How many times have you heard the expression that you should do what you love even if nobody is watching? How many times have you nodded in agreement without putting much thought into it? I know I have.
Once you start working towards your goals, however, it quickly becomes apparent how important appreciation can be. And we’re not simply talking about its impact on your personal motivation but rather the overall effect the audience can have on your success. No matter what you’re doing, the role of the audience is immense.
When it comes to websites, on the other hand, traffic is the main thriving point. A well-performing web hosting plan is essential for keeping your uptime high and thus, catering to your users’ needs. All of your search engine optimization efforts turn out to be completely pointless if you don’t receive the much-desired traffic. In fact, web traffic is one of the most indicative factors for your site’s performance, and working towards increasing it should be a priority in your everyday work.
So, how to increase website traffic for free? We’ve prepared the 3 practices that ALWAYS work!
1. On-Page SEO
SEO and website traffic mutually affect each other forming a continuous circle of everyday efforts to maintain both.
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing every single web page of a website in order for it to rank better in a search engine. This involves a number of practices that aim to make a page better readable by both humans and machines. Thereby, once engines render the content on a page relevant, they will display the page higher on search results affecting traffic and performance.
The crucial on-page SEO steps include but aren’t limited to:
- neat URLs
- title tags
- keyword research
- media optimization
- full content
All of these contribute to driving traffic to your website by directly affecting your search engine performance.
2. Social Media
Social media’s effect on website traffic is undoubtful. In fact, just about a year ago, we discussed how to drive traffic to your website using social media.
Some of the conclusions we arrived at were related to the indirect relationship between social media and web traffic. And even though search engines have previously denied the connection between social media and ranking, they’re intertwined in more complex implicit ways.
Shareability is one of the greatest ways to disseminate your content. In the era of quick sharing, people are looking for something to identify their needs and beliefs with. That can come in the form of blog posts, pictures, or videos.
Finding the sweet spot on time and media when working towards increasing your social media performance can have an immense influence on your traffic likewise. In other words, if you manage to be where your prospective audience is, at times at which it is the most likely to spend time online, you might have come across the best answer on how to increase website traffic for free!
3. Link Building
The last but more than definitely not least way to increase website traffic for free is through continuous link-building. If you’re still new to link building, it may come as a surprise to find out how much effort your competitors put into it. And that’s not a surprise.
On the day of the eternal informational flood, most people carefully select a limited number of websites to trust. Through these websites, later on, they can discover other aspects of their own interests and explore new web pages. To cater to this new user experience, collaborating with well-known names in your sector is essential. Even if you doubt your own website’s quality, approaching some other web owners shouldn’t scare you. Prepare an introduction and a quick pitch to approach prospective collaborators and offer something in exchange. Having your website recommended by the large fish in the sea will undoubtedly drive traffic to it.
In Conclusion
How to increase website traffic for free is one of the essential questions you’re probably asking yourself as your website is growing. Nevertheless, you might still not feel completely ready to embark on the paid advertisement journey. And it’s not mandatory at all.
In today’s day and age, the audience has grown extra cautious about advertisements and the trust in them has lowered immensely. Instead of them, the average web user trusts search engines’ organic results, social media, and popular websites much more.
Because of this, you should first focus on your own efforts before investing any money in your website. On-page SEO has the capacity to affect your results ranking, thus displaying your pages higher when a search is performed. Social media, on the other hand, is also an excellent indicator for users whether they’ll find the content they’re looking for. Finally, link building and collaboration affect not your off-page SEO by driving quality traffic to your website.
Whichever of the approaches you take (even though we advise you to apply all of them), remember that a web page should not be created merely to attract visitors. A much more important goal, in the long run, is retaining those visitors through high-quality content and a positive experience. The rest will follow naturally.