Here are our top 8 tips for building traffic to your website for free
Every business in every industry should see a website as nothing short of essential. Because these days, the very first step in the buying journey for most – if not all – people is to conduct a search on Google.
And if you’re not showing up in the results at all, there is no question you’re missing out on sales or leads to your competitors who are.
But it’s not good enough to simply have a website built; stopping here means you’ve essentially wasted the money you spent on having it built in the first place! If you really want it to be as effective as it can be for your business, people actually need to visit it. The right people, and a lot of them at that.
So how do you bring all of these visitors to your website?
There are quite a lot of ways to grow site traffic, with some involving costs and others not. In this article, we’ll provide you with 8 great – and free – methods to drive more visitors to your website.
8 solid ways to increase site traffic
Looking to increase the traffic your site gets each month without breaking the bank? The following 8 tips are what we reckon are the best ways for you to do exactly that.
- Conduct keyword research
If you don’t know what keywords your customers are searching for and what you want to rank higher for, you’ll never be able to properly target your audience through search engines.
By using a keyword research tool, you’ll find out information like how often people are searching for particular keywords (and any related keywords), which keywords your competitors are targeting, current marketing trends and even the cost involved if you want to utilise PPC (pay-per-click) Google/Bing ads.
There are quite a lot of different keyword research tools available out there, each with their own pros and cons – and costs. Try out a few different ones and suss out which one works best for you and provides everything you need it to (while also being free).
- Create content
Once you have a list of keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to get creating.
First, what you want to do is write copy for each page on your site around the list of keywords for that page. Be careful that what you’re writing flows nicely, makes sense and reads well. Don’t sacrifice quality by ‘stuffing’ the keywords throughout the copy unnaturally so the text is jarring and doesn’t make sense – search engines pick up on this and will penalise your site for it.
But content creation isn’t just about writing keyword-friendly website copy. You should also consider:
● Publishing blogs often. Each written to address a relevant topic and with its own dedicated page (and including internal links). This helps to keep your site ‘fresh’ and increases opportunities of ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages).
● Starting an email newsletter. This could be scheduled weekly, fortnightly or monthly and doesn’t need to be overly complex – a couple of quick tips, business update or promotion can really help promote click-throughs to your site.
● Writing and sending press releases. If you have big news or a hot take on a particular trending topic, write up a press release and send it out to media outlets. If they do publish it they’ll give you a byline which can generate referral traffic.
● Starting a podcast/YouTube channel. Although this might be a little bit too time-consuming for some, creating a podcast and/or YouTube channel is a great way to build real brand authority with your audience. And provided it’s done well, you’ll vastly expand awareness and recognition of your brand, both of which will lead to increased website traffic.
● Building infographics. Got some interesting data and information you want to share with your audience? Infographics are one of the best ways to do so. They can make otherwise convoluted data easy to understand – and in a much more interesting way than a wall of text – and are super-shareable.
And these are just a few of the content types out there waiting for you to utilise. The important thing is to create content that aligns with both your business and prospective target audience, because you don’t want to be wasting your time making content that never ends up being seen by anyone!
- Update your metadata
You may not have been aware about this, but when your website comes up on SERPs it’s shown with accompanying information. So to have the best chance of someone clicking through to your site, you want to make sure you’ve optimised its appearance across two meta elements:
● Meta title. Also known as the title tag, this is the large blue text that’s shown on the results page. It’s also the text that’s shown in the tab once a user has clicked through to the page itself.
When writing an effective meta title, make sure you use the keyword you’re aiming to target for that particular page (while keeping it sounding natural), and that it actually links to the content found on the page on your site. Also, you don’t want to go either too short or too long; keep it to 50-60 characters.
● Meta description. This is the black text that falls directly below your meta title, and is quite a bit longer in length. It’s highly useful in that it tells your potential visitors what they’ll find on the page in more detail. However, don’t go overboard – keep it under 155 characters (including spaces), otherwise Google might chop it off mid-sentence which doesn’t look great.
You’ll want to use the keyword again (naturally) somewhere in the meta description, incorporate some sort of call to action like ‘find out more’ or similar, and of course ensure it actually matches the content on the page. And make sure to create unique meta descriptions for every page on your site.
- Be active on social media
If you’re not on any form of social media for your business, you may well be missing out on a huge chunk of site traffic as a result. Even just creating an optimising a profile on the appropriate social platforms without doing much else can eventuate in an uptick in traffic.
