriptions and title tags. And getting started with optimizing images for SEO is pretty easy, too – simply add in the alt text, description, and (optionally) a caption. WordPress makes this a lot easier through helpful plugins like Yoast SEO and the EWWW Image Optimizer.
And when you’ve gotten into the practice of doing this regularly, you can try out other SEO tactics like keyword research, diversifying your content, and link building.
And if you’ve already been implementing these SEO practices on your site then be sure to get a complete SEO audit of it every month to see what things you’re doing right and which things need to be fixed. Online tools like Moz and SEMrush can help you with this and give you helpful insight on how you can improve your website’s SEO. And if you don’t have a budget set aside for SEO auditing just yet then go for Screaming Frog.
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Tip #2: Produce High-Quality Content
Call it compelling, viral, empowering, engaging, memorable, shareable, or whatever, it’s all just high-quality content that gets you to share it on your social media and be curious about what else that website publishes.
Creating high-quality content for your blog will keep your visitors coming back for more. But what is high-quality content? Its content that is entertaining, answers questions, solves a problem, inspirational and motivational, and is thought provoking. And there are a number of different types of content that you can experiment with, such as:
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Lists
- Case Studies
- Tutorials and How-to Guides
- E-book
- Reviews
- Videos
- Roundups of Resources
And it’s a good idea to mix things up a bit and try out different post lengths and formats to see which one works best with your target audience. Maybe they want to read long-form content and you’re only publishing short-form content. Or perhaps they’re interested in seeing a video tutorial as opposed to a how-to post. Doing this can also help you attract more (new) visitors to your blog.
Another important point you’ll want to keep in mind is that your content should always be data-driven and you should link to reputable resources wherever possible. This will help you establish credibility with your audience and convert them to paying customers.
Finally, make sure you’re creating a good first impression with each post you write. Why? Because if you’re trying to increase website traffic then there are going to be a lot of new readers on your blog and some of them will begin reading it from the most recent post you’ve published. This is why it’s important to make a lasting impact with each piece of content you publish.
Tip #3: Update Old Posts
If you’re not publishing 100% evergreen content on your website (who is?) then it’s a good idea to go back and update the older posts. And if you’ve been publishing content on your blog for a few years now then this also gives you the opportunity to run a content audit on your site. What this means is that you go back, look at all of the posts you’ve published and:
- Update outdated information. Are you linking to studies that were conducted in 2014? Can they be replaced with links to more recent studies?
- Remove content that conflicts with the message you’re delivering. Do you have a lot of posts from two years ago about how SEO doesn’t work and are now publishing posts that talk about the benefits of on-page SEO? You know what you have to do!
- Merge related short-forms posts. Did you write a quick tutorial for installing an SSL certificate to your website and then two months later took a screencast of the process? Merge them into a long-form post and maybe even add a resources roundup to it!
According to Search Engine Land, Google’s Quality Update is all about how the search engine made changes to its core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals. If you want to read more about it in their own words then Chapter 3 of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide focuses on offering quality content and services.
Tip #4: Submit Your Feed to Aggregator Sites
Aggregator sites are a great way to get referral traffic for your website’s blog. This is one of the best ways to increase website traffic if your blog is brand new. For those of you who don’t already know, aggregator sites (typically) don’t publish content of their own. Instead, the import a daily feed of posts from other sites.
The key idea here is to find reputable aggregator sites within your niche and submit your website’s RSS feed to them. Whenever you publish a new post it’ll show up in the aggregation site and anyone who visits the website will be able to see its title, featured image, excerpt, and meta data and redirect to your website to read the full post. Aside from the traffic benefits, content aggregation sites also give you backlinks.
Finding a suitable content aggregation site can be a daunting task since there are, quite literally, millions of them out there. Most of them are full of spam comments and links while some of the popular ones (like Alltop) are incredibly diverse and getting featured on them is difficult. If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to look for content aggregators within your niche. For instance, World of WordPress is a great content aggregation site in the WordPress niche.
Increase Website Traffic Through Outreach
Tip #5: Share Infographics
Designing high-quality, data-driven infographics for a particular topic can help you bring in traffic to your site on autopilot. Your goal should be to create and share infographics that many people within your niche will want to link to. This is why you will have to do a little bit of research before you begin designing the infographic.
One way to go about it is to identify high-authority websites and influencers in your niche and figure out what they talk about in their blog posts, social media platforms, podcasts, etc. Once you’ve figured out a common problem that a most of them are concerned with, you’ll be in a better position to create content (in this case: infographics) that they’ll want to link to.
Once you’ve identified a topic that you want to create an infographic for, you’ll want to make sure the data and numbers you’re including in your infographic are backed by reputable sources. And link back to the source (or add a list of reference links at the bottom of the infographic) wherever possible. Doing this will help you build credibility with your readers.
And the best part about this approach is that it’s based on link building. You can potentially get referral traffic through anyone’s website that’s linked to your infographic. If you don’t have an in-house designer or the budget to hire a professional, you can always take the DIY approach and use an online designing tool to help you build a high-quality infographic. We recommend trying out Visme and Easelly.
Tip #6: Utilize Email Marketing
Though email marketing is a traditional form of online marketing, it is still a thing and is, in fact, one of the best ways to boost your site’s traffic. What you do is you put up a subscription form on your website to gather email addresses and begin building your email list.
