If you’re wondering how you can increase website traffic for free, this post is for you! Free traffic takes a little longer to generate than paid traffic, but it’s well worth the effort. If you can get free traffic to your website, any sales you make is 100% profit. If you’re paying for advertising it will often make huge dent in whatever you earn.
Although getting free traffic to your website takes a lot more work than running advertising, that work compounds over time. With paid advertising, when you stop paying for ads, your traffic stops abruptly. But with organic (content) marketing, the content you build can bring in traffic for years.
As your volume of content grows, so does your traffic. So even if at first your traffic flow seems very slow and sporadic with organic traffic, a small stream can eventually turn into a river. In this post I’m going to share my strategy for building those little “trickles” of free traffic, which can turn into gushing rivers over time if you keep doing it.
Increase Website Traffic For Free
With a new website you won’t get any traffic unless you’re ranking for some obscure keyword which gets traffic and there’s zero competition for it. So to get anyone to visit your website you’ll have to run some paid advertising or optimise your website for certain specific keywords.
However, in a competitive niche, these keywords are usually well subscribed to, meaning there’s already thousands of other websites which rank for them. This is particularly true in a competitive niche (such as affiliate marketing for example).
So to get free visitors to your website you need to find long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. Once you find such a keyword which is a good match for your target audience, write a blog post using your keyword as your title. To get the most out of your blog posts, use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. This helps you write SEO friendly content with the search engines in mind.
You’re never guaranteed to rank your content on the first page of a search engine, but if you find those long tail keywords which have four or more words in them, you’l have a greater chance of getting seen!
Even if your content doesn’t start ranking, write high quality content which helps your target audience in some way. By doing so you increase the authority of your website in the eyes of the search engines. Share your content and promote it.
Increase Website Traffic – Sharing And Promoting Your Content
You’re never guaranteed a first page listing for your content. But by sharing and promoting your content, you’re giving more people the opportunity of finding your posts though other means. Share via social media and link back to your content from other websites within your niche. This can be done through guest posting and blog commenting.
It’s also worth building an email list of subscribers so that you can share your content with those who have already been to your website. This can be done through offering a freebie giveaway through your website. This could be an ebook or free video course, for example.
Building an email list is one of the simplest and most effective steps you can make towards getting more website traffic. You can access a free autoresponder here.
Rinse And Repeat
So you’ve written a few posts and shared them on your social media accounts. You’ve sent the post to your email list too. You may even see one or two hits on your website if you’re tracking your website traffic (which you should be doing). (I use Statcounter to track website hits and data.) Now you need to keep doing this, finding keywords (use Google’s free keyword tool) which are suitable for your audience.
If you’re struggling for ideas for posts, I find Quora.com is a useful resource to use. You can search within your particular topic and find all sorts of questions which your customer avatar might want to know the answers to.
Write content for the questions which are most appropriate for the customers you want to attract. You can even use Quora to share your posts too. Just make sure you provide useful information within your answers before you post. See also affiliate marketing on quora.
Low Competition Keywords
There’s many low competition keywords you can find and you can find them using Google’s keyword planner, as I mentioned already. Simply type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for longer tail keywords which are a good match and which have fewer competing pages on the SERPS (search engines results pages).
Most of the least competitive keywords will have fewer monthly searches. So a good way to find them is to click on the Av. Monthly Searches tab until your monthly search volume drops. Typically, the lower the search volume, the fewer competing pages there are for the term in the search results. Also, the longer the number of keywords within the phrase, the few competing pages there will be (on Google), in general.
There’s upsides and downside to this strategy of course. If you write blog posts for long tail keywords which have fewer searches, even if you rank at the top of Google, you’ll still only receive a share of the search volume for that particular term. Not everyone clicks on the top result when they perform a search on the internet. Some will click on the second, third and forth result. However, a small slice of a little is worth more than zero share of a lot! If you go after competitive terms which have much more competition online, you’ll likely only rank your content on page 10 of Google, where nobody looks!
So, you’ll need to create a lot of content for your traffic to start building up (depending on your topic of course, and the relative competitiveness). Over time, this compounds and these small traffic trickles can eventually turn into streams and rivers!
Summary
To increase website traffic for free, first find long tail keywords which are a good match for your customer avatar. Create content which answers questions your customers might be asking and which have little competition on the search results pages. Share and promote your content through social media, Q&A websites (such as Quora.com) and through building an email list. Build back links by guest posting and blog commenting on blogs within your niche. Rinse and repeat.
Some of your content will rank in the search engines (on page 1), and some won’t! It really depends on your topic and the relative competitiveness. Each piece of content is a digital “fishing rod” in the “pond” of the search engines and of course your other “ponds” such as social media, your email list, Quora and so on. The more rods you drop into the more ponds, the more traffic you are likely to build over time. Keep building content and keep promoting and sharing it. Over time, small traffic trickles can turn into streams and rivers.
