Ask a blogger or site owner what they’d like most in the world, and they’ll probably tell you to increase site traffic to their site.
But this isn’t an easy task.
With so much content flooding the web, many sites, both old and new, a lot of bloggers struggle to get people to visit them and because of that a lot of great blogs have failed.
How to Increase Site Traffic for Free and Fast ?!
There are a lot of ways you can increase your site traffic, but today, we are going to show you the best-proven strategies that the best SEO experts use on their sites.
Here is the best way to increase site traffic for free
1. Use Google Alerts for New Content Ideas
Your content should contain high-value researched text information and unique concepts.
Your content needs to be timely, relevant, inspiring, educational, or exceptional.
But first of all, you need to pick a topic that attracts traffic-a trending topic.
You are probably asking yourself how to know what are the trending topics.
So to know what to write on your blog or your client’s blog you can set up industry-specific Google alerts.
This way you will be informed in time by Google about anything that happens in your industry and what is trending now.
So you will have a lot of info on trending topics and a lot of trending topic ideas for your blog posts.
How to set up specific industry Google alerts?
Setting up Google alerts is pretty easy, just head over to Google alerts page, and in the search bar type the specific industry you are interested to be alerted from Google.
For example, if you are interested in SEO, just type SEO on the search bar and hit search, then you will be presented with an SEO topic, click advanced options and choose what’s the best for you and type your email where you want your alerts to come from Google.
On advanced options I would prefer to choose these answers:
How often? At most once a day – This way you will get one email per day and you can easily read it.
Sources: Automatic – You have the option to choose from blogs, news, forums, etc but automatic is the best because you will not lose anything this way.
Language: English – You can choose any language you want or that fits you best in this option.
Region: Any region – Any region is the best.
How many: Only the best results – Let Google choose what is the best content in your specific industry.
Deliver to: Write your email.
By reading every day the best and most popular stories of your specific industry, for sure you will gain a lot of blog post topic ideas to write for, so don’t wait anymore and go to Google alerts to get help from this amazing free Google service.
2. Add viral components to your website or blog
What are the viral components?
Social Sharing buttons: Make the social buttons within the content very visible to make sure that the visitors will be forcefully lured to share your content.
Reviews and Ratings: Reviews and Ratings are usually used on e-commerce sites for reviewing and rating the products there but a lot of bloggers are also using reviews in their blog articles.
Visitor comments: Comments are very important for blog posts in the SEO aspect and for creating a community on your site.
Make linking to your posts easy: See at the end of articles on my site there is a text area where it says Link easy, this is very useful for other blog authors to link easily to your articles.
Make sure you add the URL link, HTML code for linking, and BB code for Forums.
If you can also you can create a small badge or banner for your site with an HTML code below for someone who wants to link in that way for your site.
Infographics are a great way of creating viral traffic on your site because usually people like images way more than text content.
Make sure also you make infographics embeddable by placing an embedded HTML code below your infographic.
3. Write Attention-Grabbing Headlines and Create Eye-Catching, High-Quality Images
An SEO strategy can liven up & you can increase your site traffic just by writing attention-grabbing headlines and creating high-quality images.
Some headline types get more traction than others for social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking.
List, “how-to”, and question headlines typically see the strongest results for click-through.
Research proves that readers share emotional and positive headlines with their social networks.
Research studies have shown that the most clicked-through words are:
- How to
- Tips
- Tricks
- [List-related numbers]
- Free
- You
- Blog post
- Why
- Best
- Great
You can experiment with using these words on your page titles with the idea to increase your website traffic.
Also, there is a great free tool to analyze headlines from Coschedule which I use very often myself.
With this tool, you can analyze headlines for their emotions, power, common and uncommon words, etc.
Where do you look first after seeing a page’s headline?
Most of the visitors look at the image, which usually determines if we are going to stay to read or if we are going to hit the back button.
So make sure that you include great images or infographics on your site.
Also, use keyword-rich captions, alt descriptions, and titles with your images.
Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions – it will help you to increase site traffic.
4. Use Social Bookmarking Sites and Pinterest for Social Media Referral traffic
Understand social marketing.
The more you understand about sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search and increase site traffic.
Join popular social bookmarking sites such as TikTok, Pinterest, or Instagram.
If one of your posts is posted on any one of these sites, people can see it.
If your content is good, problem-solving, and emotional it can easily go viral.
Use Pinterest: People are naturally drawn to attractive, magazine-quality images.
Information can be processed very quickly when it’s seen as an image.
Pinterest makes it possible to leverage beautiful, shareable images.
According to Mitt Ray on Social Media Examiner there are 6 steps to increase site traffic with Pinterest:
- Optimize your page
- Design Content to Support Goals
- Be Strategic With Your Pinning Schedule
- Design Skinny Images
- Write Detailed Descriptions
- Test Various Pin Times
5. Create Content To Provide Value & Solve Problems
The majority of people who come to your blog for the first time are there for one thing only to find answers to their problems.
So that being said, you have to create ‘problem-solving content’ for your readers as often as possible.
