15 FREE WAYS TO INCREASE WEB TRAFFIC
What is the #1 desire that small business owners want for their website? Over 61% of them, according to Hubspot, would say More traffic to their site. More traffic, equals, more business leads and sales, which is the goal for a website in the first place.
But how is this achieved? Of course you can hire a marketter who specializes in the effort of getting your business knows. Yet that will cost business anywhere from $900 – $20,000 a MONTH, on average. Most start up and small business simply can not afford that.
What to do then? Cross your fingers and hope OR take matters in your own hands. In fact 47% of business owners, do exactly that.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Staticly speaking, 96% of local business depend on social media for most of their marketing solutions. And 71% of consumers use the same social media to help make purchasing decisions. Useful, since social media customers tend to purchase 40% more in product. Why this is true, is unknown, but the stats reveal the tendency.
Given that most business owners need to keep costs down, while growing the business, solutions need to be found. Below is 40 different methods to increase traffic and hopefully sales.
#1 PRODUCT & BUSINESS BLOGS
While news and trending topics can give you a traffic boost in the short term, they’re not worth the time and effort it takes to write, create imagry and promote the article. Post that are forever current are acalled Everygreen Posts. Typically that is content around topics that will always be of interest to your audience. These posts tend to build over time, creating a good stat record for the local search engines.
#2 BLOGS - EYE CATCHING TITLES
Effective blog titles have been shown to drive up to 500% more traffic. Without a compelling headline, even the most comprehensive blog post will go unread.
#3 BLOGS - WELL KNOWN GUEST BLOGGER
Cheesy…yes. But well known names work for consumers and search engines alike. Not only can guest authors diversify your topics and perspectives, but they’ll want to share the article with their network and link to it on their site, causing a cross link. Search engines love common link and assume popularity. Just be sure that you only post high-quality, original content without links that click to non-related content. AKA spammy link. To do so will get you a search engine penality and thus the opposite effect of losing rankings.
#4 BLOGS - GREAT IMAGES
This one is not always free..unless you are a trained graphic artist who also understand the technology of fast loading format. The perk of super images is again, the search engines. They link images as well as pages. A cool graphic, is another way to get persons to your site.
#4 BLOGS - GREAT VIDEOS
This one is ALSO not always free.. There is a technology and moving images that are eye catching . An art form all on it’s own. But video tends to draw viewers more readilty. so the investment may be worth it. A video can also be cross-used in social media ads to achieve the same effect.
#5 HOW TO SECTION
Should your site be related to another activity, having a resource center is another way to get attention. Solutions and how-to guides in the activity of your business. The result is typically return viewers as they return to find out how to achieve their own personal goals.
#6 SEO MAGIC
Amazing blogs are a seal the deal type of section, but do nothing if people can not find your site. A f1st page placing staticly generates 71% more traffic. And there is the rub…how do you get there?
Some will say pure SEO, a technology that allows search engines to catagorize websites, the real key is the combination. The SEO helps the engine list the site, the blogs raise the rankings. Using a good keyword tool, such as Yoast or Wordstream, are excellent ways to choose the seo indexes. Of course, the “good keywords”and the associates uses is also something you pay for, BUT some common sense of sentencing can work….aka long key words.
#7 SEO MAGIC - LONG KEYWORDS
Classicly, keywords have been used a singular. Single descritive word such as “Junk”, or “Horse” or simular. The good news is short sentences are also an effective use and the engines combined them as a “one word” descriptive. So instead of the word “junk”, you could say “emergency junk pickup” or “classical dressage training”.
The advantage is obvious, the disadvantage is it does narrow the possible serach output. For example searching for “Coffee” will result in thosands of results, of which, if you work with coffee, you would be amoung them. BUT that is thosands and hundreds of pages. Where as the long keywords, narrows down the search bundle leading to higher rankings.
#8 SEO MAGIC - USE KEYWORDS IN PAGE TITLES & IMAGE NAMES
Every webpage has a title, but most are not displayed. But those titles are still indexed by search engines and used as another type of SEO.
#9 SEO MAGIC - USE KEYWORDS STRATEGICALLY
Bit of technology here. YOu will have to interface with your web developer so that words are not just used in pages, but are also reused in header titles and labels. That is an art form. The page needs to be clean and simple and yet the SEO wording blended. In short these are areas to consider:
- Title tag (meta title)
- H1 heading
- At least two H2 headings
- Naturally in the body
- The first 100 words
- Image file names and alt text
- Meta description
A good wordpress plugin, like Yoast, can help here. But again, that free version of the plugin, does not achieve this level of application. The pro version does. You have to balance your time, web developers fees with the cost of the SEO to optimzie the process.
