4 Hacks to Increase Website Traffic without Paying

Chris Hood
4 min readFeb 22, 2021

Launching a website and creating social media profiles for your business is simple. The hard part is getting visitors to actually visit those pages and engage with posted content. If you are an experienced digital marketing expert, you’ve probably battled with increasing your site visits without having to pay for them. So how would you go about it? Before we dive into it the traffic tips, let’s start with few fundamentals. Why do you want more traffic? A quality website visit is both a key pointer and driver of business achievement. The volume and nature of the traffic that you can head to your pages can help you:

  • See how well your marketing plans and executions are performing
  • Assemble significant insights about your audience and their purchasing behaviors
  • Generate more leads, improve conversions, and drive more sales
  • Develop brand awareness and recognition across the web
  • Improve your SEO efforts and increase search engine integrity

These are some of the advantages that you can gain from driving the correct traffic to your site. What do we mean by quality traffic? Currently, there are a ton of traffic generation techniques all across the web, many promising to drive a huge number of visits to your site… If just it were that simple, right? Quality traffic essentially implies the correct audience — actual people with a veritable interest in whatever it is that your business offers. Creating millions of traffic to your website from online bots and individuals who couldn’t care about your business or its offer is really a step back in your marketing efforts. Sure, overall traffic numbers look amazing, but conversion rates tank, sales stay flat… Even worse, it can seriously hurt your SEO rankings since it increases the bounce rate and decreases average time on site, which are basic ranking factors. Quality traffic is about the engagement of visitors, which in turn, generates conversions. Your site’s visitors should be people who are truly interested in your business and the solutions it offers. Anything outside of that can’t be marked as quality traffic. Here are some tips to drive quality traffic without paying for it #1 On-Page SEO: On-page SEO is all about optimizing your website to be in line with current SEO best practices. This implies performing keyword research to classify high-volume search terms related to your business and te using those keywords in the content of your site. It also implies paying close attention to outbound links, appropriately creating meta title and description tags, posting keyword-rich blogs and articles, and giving alt tags to images, among others. The takeaway here is that there are numerous elements that go into appropriate on-page SEO, and once it’s executed well it will ultimately be work that simply keeps on giving. #2 Create Google My Business Listing and Optimization Google My Business listings are the most important marketing tool accessible today for small, locally-based businesses. When people perform a search for a business close to them, Google will rank businesses with optimized Google My Business listing higher on the search result page. The key here is to fill in as much keyword-rich and accurate information about your business including: Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), post regular updates to your GMB profile, and ensure your listing links directly to your website. #3 Link Building Backlinks are how we describe the inbound links from different sites or online platforms that point back to our website. If other sites are linking to your website, that tells Google and the users on those different locales that your site is genuine and contains valuable info. This can bring about higher search engine rankings. However, these should be quality backlinks — links from trustworthy sites with high domain authority and overall credibility. For instance, if your business deals in financial services, you could compose a guest post on a site like Investopedia and have a link included back to your site. In fact, the most ideal approach to generate backlinks is through strategic guest blog posting. You compose a quality article to be posted on another site and include a link back to your website either in your Author Bio or in the article itself. #4 Email Marketing On the off chance that you’ve just got a sizable mailing list, investing in an email marketing campaign is a great effort to increase visits to your site. Of course, the contents of the email should be relevant, engaging, and valuable to your readers, otherwise, you just become noise to your subscriber’s inbox and your work doesn’t do much at all to generate clicks. Worse yet, if you abuse your email list with poor content and sending too frequently subscribers will unsubscribe from your list or even file SPAM complaints against you. A good example of an effective email is to include exclusive promos and deals to your subscribers and encourage them to click on a banner or link to learn more, taking them directly to a dedicated landing page on your site where they can learn more about your offer (and take action)! Using these methods for driving traffic to your website you can generate more leads and conversions for your business. These are also great techniques used by our own digital marketing agency to drive more relevant traffic to our client’s websites. :-)

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Chris Hood
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Founder/CEO of The Conversion Mill, a digital marketing agency passionate about growing revenue for small businesses https://www.theconversionmill.com