And don’t forget to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts by analyzing various tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, etc…
6. Optimize Existing Pages Before Creating New Ones
Audit your existing pages with On-Page SEO Audit tools that are available on the Internet and make the necessary changes to those pages.
After you complete that step head over to Google Search Console at Search Traffic, Search Analytics section, and filter your queries with Impressions, Clicks, CTR, and Position.
The top of the chart will be keywords that you’re on the first page for, but forget about them, set the number of rows to show to “500” and scroll down until you see an about average position of 11 to 20, then look at those queries that are ranking for those positions.
Impressions and CTR will tell you how much those queries are searched on Google and if it is worth it to try ranking for those keywords.
If you find any keyword that has a decent search volume and is worth it then you can click on that exact keyword in the Search Analytics section of Search Console and then select Pages to see the top pages for the current results.
That will show you the page on your site that’s ranking for that keyword.
And include that keyword as part of that page’s SEO, and try to optimize that page even more for example: by interlinking from other pages that have a higher reputation on your site and trying to earn some external backlinks directly to that page of the site.
This will in return increase site traffic.
7. Incorporate user experience UX into your SEO strategy
User experience has managed to grow from a mere factor to a major influence when it comes to SEO.
Website speed, Crafting a thoughtful, empathetic user experience helps ensure that visitors to your site perceive it positively, encouraging sharing, bookmarking, return visits, and inbound links and this will increase site traffic.
Pay attention to:
- Responsiveness,
- Cross-platform compatibility,
- Constructive internal linking,
- Proper content structure,
- Lower your bounce rate
- Avoid using pop-ups and interstitial ads
- Consider readability
- Fix Broken links,
- Set up friendly 404 pages and
- Minimize downtime.
8. Contact influencers to share your content
This is a very important strategy and you should implement it carefully.
Reach out to influencers and discreetly ask if they will be interested to see your content, but never directly ask them to share your content, because if asked directly and if you sound pushy then your risk being considered a spammer by them.
If some of the top industry influencers review your content, don’t forget to thank them, if it happens so that they also share your content then great.
9. Remove any type of duplicated content on your site
Also, configure the server so that your site IP is redirected to the site domain name.
Common homepage variations: Check the link to your home page throughout your site, redirect /index.html, /index.htm, or /index.php, back to your domain.
10. Use Google’s Change Of Address Tool When Redirecting A Domain
If you have any old domains 301 redirected to your current domain and if any of these old domains *have not* been verified through Google Search Console then verify them.
You can verify them with the advice given by Search Console, in this case, the best solution is by setting up a DNS TXT record.
Then, use Google’s Change of Address tool to tell Google the new address for these old domains.
This process works better for SEO than just a 301 redirect.
11. Add a call-to-action at the end of your posts
Add a solid call-to-action at the end of your posts that urge your readers to either read another of your posts, subscribe to your list, click a link to a landing page, or – do something.
You can ask your visitors anything that will be valuable to you and if they are satisfied with the article that they have just read then most of them are going to respond positively to your request.
12. Build up your professional brand on Community Sites
This is an old strategy but still works if done properly, but you shouldn’t do it for links though because you would be easily considered as a spammer by community members.
The best place to start is by answering questions that people have on Quora and by helping those members fix their problems and offering solutions to their problems
The same can be done also on Yahoo answers, which is also a great community site that can bring lots of traffic.
You can also become a member of related niche Forums or Blogs and be active there to get noticed.
There are Forums on the Internet for almost every niche you just have to find them.
The easiest way to find related niche Forums is by googling with this search string:
- “Keyword” + Forum”
- “Keyword” + Forums”
Replace “Keyword” with the topic of your site.
13. Include internal links on your 404 error pages
It doesn’t matter how much we try to reduce broken links there always will be some internal or external broken links to your site.
That’s why it’s important to have custom 404 pages that will help your visitors to navigate better on your site and sometimes instead of using a generic 404 error page, you could try to design something that is also entertaining.
But what if your custom 404 pages are entertaining for your visitors and also helpful because you can place some internal links to your site on your 404 pages?
Neil Patel on his blog explains that he always creates custom 404 pages that display a creative image and link out to 25 to 50 random internal pages on the website.
He says this way you can increase the number of pages that get indexed by search engines.
14. Join HARO and answer relevant queries
Try to use HARO: “Help a Reporter Out” to achieve this task and if any of the reporters will link to your site, this can give you valuable backlinks from huge media companies.
Brian Dean in his Backlinko blog post explains how to use HARO to get backlinks from domains with great authority:
a. You need to sign up to HARO as a source,
b. Then you will get three emails per day from reporters looking for sources,
c. You only need to respond to those queries with your credentials (don’t forget the link to your site) and with some helpful tips.
So don’t wait to JOIN HARO ASAP!
15. Update Your Already Published Viral Content To Rank For Competitive Keywords
If you have already published a “viral content” type piece to earn rankings, strongly consider how you can make it updateable regularly so you’re not just relying on that first push.
Now seriously these strategies are very doable and if you want to increase site traffic there is no reason for you to not start doing these tips now.
You don’t need to do all of them but start with at least one of them… it’s up to you to do it.
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