Tried-and-tested tips to drive free traffic to your website
Every brand, business, and blog owner wants to drive more traffic to their site and boost their online presence. We all know that paid campaigns can drive a lot of traffic, but many website owners don’t realise there are plenty of ways to drive free traffic too. Black-hat Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are becoming a thing of the past. Google and other search engines now penalise ‘shady’ SEO practices and encourage businesses and marketers to focus on organic growth instead.
With a combination of white-hat SEO, social media marketing, and our other tried-and-tested ways to drive free traffic to your site, you’ll be in the best position possible to convert new traffic into leads and sales.
photo/ William Iven
Start a blog or a website and focus on keywords
If you don’t already have a blog for your business, then you should strongly consider starting one. A blog is a great way to share your expertise, reach out to potential new customers, and ultimately drive traffic to your website. However, it’s not enough to simply have a business blog; you need to be using it regularly too with a focus on keywords. The keywords you are using are crucial for driving traffic to your website.
You should be looking to score some serious rankings for high-volume, low competition keywords. It’s worth learning more about keyword research and why it’s vital to anything you produce. When writing a new blog and exploring the competition, take some time to choose the right keywords that are relevant and will give you a chance of ranking.
If the difficulty level is high, then try targeting a long-form keyword, or a keyword with less competition. A little bit of extra care here will go a long way to getting hits on your content.
Write guest posts
Guest posts are a fantastic way to collaborate within your industry and highlight your expert knowledge through another brand. Write a guest post for their page and everybody wins. The host platform gets to post some new, exciting, and expertly-researched content for free, and you get to promote your brand to a new audience.
Like all things in life, some guest post opportunities are better than others, so fully evaluate your options before sending a proposal. Consider what you want to achieve from the guest post. Find out if you can include a backlink (and ideally a dofollow link) or if there will there be any link at all. Also, check if there has been any interaction with previous guest posts on the site. Find appropriate guest post opportunities, select the most time-effective ones, and get your content out there.
Go social
If you don’t already have a social media strategy in place, then this is another free, tried-and-tested way to build traffic. It doesn’t always need to be Instagram posts, LinkedIn shares, and stories. You could become a regular contributor in Facebook groups or spend time answering questions on Reddit and Quora, and drive traffic to your site that way. You need to give a little back and become a valued member of these groups, but there’s no doubt that social media plays a vital role in driving traffic to any company’s website.
Re-work and update your existing content
When was the last time you updated your website? If it is out of date, then Google’s already noticed. Re-work some of your old content, carry out some new SEO research, and there’s a good chance that freshly worked blog posts will quickly rise in rankings. When it does, that means more traffic to your page at no cost to you, because the initial work has already been done.
There are so many ways to drive new traffic to your website without spending a penny. As well as the techniques we’ve already mentioned, you could produce free e-books, webinars and courses, or simply keep a close eye on your existing traffic to squeeze new visitors out of every keyword and page possible. Put white-hat SEO at the forefront of everything you do, and visitors will always find a way to your website.
Author: Chad Harwood
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