If you’ve ever asked a marketer or business owner what they’d like most in the world, they’ve probably told you “potential customers”. And what comes after customers on a marketer’s wish list? More traffic to their website. There are numerous ways you can generate traffic to your website, but in this post, I’ve just penned down several tips to generate FREE organic traffic to your website. Let’s dive right in…
Write & Accept Guest Posts
Write Guest Posts: Guest posting isn’t just about getting links, it is to create the steady flow of free organic traffic to your website. A site like Similar-Web helps you to find high traffic sites in your niche and the key reason why you should guest post to a trusted site is the traffic benefits without having a link pointing to your website. So just make sure you only contribute to highly-relevant and quality sites in your niche. Being a contributor on authority sites like Huffington Post or Forbes not only generates targeted traffic to your website but also helps you establish as a pro in your field.
Accept Guest Posts: Many websites need links and access to your audience for SEO purposes. So if they’re not your direct competitor, allow them to guest post on your site. By investing in your company they’ll promote the content they’ve created which in turn gets you in the front of their customer base.
Don’t Forget Email Marketing
Collect email addresses and build a list of the customers who have shared their email address. Then simply send them consistent marketing emails for social promotion. A newsletter is also a crucial tool for driving traffic to your website and hence ensure that you have a newsletter option on your site. Whether this is a daily, weekly or a monthly newsletter to teach and sell, this is the right way to keep a tight grip on your customers.
You can also promote your blog posts to your email list but this shouldn’t be your main focus of all emails. Therefore, include only one or two links back to your blog posts in order to increase traffic, leads, and sales.
A giveaway is also one of the best ways to build an email list and thus a new audience. By giving away high-value gifts, encourage your entrants to share their experience leading to more entries. Kingsumo Giveaways plugin can easily help you achieve this.
Note: Be careful not to bombard people with useless emails about every single update happening in your business.
Optimize Your Site for SEO
Manipulating search engine rankings is a very hard task. So instead you should be more cautious to make your site look as attractive as possible for the search engines crawling your website. But the hardest way to drive free organic traffic to your website is by optimizing your site for Google as it holds more than 70% of the search engine market share and #1 position in generating the best source of free traffic.
As the competition is huge, you need to have a great website both in terms of SEO and Content if you really want to get a part of the pie. So, What should be done?
- Conduct a Content and SEO audit for your site
- Optimize old content and publish new high-quality content
- Do keyword research
- Target the popular and long-tail keywords for SEO
- Optimize your headline and content URL
- Create internal links to new content
- Make images SEO friendly
- Create correct affiliate links
Software such as SEMrush can provide you full SEO audit and show you what you should need to fix up. Investing time in optimizing your site for SEO is always time well spent.
Content Marketing
There is no magic wand for content marketing success! This is why, write highly relevant long-form content with compelling headlines, vary the length and format of the content to make it look more appealing to different kinds of readers.
Many businesses fall off the track as they either lack a solid content marketing strategy or if they’ve, it’s seriously off the mark.
Even if you’re using all the SEO tactics, without creating any better content marketing strategy, you’ll be only wasting your time. So how can you create a well-planned content marketing strategy that works? Before we jump into that, take an insight on different forms of content that should be involved in your strategy:
- Blogs
- Videos
- eBooks
- Podcasts, and infographics
The overall mix of all these different types of content makes a good content marketing strategy. Now, moving on …below are some of the actual strategies for generating organic traffic:
- Go social and build strong connections
- Make proper use of categories
- Curate content by staying active on social media
- Go after referral traffic
- Post frequently
- Create top 10 website posts
- Add text to your blog posts images
- Contact and invite influential bloggers
- Write a responsive post
- Work on headlines
- Join a blogging community like ProBlogger or CopyBlogger
- Submit your posts to Reddit and StumbleUpon
- Share your posts regularly on Facebook
- Comment, answer and respond
- Promote content on Outbrain/Taboola
When it comes to the long-term return on every dollar spent, SEO and Content Marketing beat paid marketing techniques almost every time.
Speed Up your Site
A fast and responsive site is the prominent factor for better conversions rate and as more and more users are browsing the web using mobiles, the searches on mobiles are rising drastically. You simply can’t hide away from this fact!
A recently conducted survey shows that nearly 28 percent of mobile searches are converting within an hour. Therefore, it’s really essential to offer users an optimized mobile version of your site.
If your website is still loading slower, you need to consider options such as moving to a faster web host to leverage caching benefits. With the help of plugins like caching plugin for WordPress, it’s not very difficult to speed up your site.
Do you know about Accelerated Mobile Pages? This is the new trend in search marketing industry and I’ve also discussed this digital marketing trend in my previous article.
Interview Thought Leaders in your Niche
Do you think interviews are only for big business associates? You’d be very surprised to know the number of people who’ll be ready to interact with you if you just take the initiative to ask them. For this, you only need to send them emails requesting an interview and publish those interviews on your blog. You can also interview experts with an audio session or text Q & A’s.
Their name recognition will not only improve your credibility and drive more traffic to your website but the industry thought leaders will likely share your content too, which will result in higher shares/reactions. It would indirectly drive more visitors to your site through referral traffic.
Use Schema Microdata
The term “schema microdata” may sound like a foreign language initially but it has been around for many years. As only some people actually know what schema is or what it is for, you’ll find relatively few sites that bother to use microdata. Please do not get embarrassed – I’m going to brief you about schema and why do you need to make it an integral part of SEO strategy. So, what is Schema?
It is a type of microdata that helps search engines to interpret the information present on your website in a more effective ways so that it becomes easy for them to serve relevant results to users based on their queries. Next, you should know, how it works?
Alike other markup formats, schema is also included in the content of a page to explain clearly what it is and how it should be treated? It’s elements and attributes can be fixed directly into the HTML code of a site to offer search engine crawlers with more information. You can easily find various tutorials online on getting started with Schema.
Major search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing has already recommended the implementation of the schema for the purpose of providing embedded rich information about any specific post or article. This in turn, improves traffic to your website and regulate better click through rates. To generate schema for your site you can use tools like Google Search Console (Webmaster Tool) and Webcode Tools For Schema Generation
Participate in Q and A’s Platforms
Participating in Q and A’s platforms is one of the effective ways to gain an authority in your niche and increase your website traffic. Every day, hundreds of questions asked by users are published and you should be prepared to answer them first. It’s quite simple! People ask questions and you post answers for them. So if you post good answers embedded with relevant backlinks to your site, your traffic graphic is definitely going to show a spike. Most dominating Q & A platforms are:
- Quora
- Yahoo Answers
- Stack Overflow
- Mind the book
- Answers.com
These platforms are created to be the easiest place to write, share online content and serve as the great source to increase free organic traffic.
Bottom Line: Be consistent while using these proven strategies and do not wait for overnight results. Just stick to them!
I’d love you to implement at least two or three strategies in this list and then come back here to share your experience but if you’ve already tried and tested these strategies, then please comment below to tell which worked best in your case.
On the closing note, I’d love to know your favorite strategies to generate free organic traffic to your website.