Whether running a blog or an online business, website traffic is very important. It’s one of the most used success metrics. The number of users your site gets closely relates to your business’s opportunities to generate leads, increase brand awareness, and build relationships. That’s why I compiled 12 reliable, free ways to increase website traffic without experience.
But first, let’s explore possible reasons you may not be getting enough traffic to your site:
- Failure to understand the search intent
- Lacking enough worthy content on your site
- Focusing on too competitive keywords
- Your SEO game is too weak
- Failure to promote your content online
- Your headlines aren’t click-worthy enough
- Giving less attention to user experience
- Ignoring social media presence
Within this article, you’ll understand how to solve these and more mistakes that could cost you traffic. And then get more tips on how to increase your website traffic to your business for free.
12 Ways to Increase Traffic to Any Website
Whether you’re running a food blog or an academic one, the following methods apply to any website. They even work for online businesses like SEO agencies and online shops. Let’s dive into the 12 most reliable yet free ways to increase traffic to your site and save you the struggle.
1. Start a Business Blog
The most basic way to increase traffic to your site is to introduce a blog and start publishing great content in your industry. More importantly, you may focus entirely on posting long-form content and targeting long-tail keywords. Recent statistics show that:
- Websites with a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages.
- Bloggers who write articles of 2,000+ words are far more likely to have strong results.
- 72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic.
- Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.
- Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.
You see, blogging is non-negotiable for people looking to boost their online presence. A well-optimized blog helps you get more readers, email subscribers, and backlinks. As more people engage with your website, search engines get more signals that your content is worth ranking.
So I want you to write really-awesome content on your blog and understand your audience. Content that meets the search intent and offers the right solutions to your audience. Don’t give answers like ‘it depends’ but instead go further to explain to them what it depends on and why.
2. Target Long-tail Keywords
Keywords refer to phrases or terms people type on search engines to discover answers. As you’d expect, some keywords are searched more than others. For instance, using keyword research tools, you can notice that in the United States, website traffic gets 9,900 monthly searches, while how to get more traffic to my website only get 320 searches.
So, the more the search volume, the higher the potential traffic, right? Not so fast. Ranking for high-volume keywords can be tricky, especially if your website is new. Instead of focusing on ranking for website traffic aiming for 9,900 monthly traffic, you can target its long-tail version. And you’ll end up driving more qualified leads for your business fast.
After analyzing over 306 million keywords, Backlinko reported that 91.8% of all search queries are long-tail keywords. Search Engine Journal argues that these keywords are less competitive and specific enough to help you understand search intent and drive high-converting leads.
Other statistics show that:
- Ling-tail keywords make up as much as 70% of all search traffic.
- Pages optimized for long tail keywords move up 11 positions on average
- Conversion rates are 2.5 times higher than for head keywords.
You should target long-tail keywords and understand your audience’s search intent. And then write excellent content that answers all their questions and offers practical solutions. That way, you create brand authority and increase the chances of your visitors turning into customers.
3. Place your Keywords Strategically
Writing great articles on your blog isn’t enough – you should optimize them by placing your target keywords strategically. This approach helps search engines understand what your content is about and rank it on the SERPs. Specifically, you should include your target keywords in the:
- SEO title and H1 tag (towards the beginning)
- H2 and H3 headings (including synonyms)
- Introduction (first) paragraph of your text
- Body of your text (naturally – no stuffing)
- Image name and alt attribute
- Meta description
- Article URL
You should optimize your content for one target keyword per post and avoid keyword stuffing. And also use some of its synonyms. For instance, if you’re targeting how to start a blog, you can use alternative keyphrases like how to create a website to avoid too much repetition.
4. Write Irresistible Headlines
Headlines are super important parts of any content. After testing different headlines, studies show that a good headline can increase traffic by 20% or 30% and others by up to 500%. We can conclude from this study that headlines can make your content go viral.
You can use a few tools to gauge the suitability of your headings. One of them is MonsterInsights’s Header Analyzer which assigns your headline a score from 0 to 100.
As seen above, the title “How To Increase Traffic To Your Website (13 Proven Ways)” scored 93%. You can increase this score and boost your chances of more clicks by using the following:
- 20-30% common words (how, to, your)
- Uncommon words (ways)
- Emotional words (money)
- Power words (how-to, proven)
- About 55 characters long
- Pay attention to the first and last three words
Of course, tools are only meant to guide you. And you can ask your social followers to vote for the most suitable title, which would be way better than relying on tools entirely.
5. Leverage Video Marketing
Studies found that video gives a 157% organic traffic increase from the search engine results page. It is an effective strategy that nearly 61% of companies use video content as the major part of their marketing plan. You can increase your website traffic by embedding your videos in your blogs. Then, your videos will appear in the search results when people click the videos tab.
One of the best strategies you can use is to start a niche YouTube channel, create quality content around low-competitive keywords, and optimize your videos for SEO. Then embed in your blogs or articles to drive more people from YouTube and from search results to your site.
6. Internal Linking
Internal links are links from one page to another within the same domain. Linking your posts internally helps people discover content on your site more easily. As a result, they stay on your site longer, and the bounce rate decreases, which sends positive signals to search engines.
Therefore, when writing content on your website, link an article to three or more pages to enhance your site’s user experience. It helps drive more traffic to your pages and ensures search engines understand what a particular page is talking about and rank it appropriately.
7. Build Quality Backlinks
Backlinks, which refer to a link from an external domain to your website or webpage, are Google’s top three ranking factors. Yet, Ahref says that 66.31% of pages have no backlinks. It has been proven that the more backlinks a website has, the more traffic is likely to get.
