As a small business owner with a website, it can be difficult getting website traffic. Especially since you’re competing with other businesses. There are plenty of methods in which you can attract more visitors, however many will require you to spend money. Believe it or not, there are proven, free methods out there that will let you greatly increase the traffic to your website.
Constantly update your website
Nothing will kill your website faster than inactivity. Fresh content is critical for your website and SEO. Google and other search engines don’t want people being directed to websites that haven’t been updated in years, which is why inactive sites drop in search rankings.
So, if you want to make sure people can actually find your website on search engines, regularly update your site with new content. Ideally, you should be adding high-quality content, such as blog posts or creating new pages. Run a small business? You should definitely have a business blog.
With regular site pages, adding things like photos or small pieces of writing to existing pages is better than not adding anything. You should aim to update your website at least once every 2 to 7 days. If that’s not possible, you should aim to update it at least once every week.
Make sure you post your website URL on social media
You may be wondering how posting a website link on social media can increase website traffic; after all, everyone who follows a social media account for a website probably knows about the business and their website. While this is probably true, remember that people often browse social media to kill time.
There is a chance they could stumble upon one of your posts while searching for something or while looking through a post that their friends had liked and shared. If you don’t have a link to your site, then you risk missing out on a potential visitor who could even become a customer. If on the other hand, you have a website URL visible, the person scrolling by might decide to give your website a visit.
Make sure to link internally
If you’re familiar with SEO, then you probably know that there are two types of links you want on your site. The first is backlinks; these refer to links on other sites which link back to your site. Backlinks are the best type of links for getting your website higher on Google. But, backlinks are a bit difficult to get for free. You can find free backlink packets, but they’re usually not high-quality links. If you want the best backlinks, you’ll most likely have to pay.
The opposite of backlinks is internal links. As the name suggests, these are links within your site that link to other parts of your site. These links aren’t as good as backlinks, but they’re still useful and they’re completely free.
It’s very easy to put internal links on your site. All you have to do is put a “related pages” section on each page of your site where you have linked to other parts of your site, which might be of interest to the person browsing it. You can also create a table of contents on the front of your website which links to other internal pages. You need to be careful with internal links because Google is aware of how easy they can be spammed. They’ll punish websites that it thinks are spamming internal links, so make sure you only post 2 or 3 internal links per page.
Submit your content to content aggregators
There are a lot of websites out there that essentially act as content aggregators. They basically compile links to random websites and people can browse these aggregators and discover new websites. An example of one of these aggregators would be Alltop, yet there are dozens of similar sites you can choose from. But, a note of caution, users on these sites tend to be pretty internet savvy and will quickly recognize business owners who are simply spamming the site for clicks. So, make sure you have something genuinely interesting or valuable to share, otherwise, you won’t get any clicks.
Create valuable and interesting content
One of the best ways to increase your website traffic for free is to get your website shared on social media. Now, you can pay to get your site shared on social media, but of course, that’s not free. It also requires very little effort. It is possible to get your site shared for free on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but you’ll need to put in some effort. People rarely just share sites randomly. They only do so if there’s genuinely interesting or valuable content they want to share with their friends and family. So, try creating some interesting or valuable content.
People love to share things that are easily digestible, like infographics and images. If you have skills with Microsoft Office or Photoshop, trying creating an interesting infographic that’s relevant to your industry. Make sure you include your website URL on the infographic so people can identify where it came from and visit your site.
Target long-tail keywords
Unless you’re an SEO expert, you’re not going to be ranking for high-competition keywords. But, you might be able to rank for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are low competition keywords that are generally longer than 3 words. See, most people won’t bother with long-tail keywords, but if you’re a business owner looking to increase your website traffic, long-tail keywords can be a great way of getting more people to come to your site since few people try to target them.
Typically, when you go after normal keywords, you have to pay for backlinks in order for your site to get ranked on Google and other search engines. Since not many people target long-tail keywords, you have a better chance of ranking for them without paying for backlinks.
Conclusion
We hope this article on how to increase your website traffic helped in your search for finding effective, free ways. Let us know in the comments what you’ll do from our tips above.
