5 easy ways to boost your website traffic for FREE
Increasing traffic to your website is important whether you’re just starting out or if you’re an established business looking for more growth. In the online world, more traffic equals a more successful business, period.
Writing quality content and having a good SEO plan should always be priority number one. However, there are so many ways to boost traffic to your website and in this article, we want to share 5 easy tips to get more traffic to your site for FREE.
1. Write great headlines
This one may seem simple but it’s far too often overlooked.
Clicks give you traffic and great headlines give you a better click-through-rate (CTR).
You could have the number one spot on the search engine ranking pages but if no one clicks on your headline then you won’t have any traffic.
Therefore, if you can write better headlines you will improve your CTR and create more traffic for your site.
Google and other search engines are much more likely to reward pages with higher click-through-rates because they want to show content that users will engage with. A 2014 study from Moz showed that there is a strong correlation between higher click-through-rates and a higher ranking position.
This is because your headline is what makes you stand out on the search engine ranking pages and is the difference between attracting clicks or being overlooked.
So, creating headlines that will improve your CTR is essential if you want to increase traffic from search engines.
How to write great headlines
A good headline will do one of four things:
- Make a promise
- Draw a picture
- State a fact
- Ask a question
When you do one of these things in your headline, you are much more likely to grab the attention of the reader. If you do it right, you’ll leave the reader interested, intrigued, and wanting to find out more.
Here’s an example of a headline-making a promise:
Kiss Back Pain Goodbye in 30 Minutes!
This headline has promised the reader a quick solution to a problem. If you’re suffering from back pain there’s no way you wouldn’t click on this.
Asking a question in a headline is a great way to involve the reader and create interest. Here are two examples:
Squarespace vs Wix: which is better?
Are you looking for a cheap website builder?
The first example uses a comparison followed by an unanswered question. This invites the reader to click on the article to find out more.
The second example uses the second-person pronoun ‘you’ to directly address the reader. If in the reader’s head they answer yes to the question you’ve directed at them, they are much more likely to click through to your article.
Free tools to help you with your headlines
There are lots of free headline analyzer tools that help you to optimize your headlines with the correct language and character length.
They usually give you a score based on how similar headlines actually performed. Play around with a few different titles until you get the best score before publishing your content.
2. Video content
This is maybe the most powerful tip to boost traffic to your website.
Producing and then posting video content to platforms like Youtube, Vimeo, and Facebook with links to your website as well as mentioning the name of it within your content can hugely expand your potential audience.
Anyone that views and likes your video content will click the link or search for your website, which can dramatically increase the number of unique visitors arriving on your web pages.
The reason this can be so powerful is because by 2022 online videos will make up over 82% of all consumer internet traffic, so without any video content to capture some of this traffic, you’ll be missing out on lots of potential visitors.
Embedding video content on your site helps you to gain more views from other visitors and creates even more chances to reach new audiences, especially when you consider that 92% of mobile video watchers are willing to share videos with their friends.
It can create a cycle of exponential growth as your new audience shares your video content again, creating even more exposure for your website.
You don’t need any fancy equipment to start seeing benefits from video content. Most people have phones that shoot in good enough quality to publish.
There are lots of different types of video content that people love to consume. Finding the right type for your audience is important but here’s a list of some great ideas to get you started.
- Interviews / Q&A’s
- Tutorials / How to’s
- Product reviews
- Animations
- Live-streaming
- Vlogs
- Webinars
- Behind the scenes
- Testimonials
- Brand films
Start experimenting with uploading videos using your mobile devices or create animations using free tools to start gaining traffic with no upfront cost.
3. Get social
It’s important to let people know about your content, you can’t expect them to find it for themselves.
With over 3.8 billion active users, social media provides a huge potential audience.
Simply spending some time sharing your content and engaging with people on social media will increase the potential reach and create another funnel for traffic to reach your website.
The best thing is that posting on social media is absolutely free!
How to get the most out of social media
- Think about the platform
It’s easy to push out the same captions and hashtags across all platforms but users engage differently across social media channels and each one presents content in different ways.
For Twitter, you’re going to need to create short and snappy copy that can grab the reader’s attention in 280 characters.
Whereas on Facebook and Instagram there’s room to be more detailed and educational if it’s right for your audience.
Tailoring the copy to suit that particular platform’s audience will increase the likelihood that they will engage with your post. - Include an image
Including an image in your post can be very beneficial.
On average Tweets with photos receive 35% more retweets than those without.
Facebook posts with images receive a 37% increase in engagement.