But if you really want to see the positive effect socials can have on website visitor figures, you want to be at least somewhat active on them. Being able to directly engage with your audience provides you with a way to generate real relationships that can lead to a more long-term, loyal customer base and word-of-mouth to attract more customers at the same time.
By carefully planning and scheduling social posts that your followers find useful, informative and/or entertaining, you’re maintaining an open line of effective communication with them. As such, if and when you post something a little more salesy that includes a discount or other promotion pointing to your site, you’ll find there’s a much higher click-through rate than if you were constantly posting salesy content.
- Generate backlinks
The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher the chances you’ll have people clicking through. If you’re a local business, you might look at building up yours by reaching out to other relevant businesses in your area (that have websites).
For example, if you’re running a cleaning business you might get in touch with the different real estate agencies operating around your service areas. You might then offer them an office-cleaning discount in exchange for their rental department linking your website as their end-of-lease cleaning company of choice.
Increasing your backlinks isn’t just good for getting visitors clicking through from elsewhere on the internet, though; Google sees sites with a higher amount of backlinks as more credible.
In fact, they’re one of the most influential ranking factors that Google takes into consideration. So by generating more backlinks, you’re also helping to boost where your site ranks on SERPs.
- Optimise Google My Business profile
Especially for local businesses, having a complete and optimised Google My Business page is a huge contributor to bringing in more traffic to your website. Make sure you’ve filled out everything you can on your page – website, location, opening hours, photos and general information – and update it all regularly.
Just as importantly is to stay on top of the reviews you receive from past customers. Businesses that have a lot of positive reviews and an optimised Google My Business page will actually be displayed in what’s known as the ‘3-pack’ – the 3 businesses shown at the very top of the SERP. If you don’t have any/many reviews, you need to start asking for them! If you do have reviews but they’re unfavourable, you might need to bring in reputation repair professionals.
- Undertake influencer marketing
Ever thought about involving someone that’s highly recognisable in your industry to create a bit of buzz around your brand? Influencer marketing is a fantastic way to generate a ton of awareness to businesses and bring in major traffic numbers.
You can approach this in a few different ways. For example, it might be as simple as creating a social media post that relates to them in some way (ties in with research they’ve done, say) and tagging them. Or perhaps you might write a blog post that includes a quote from them, and after publishing you can tag them in the post linking it. You might even ask them to come and be a part of a podcast or simply a Q&A session, and ask that they either post or share your post once it’s completed.
- Ensure responsiveness across various devices
More people are visiting websites through mobile devices than desktop these days. That means if your site isn’t up to scratch for mobile users, you’re undoubtedly going to see a super-high bounce rate. Make sure everything works exactly as it should no matter what kind of device your audience is using.
To add to this, site speed is pretty much just as important to minimise bounce rate as responsiveness. If users have to wait even just a few seconds for your page to load, they’ll go back and find a competitor’s site that’s faster and offers better UX.
A fast, responsive website with first-class user experience is vital to not only bring traffic to your site (as they’re ranking factors), but also to keep traffic on your site.
Why quality website traffic is so important
At the end of the day, the end goal of any digital marketing campaign is to either immediately (e.g. conversion campaign) or eventually (e.g. awareness campaign) lead to higher sales/leads.
When you’re getting a higher number of people who visit your site you’re increasing the opportunities you have to make sales and generate leads, and you’ll be able to achieve a much better conversion rate when it’s quality traffic.
Generating higher quality website traffic involves undertaking a substantial amount of research into your desired target audience(s), conducting in-depth competitor analyses in order to build a successful strategy. And unless you have a good deal of experience with this, you may see poor metrics such as high bounce rate and low overall conversions.
Skip the hassles and leave it to First Page
You might be thinking that while it’s all well and good to know all this, you simply don’t have the time to get it all done while operating your business. Or it might all still feel pretty convoluted and finicky. Either way, we’ve got you.
At First Page Australia, our team of digital marketing specialists have the knowledge and expertise to bring in a ton more traffic to your site, skyrocketing your conversions and taking your business to the next level. From SEO and social media marketing experts to programmatic advertising as well as landing page development and much more, our services truly cover every element of a highly effective online marketing strategy.
So take the next step towards an exponential surge in traffic and call us now on 1300 479 226 or send us an online enquiry and we’ll be in touch ASAP.