Next, you want to create content for your email newsletters. This can be anything from special discounts to a list of the most-viewed posts in the past week to a simple notification about an update in your business. One thing that you have to keep in mind is that your subscribers don’t want to receive spammy emails from you – that’s (hopefully) not what they signed up for.
The thing you have to understand about email marketing is that once a visitor gives you their email address, you already know that they want to hear more from you. Whether this is in the form of coupons and deals or access to premium content depends on the type of business you’re running.
Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to invest some time into creating email marketing campaigns and setting schedules in advance. This way, you won’t feel overwhelmed having to create an email newsletter each week and you won’t have to worry about losing subscribers to spammy emails. If you’re looking for a free solution to test out the email marketing waters or work on growing your email list then we suggest giving MailChimp a shot. On the other hand, premium solutions like Constant Contact and ConvertKit offer advanced features and are great for medium sized businesses.
Tip #7: Prioritize Mobile Usability
This isn’t exactly outreach but it’s still something you should be doing since mobile usability numbershave gone up significantly these past few years. Making sure your website is thoroughly responsive and mobile-friendly is incredibly important.
For starters, you might want to head over to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to get a quick report of your site’s mobile usability – in terms of speed and optimization – and some helpful optimization suggestions that you should implement to improve your scores.
And if you’re all set on that front then you can take things to the next level by exploring and implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which is designed to help you make your site’s pages load faster on mobile devices.
Increase Website Traffic Through Social Platforms
Tip #8: Answer Questions on Quora
Quora is a Q&A platform where people post questions and experts provide helpful answers. And though it’s been around since 2009, it’s gaining a lot of traction these days making it a great source to tap into to receive high volumes of traffic for your website.
One of the best things about Quora is that a well thought out answer you provide that’s backed by data can bring you traffic for months on end. It’s kind of like a social platform – whenever someone upvotes your answer, it’ll show up in their feed and be visible to their followers.
The key to driving traffic to your blog via Quora is to make sure you’re providing enough information and delivering value through your answer but aren’t giving every last detail away. You want the upvotes but you also want the reader to click on the link, land on your website, and read the rest there.
Tip #9: Post Videos on YouTube
Google loves owns YouTube which is what makes it an obvious traffic-gaining platform to tap into. It’s free and it makes for a great way to drive organic traffic to your website. The idea here is to create video content that adds value to your blog’s content and then provide a link to your site from the video’s description.
Here’s a quick list of some of the type of video content that does well on YouTube:
- Product/service reviews.
- How-to videos/tutorials.
- Vlogs.
- Educational videos.
Be sure to end your video with a call to action prompting the viewer to head over to your site (or a particular post on your website) for more information about the topic.
Tip #10: Get Social With Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest/Instagram
Social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram are great ways to promote your blog to your own followers and in popular groups/hashtags. And by this I don’t mean send out a generic tweet every time you publish a blog post. You have to actively participate in the groups you’re targeting which involves a lot of liking, commenting, and sharing.
What a lot of people who set out to promote their blog on social media platforms don’t understand is that it’s a social media platform not an advertisement broadcasting channel. I mean, would you follow someone who monotonously posted links to their published content on their social profiles? Would you comment on them?
Tip #11: Leverage LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform
If your website is more business-centric then you’re missing out on a huge chunk of traffic if you’re not already leveraging LinkedIn’s publishing platform, Pulse. It’s a great way to promote the content you publish on your website. One way to do this is by writing a summarized version of a post you’ve published on your site and linking back to it from the LinkedIn post.
Anyone who’s interested in reading the post on LinkedIn might want to find out more about the topic and bada bing bada boom – you just set up a LinkedIn traffic machine.
Tip #12: Write on Medium
Medium is a free, hosted blogging platform that a lot of content marketers use to promote their blog posts and articles. The best part about it is that you can freely link-drop the same way you would on your own blog and garner a bunch of high-quality backlinks to your website along the way.
But just like with every other type of content you create, make sure your posts on your Medium profile deliver value and don’t come off as spammy.
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Tip #13: Be Relevant on Reddit
Reddit (also known as the front page of the Internet) is an early-2000s looking forum-style platform where you can post relevant links from other websites and original text posts. Both of these channels make for excellent ways to increase website traffic to your blog if you’re careful, that is. The first step is to join the sub-reddits you’re interested in and then actively participate in it to gather karma points.
Once you have a few thousand karma points under your belt, you should be ready to publish your first text post. And based on which sub-reddit you’re interested in, you can begin creating link submissions. Remember: when on Reddit, just do what everyone else is doing.
Two things that you have to keep in mind with Reddit are (1) Redditors hate marketing and (2) your posts and comments are moderated. If you, your comment, or your post comes off as spammy then you will be banned from the sub-reddit you’re participating in.
Tip #14: Create Presentations on SlideShare
SlideShare is a lesser used social platform for bringing in traffic though it might be a great fit for your niche. The idea is to create high-quality, SEO-friendly presentation slides that can help diversify your content and increase your visibility on the web.
For instance, you could create a presentation version of your most recent blog post and then link to your original blog post from within the presentation. One huge benefit of creating presentations is that they have more visual elements to them than textual ones and they’re a lot easier to create than infographics. This is precisely why SlideShare is an easy social platform to get started with if you’re trying to increase website traffic.
What are some of the ways you’ve used to increase website traffic? Let us know by commenting below!
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