#10 SEO MAGIC - OPTIMIZED YOU SERP
SERP: Short for Search Engine Results Page. Each page is displaed as a part of the search engine results. What is said about that page, is what you optimze. It is a short, condensed yet appealing discription of that page or what you want to promote.
- Meta description: Keep this between 155-165 characters, indicate the value the reader will get out of the post, and make it actionable.
- Meta title: Make this 60 characters or less value, with the keyword close to the beginning, and indicate some sort of value or benefit.
#11 CROSS LINK YOU OWN SITE
When creating and publishing pages, make sure to insert at least 1-3 links to other pages on your site. The goal is to KEEP people on your page and that in turn will show a longer exposure time and improve your overall rankings.
#12 SPEED OF YOUR PAGE
According to Nelson UI studies, if your page takes longer than 10 seconds to load, you may lose the view. Here comes the balance again, between good graphics, hidden user interface tools called JavaScript and speed of server. All contribute to the speed that a page loads. The general rule is, the smaller the page size, in terms of the data (not the length of the visible page), the faster it will load.
Load speed can be a complicated art form. This get’s into understanding how the internet works in the first place. The speed of the server you are on, how many persons you are sharing the server with and how far away the viewer is from the server. If your server is in Los Angeles, having someone in New York is going to experience your site as slower than someone in San Diego. This is something you may or may not be able to control.
So what do you do to increase speed. Optimize each page to be as small as possible.
- Limit or reduce the number of images on the page
- Optimized the size and file size for each image.
- Reduce the amount of hidden interactive code
Finally test test test the speed of the page, after optimzing it’s content.
#13 ADD INTERACTIVITY TO YOUR PAGE
Opposite to item #12, adding interactiity is an essenial element depending on the demographic of your audience. That is a marketing and business call that you will need to make. WHO is your audience and WHO do you want to draw to your site. To not implement according to the audience, is like telling the viewer, we are not interested in you.
#14 REGULARY UPDATE YOUR SITE
Even the most evergreen content loses its luster over time. Updates, of some form, at least once a month is necessary to keep the freshness and is part of a ranking factor. Even if your post is still ranking on the first page of Google, you’d be surprised at what a content refresh can do. A new publish date on the SERP can bump you up a few positions, which, in turn, can lead to a surge in traffic.
But you can’t just change a few words and then update the publish date on your post. Google knows better than that.
#15 GET BACK LINKS aka CROSS LINKS
Blogs help here. The search engines see your site is listed on other sites, your ranking goes up. But quality does matter. Get your site listed on high volume, high ranking sites and visa-versa, instantly raises your ranking level.
WHAT TO AVOID
WRITE YOUR OWN BLOGS
The only blog no no, is don’t copy a blog from another site verbadum. You will be punished by not only the search engines with a lowering of your ranking, but you could face some legal challenges from the orginal company. If they are doing their job, they will find you too. Some nasty complaints on your reviews or worse could result.
Relying on other blogs is good for your own information and education, but write your varation using your own words and presentation style.
DON'T STEAL OR BORROW IMAGES
This includes images. Maybe you are not the best graphic artist and you can’t afford paying for a professional. Maybe you just don’t have the time. Good graphics are time consuming to creat and optimize. The good news is that there are many online royality free sites like PixelBay, that you can gain access to images without the cost. Worse case, you can search for images and refine the search using the “creative commons” parameters.
If you “steal” or “borrow” a image, minmiually give the site credit and a link. Just be VERY AWARE that there are legal search trollers, looking for images that were taken without permission. You may be confornted by a lawyer, who will now demand a fee of 6 digits or more, for the violation of using that image without permission. Worse case, they will take you and your business to court. This is all these lawyers do… looking for your violations.
Happy Promotions.
THE AUTHOR
CEO & Technical Director of Multimedia Designs, LLC, System Designer, Developer, Producer with 15+ years in the internet design and development space and 25+ years in the Software Development for the entertainment industry. Winner of the prestigious International Themed Entertainment Association award for interactive design. She holds a degree in Computer Engineering & Mathematics from California State University, Long Beach.
She can be reached at : multimedadesignsllc@gmail.com