While the average cost of buying a link is $361.44, and the average cost of publishing a paid guest post is $77.80, there’re different link-building strategies that you can adopt for free. Then, you can boost your site rankings and increase your traffic. Check out how this strategy works:
And after publishing ‘enough’ quality content on your site with statistics, primary research, and visuals, you can focus on building more links to your articles to increase your rankings.
8. Update your Content Regularly
Publishing new content and forgetting to refresh the existing ones is one mistake that could cost you traffic. In fact, a website updated its old content and increased its traffic by nearly 96%. And you can enjoy even more results if you update your content regularly.
First, updating ensures your content offers practical and workable solutions to your audience. And second, it helps you fix broken internal and external links that could otherwise harm your SEO rankings and traffic. Not to mention that you can optimize your content for search intent.
Other ways you can increase traffic to your website include:
- Twisting your titles and meta description
- Adding new data or resources
- Remove or edit broken links and images
- Add new relevant keywords and their long-tails
- Replacing outdated information
While refreshing your content, head to your Google Search Console account. Then check what search terms are driving impressions and clicks to your site. Then optimize your content for such search terms. Eventually, you’ll get more traffic to your site with minimum effort.
9. Enhance your Page Speed
Site speed has always been a ranking factor. And Google has a tool called PageSpeed Insights that helps you monitor your site performance and offer suggestions on what to improve on.
Speed as a ranking factor aside, have you ever waited for over 30 seconds for a webpage to load? Me neither! In addition to ruining your rankings on SERPs, slow speed will sky lock your bounce rate, and more people will not get to see what your business offers.
You can improve your website speed by:
- Getting a reliable web hosting solution
- Compressing and optimizing your images
- Enable browser caching
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Reduce redirects
- Cache your web pages
The faster your site loads, the better. It helps you lower the bounce rate, which then helps your site rank better on SERPs.
10. Mobile Responsiveness is Key
Google is, so far, the most used search engine, with its market share increasing to 91.88% in June 2022. Semrush reports that its desktop traffic accounted for 20.8% in the past six months, compared to 79.2% on mobile devices. And the situation is no different on Bing.com, the second most popular search engine after Google, where mobile traffic accounted for 75.9%.
Consequently, your website should be responsive across various devices, including smaller smartphones. Otherwise, you’ll redirect most of your visitors to other websites.
11. SERP Appearance Optimisation
You should always include your target keyword in your SEO title and meta description. But that’s not enough. You should optimize these essential parts of your content to increase the probability of your site being featured in the search snippets and encourage more organic clicks.
Ensure all your site meta descriptions and title are visible on SERPs. Make your descriptions between 155 and 165 characters and your titles 60 characters or less (55 is better).
Check out this example of a search snippet on “what is digital strategy.”
And you can have your site listed by including lists in your content and images and answering FAQs. Check how Google’s featured snippets work, adopt the strategy and get more clicks.
12. Don’t Ignore Social Media
Writing great content isn’t enough; you still have to push it online for more people to discover and get the intended information. And one of the ways you can do so is by sharing your content on social media, either as images, videos, infographics, or just text.
Twitter is the most used platform to share links and short text, while Facebook and YouTube are more suitable for videos. Though, you can still use images and reels on Facebook and Instagram. Or even repurpose your content in these free blogging sites for more visitors.
Sharing your content with the right audience helps you drive traffic to your audience and create brand awareness. More so, it helps you discover more backlinks opportunities.
FAQs on How to Increase Website Traffic
Organic traffic refers to visits from search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. You increase it by publishing content that meets the search intent and answers questions that search engine users are actively asking. Content marketing is crucial in increasing organic traffic.
You can increase traffic to your website by starting a niche blog, writing long-form content, and optimizing it for SERPs. Then add internal links, build backlinks and share your content on social media. And update it regularly to add new data or remove broken links.
You can boost your site traffic through content marketing and write excellent content targeting low competitive long-tail keywords. And then, you can use social media marketing to drive people to your website and PPC marketing on social media and search engines.
There’re many ways to make money on your website, like selling ad space to businesses, applying for Google Adsense, leveraging affiliate marketing, or selling your products.
A website or webpage with more appealing but consistent colors, images, backgrounds, and other visuals is usually more attractive to visitors than one without.
Backlinks, links from external sites to your pages, play the most important role in website traffic. They help rank your website higher on SERPs, increasing your chances of getting more clicks and qualified leads that you can turn to customers.
You can check any website’s traffic using free SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahref, Ubersuggest, MonsterInsights, and Google Search Console.
Conclusion: What Next?
Increasing traffic to your site is very important, as it allows you to get more impressions and leads to your business. So, if at all you want to increase traffic to your website, which I know you do, here’re the 12 most proven and guaranteed ways to do so:
- Start a blog – get more traffic and backlinks
- Long-tail keywords – less competition, higher conversion
- Place your keywords strategically – no stuffing
- Write irresistible headlines – make them clickable
- Video marketing – optimize videos for search engines
- Internal linking – get visitors to stay longer
- Build backlinks – improve SEO rankings
- Update your content – fix broken links and images
- Enhance your page speed – reduce bounce rate
- Responsiveness – most users browse on mobile
- SERP appearance optimization – get more clicks
- Use social media – more traffic and backlinks
What Next? How many well-optimized blogs do you have on your website? If less than 50, reach this goal first. Focus on one niche to establish authority, and let Google and users understand what topics your website covers. Then, you can implement the above strategies.
If you already have a lot of content on your blog, check out which strategies you missed while creating your content. Have you linked your articles internally? Are your articles well-optimized for long-tail keywords? Any backlinks? These are some of the issues to start with.
But if you still need help getting traffic to your website through content creation and SEO, Contact Me, and I’ll see what or how I can help. Or let me know if you have any questions.
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