Just make sure your image is high-res and relevant to the topic you are posting about so you can tap into this increased engagement from readers and bring more traffic to your site. - Use a hashtag generator
Adding hashtags to your posts increases your potential audience and is a great way to get your content in front of people that don’t follow you.
Posts with hashtags generate 12% more interaction.
Using a free hashtag generator like Kicksta or All-hashtag allows you to see the most popular hashtags for a particular topic.
The most important thing here is to include relevant hashtags that will target people that would want to read your content.
Also, lots of hashtags are not always best because you can appear spammy. Think quality over quantity for the best results. - Engage with your target audience
Joining groups and following popular hashtags that are relevant to your industry is a great way to start a dialogue with your target audience.
Try to find questions in the comments and produce an informative or entertaining answer with a link to relevant content that’s available on your site.
You can impress and help out the individual user by helping them to answer their query as well as attracting other users that are scrolling through the comments section.
If you answer enough questions and engage with enough users, you can create lots of additional links back to your site which can result in a considerable traffic boost.
Try to avoid posting any commercial content and focus on educating or entertaining so that group admins don’t remove your comments and kick you out of the group. - Reshare old content
Don’t be afraid to share your content more than once. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean people don’t want to read it.
Creating new content is very time consuming and there’s no guarantee that it will pick up lots of traffic.
Utilizing content that you know people will engage with is an easy way to bring more traffic to your site.
So much about going viral is being in the right place at the right time.
Try sharing your most popular and best-performing content once every 30 days with a new caption, on a different day of the week, and at a different time of day.
This will make sure a new group of people, with different social media habits, can be exposed to your content.
Pro tip: If you do have some budget behind you that you want to spend on boosting your chances of going viral, check out 99designs’ logo and social media pack for a custom logo and Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter cover images.
4. Tap into forum referral traffic
Finding areas of the internet where your target audience is active, and building a presence there, is a great strategy for boosting traffic to your site.
Just like engaging with comments in groups and on popular hashtags on social media, finding popular forum threads on sites like Reddit and Quora, and engaging with users, can be a great way to create more traffic funnels to your site.
And it will cost you nothing but your time!
The first thing you need to do to get the most out of driving traffic to your site from forums is to find popular threads, relevant to your industry, that attracts a lot of people and creates lots of engagement.
From there it’s about posting great content, asking good questions, and posting often to make sure that your profile is visible.
Make sure that you mention or have a link to your website in your signature so people have a way of getting to your site.
Always post links to relevant content from your site when it’s appropriate.
However, just be careful not to come across as ‘spammy’ by constantly posting links without any helpful advice. At the very least you will get ignored and at worst you will receive negative replies that will discourage other users from visiting your site.
5. Use email marketing
Research has found that 91% of consumers check their email every day so it’s a great way to gain more traffic if you can get into people’s inboxes.
Including a sign-up box on your website that allows readers to sign up to a newsletter will enable you to start building an email list.
It’s not always easy to get people to give away their details but here are a few things you can do to start building your mailing list:
Create content that gives value to your readers with a personalized call to actions
This could be an ebook, a quiz, exclusive articles, or a downloadable PDF.
If you offer content in exchange for an email address people tend to be more willing to sign up for your newsletters.
Create a pop-up banner for each page of your site
Setting a pop-up to appear after someone has spent a few minutes on your site will increase the likelihood of them inputting their details as they have obviously enjoyed the content if they have stayed to read it.
Include newsletter boxes on your about us page
If people are taking the time to read more about you and your company they must be interested in you. This is the perfect time to ask them to sign up to your subscriber list.
Now you have started to build a list, you can push out emails telling your subscribers about a new piece of content or your latest promotion on a product to increase the amount of traffic coming into your site.
It’s unlikely that you will get 100% of your mailing list to turn up to your site but even 10% could generate more sales.
Pro tip: If you want to get more out of your email marketing there are lots of services out there like Constant Contact that help you optimize your email campaigns with professional templates and expert insights into what works best. They offer a 60-day free trial that ends on its own once the time is up.
Final thoughts on how to boost your website traffic for FREE
Like we said in the intro, building traffic starts with great content and good SEO.
However, spending some time working on creating better headlines, posting video content, sharing on social media, getting active on forums, and growing a mailing list are a few simple ways for you to increase traffic to your website without having to spend any money.
Written By
What is a website builder?
The simplest answer to the question of what is a website builder is that it’s a software programme that helps you to build a website without having to manually code anything. But, how do they work?
Cheapest Website Builder 2021
Building a website doesn’t have to cost the earth. We’ve pulled together a list of the cheapest website builders and ecommerce platforms to help you find an affordable option for your website. Not only are they the cheapest, but some of them are the best of the best…
