Website traffic is vital to running a successful website. Revenue from profits pays the bills and keeps the lights on. To that end, if you can increase website traffic, you can increase profits as a site. If you can increase traffic while not spending more on expenses it’s a win-win.
The best way to increase website traffic for free is by writing quality content and following it up with social media interaction. Starting out, always focus on writing content and work on the social media and outreach once you have 50 content pages minimum.
There are a lot of other sites out there that have done similar posts to this, but this one is going to be a little different.
Why? Many of the lists are from 5+ years ago and they have you putting links to your site from directories and such. Nowadays that will just get you a penalty.
What I am going to give to you here are safe ways that will stand the test of time and not get you future penalties.
Why Do You Need More Website Traffic?
While every website owner’s ego wants to see a site filled with visitors, there are some practical reasons for having more website traffic.
- More traffic means more customers means more money in your pocket.
- More traffic going to your site is an indicator to search engines your site is a prime destination. It is just one of the factors but is still a real-world indicator that Google uses.
Without the fluff, those are really the 2 biggest reasons. It’s the same reason that either online or brick-and-mortar, every business wants to grow (and if your website makes money, it needs to be treated as a business).
How to Measure Success of Increased Traffic
Here’s the rub. Just increasing traffic itself is not necessarily going to make you more money. Not all traffic is equal.
There is free traffic, and there is converting traffic. Ideally you want as much converting traffic as possible.
Put another way, you are looking to try to get more people to your site that are in the mindset of purchasing either now or in the near future.
Done right, this is not only entirely possible, but it’s very probably with some elbow grease.
How To Increase ROI of Increased Traffic
As your traffic is increasing, you need to ensure that it is profitable website traffic.
That is, window shoppers won’t pay the bills. There are a host of ways you can use to ensure that you use the traffic to its utmost.
- Advertising
- Collect emails for email marketing
- Links to affiliate products
There are many ways but the key is to ensure that you use your traffic increases wisely. Watch Analytics and the Search Console to that you know about your visitor demographics and such.
Free Ways To Increase Website Traffic From Google
1. Create Fresh New Content
Creating new high-quality content is always the best way to ensure a bright future. Not only does Google like to see new content on a website so the site doesn’t appear stale, but each new piece of content can rank potentially for thousands of searches and can attract a few more visitors.
Lots of new content over time is what helps to establish a website as an authority in Google’s eyes.
Starting out with a new site, ideally you should have at least 50-60 solid pieces of content with 1200+ words before you worry about social media and such. You need to build the base first.
If your site is established, you still will want to have at least 2-3 new pieces of content a week to keep the ball rolling and keep increase website traffic from this.
2. On-Page SEO
The best ways to increase incoming traffic is always to first optimize your site and pages to naturally rank better before looking for new sources of visitors, so that’s where we’ll start today.
I put together a great article for on-page SEO which has a 14-point checklist to get all of the basics setup right on your pages and site.
3. Review Internal Linking On Your Site
Internal linking within your site offers suggestions to readers of one article. Within the article, link out to relative articles on your site. This creates sort of a mesh internal link setup within your site but more importantly, you are giving your read more of the related information they are looking for easily.
4. Post Your Content To Social Media
After you create your new amazing content, post it to social media to share with all your future readers. Share it on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and especially Facebook. In fact, put some social sharing links on your articles so your readers can like and share it as well.
5. Capture Visitor Emails for Email Marketing
Many visitors may be interested but not ready to purchase. Email marketing can be very lucrative so offer your readers some extra content such as an ebook that you have written in exchange for subscribing to your email list. Quite often you can either notify via email on really great new content or perhaps a new affiliate offer that you can give.
6. Target Long Tail Keywords
Target those niche keywords that have low competition and a decent volume. The easiest way I’ve found is to use Long Tail Pro which works great at finding long tail keywords like the name suggests. I can usually find 3-4 keywords that I can rank for within 5 minutes and at $25/month it’s worth it for me. They do have a 7-day trial of Long Tail Pro if you want to check it out for yourself and if don’t like it, cancel it. You get some great keywords in the meantime at the least.
7. Track Your Keyword Rankings
You can track your rankings in Google Search Console or a tool such as SEMrush (get your free SEMrush trial here). Fairly simple things and there are several free ones out there as well in which I listed a few in an my article on websites to get your true ranking.
8. Use Google Analytics and the Google Search Console
Both of these Google tools can tell you an amazing amount of information about where your visitors come from, your actual visitor count, and much more. The search console is really great for seeing what search results have you showing as a search impression. You can see how you rank for terms and you can see the trend for your site traffic. These are really great and free resources direct from Google.
9. Create YouTube Videos the Easy Way
Creating your own YouTube channel and putting some videos on is an easy way to free traffic. YouTube videos do rank in google searches, but the thing has always been how to create good quality videos relatively easy. I came across what is a great idea the other day and wow the results are amazing. This is going to amaze you.
I found a program called Content Samurai (from the markets of Market Samurai) and you can create a video by selecting a template for the general topic (finance, business, food, etc) that you want the video on. Then you copy in some content you have written, perhaps a few paragraphs or so about the topic, and hit the create button.
I’m going to create an example tomorrow to link to this, but in a a nutshell, there is a voice that reads out your content like a commercial, and it picks up words in each paragraph and will find a matching image and have it as the background while it prints and reads the words in a natural voice. It’s amazingly well done and you can really create a new video and start uploading it in under 10 minutes and the quality is enough that I’m going to subscribe myself permanently.
But if you want to try this, try it like I just did, then take my special link and you will get a free 7-day trial of Content Samurai and give it a use for a few days. Create a dozen free videos without watermarks and upload them and get free traffic without spending a penny.
Content Samurai does offer a YouTube Cheat-Sheet product you can get completely free with shows you tips for how to get videos to rank higher on YouTube. COMPLETELY FREE. Cool huh? Here’s the link if you want a free copy of YouTube Cheat-Sheet.
10. Engage With Your Customers Online
Join forums and places such as Reddit and interact with potential customers or current customers. You may have the perfect solution, and when you’re part of the community you become the likely go-to person for your services and products.
11. Study Your Competition
Use tools to check out your competition. Want you are mostly looking for is what search terms your competition is ranking for, and where their backlinks are coming from. SEMrush is one of the best tools for doing competitor analysis. You can get a free trial with this link. Even if you don’t subscribe for a membership, I highly suggest checking it out for free to see how much information it can give you and the edge it can give you over the competition when you know what is letting them rank the way they are.
12. Guest Blogging
Make sure you find high quality places to guest blog with. Don’t choose just anyone. You are going to have a backlink in the author part back to your site so you want to have your guest blogs on sites with the best reputation. Do your best job on the content that you can. Both powerful and whitehat.
13. Publish Studies with Statistical Data that is Original
This one is interesting. When people write content, they like to cite reference material on the subject. If you can do studies and publish real research on a subject, you can a high-quality page to link to. People who want to cite a good source will likely linking to sites with statistics and graphs. Create a page people can’t help but link to.
14. Create Your Own Shareable Infographics
Infographics and great and ripe for sharing. Create an infographic for instance of a 10-point on-page SEO check. Put your site url at the bottom of the infographic and let people share it. It works great and you also get links back to your site for credit, so now you have earned lots of real backlinks and boosted your site. It’s a win-win. On my post about what long tail keywords are I use an infographic from Ahrefs and attribute them with a link to the page with the original infographic.
Summary
So there are a ton of ways you can increase website traffic for free and all it takes is a bit of labor. If you have time and not so much money to use on the project, then the ways above can work like magic for you. The key is to continue usage of the methods for an accumulative effect.