15 Easy Ways to Increase Website Traffic for Free
“The world is overrun with content; as many as five million blog posts are published on WordPress each day. Yours needs to stand out to make content creation worth your while.” — Elise Dopson, a content creator at CoSchedule.
You can have a very good website and blog, but it’s useless if no one reads it, right?
For more people to visit your website, you must increase the number of visitors to your website or blog.
In other words, you need to increase traffic. Here is how:
1. Start By Doing Topic Research
Many bloggers go astray by writing about topics they are interested in, or think their audience will be interested in, without doing their research first.
If that’s the case, we can’t expect your blog traffic to increase if we write on topics that are not of interest to the audience.
Why should they visit your blog if the topics you write about are not what they are interested in and need?
The solution is, you can research to find out what your blog audience is interested in. The method:
First, explore writing topics online through Google, Reddit, and Quora, as well as social media and forums where you can find people discussing your writing topic.
For example, you will create a writing topic about traveling, other than via Google, you can enter discussion forums such as Quora and Facebook groups.
Find out what traveling topics are currently being discussed there.
The second way, pay attention to trends that are of concern to influencers in the scope of your writing. What questions are frequently asked? What topics are being discussed frequently?
For example, if you are going to make an article about digital marketing, then you can look for what topics are trending and being discussed by influencers or experts in that field.
From the influencer’s content, there’s nothing wrong with “diving” into the comments or discussion column to find out what their followers are asking a lot.
Find out what information they need about the trend.
2. Do Thorough Keyword Research
After finding a topic that interests your blog audience, the next step is to do keyword research to determine the right keywords.
The words from these keywords are what you will put in the title of your writing.
Apart from being paid, there are also free keyword research tools that you can use. One of them is from Ubersuggest.
3. Target Long Tail Keywords
There are two types of keywords that you need to know; short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords.
As the name implies, short-time keywords are short keywords consisting of only one to two words.
Meanwhile, long tail keywords are keywords that consist of three or more words.
Example
Short tail keyword: Bali tourism
Long tail keywords: low-budget Bali tourism recommendations
Usually, short tail keywords have high search volume, but also have high competition.
Using short-tail keywords will make it more difficult for articles to be in the top positions of Google, so the number of visits will be small.
So it is advisable to target long tail keywords that will provide a greater chance of getting more traffic.
4. Use LSI Keywords
LSI Keyword or Latent Semantic Indexing are keywords related to the main keywords typed into the search engine.
LSI keywords are usually an accumulation of variations of keywords that many internet users are looking for.
If it turns out that the keywords provided by the keyword research tool are too rigid and not varied enough, then we can target LSI keywords to get traffic.
The trick, you can use Google to go through the “People Also Ask” or “People Also Ask” feature.
5. Create a Writing Brief
Writing blog articles without direction is like sailing aimlessly.
In writing, you also have to set a goal. Because without a goal, you will write instantly which results in writing that is less than optimal and not right on target.
The trick is to make a brief outline of the writing that you are making, which includes the points that you need to discuss in the writing that you will publish.
These points should include:
- Key points that make the audience interested and feel the need to read your article.
- Writing point of view
- What keywords should be in the text
- Dividing writing topics into subheadings
With these points, it will make it easier for you to use the information you get at the research stage to be developed into writing.
For example on the topic “How to Increase Website Traffic”, from the research results above it is known that many potential audiences need information about “how to increase blog traffic”, “what is traffic”, and others, which need to be included in the writing.
This means that apart from explaining “how to increase traffic”, you also need to explain “what is traffic”.
That way, you will write articles according to what your audience wants to read, and of course, invite more traffic.
6. Make sure your writing is unique and more complete than competitors
Creating unique writing is one of the basic writing techniques that a blogger must have.
Because out there, of course, many articles discuss the same topic as what we are going to write about, the tips are for making unique writing.
The uniqueness of writing can be seen from the style of language to the point of view taken by the author.
For example, when writing this article, of course, there are many articles on how to increase blog traffic, but from what I’ve read most of them are technical.
So in this article, I try to discuss it from a non-technical perspective, namely from the beginning of the writing process.
That way, I hope it can be more easily understood by readers.
While it’s complete, you can “check the shop next door” aka similar articles from competitors to see the deficiencies in the contents of their articles, so you can add them to your writing.
Finally, you can add statistical data, research, or include a source link with a good reputation.
This can build readers’ trust and keep them coming back to read your other writings.
7. Add Visual Content
You need to understand that not everyone can read long texts, especially when reading them through a gadget screen.
Other data shows that visual content in the form of images can increase 35% -87% engagement with content.
From these facts, you need to add visual content to your writing to make it easier for readers to understand what your writing is about.
Especially if you present a lot of information in the form of statistical data.
The visual content that you can use is:
- Pictures/photos
- Infographics
- Videos
If your article is in the form of a long text, you can outsmart it by:
- Make a short opening paragraph and represent the contents of the entire writing.
- Use subheadings
- Create listicles
- Create infographics to explain statistics, tutorials, or lists.
- Insert a Youtube video to explain something
8. Create a Catchy Title
Headlines or writing titles are very important in increasing traffic.
Because it starts with the title, potential readers will immediately decide whether to click on it or not.
For that, make the title of the article as attractive as possible in the eyes of the reader.
In my writing tips for writing titles so that many people read them, there are seven tips that you can try.
The most important thing you need to pay attention to is:
- Insert keywords into the title
- Use emotional words that attract readers (but not clickbait yes)
- Use numbers in the title for writing in the form of a listicle
- If competitors give 5 points on the same topic, you can add it to 8 points or more.
9. Optimize SEO in Every Post
Doing SEO optimization or Search Engine Optimization on writing is very important because it will determine the ranking of the blog in the search results of the Google search engine.
If the posts we make occupy the first position, it will automatically increase blog traffic.
There are two kinds of SEO optimization that you can do, namely On-page SEO optimization and Off-Page SEO. Here’s a brief explanation:
Refers to the optimization that we do on the website, which involves internal factors that we can control.
To increase blog traffic, focus on the following:
- Put the main keywords in the title, URL, opening paragraph, and the name of the photo file in the text.
- Spread the derived keywords naturally in the body and closing paragraphs, as well as subheadings.
- Create strong and attractive title tags and meta descriptions.
- Upload an image by entering keywords in the alt text.
- Include relevant internal links in your posts.
SEO Off-Page Optimization
SEO Off-Page Optimization refers to optimization carried out outside the website, which involves external factors.
What you can do include:
- Do a guest post on another blog or website by inserting a link to your blog address.
- Write on writing forums then insert your blog article link into the content.
- Utilize broken links on other websites to be replaced with relevant links to your blog articles.
12. Create an Email List For Readers
Maximizing SEO is great for increasing traffic, but you also need to make sure that they don’t just come to your blog once.
If you are the owner of a shop, of course, you want buyers to come shopping again, right?
Well, in the blog world, what you can do is encourage blog visitors to register for an email list or email marketing to regularly receive emails with the latest updates on your writing.
So, visitors who register their email will get periodic newsletters and regular promotions of the latest content or blog posts via email.
That way, you will get greater potential traffic.
You can start by using free email marketing services from MailChimp.com and ContantConstant.com.
Here are tips for doing email marketing:
- Insert email list registration in each post.
- Offer the latest content with upgraded information
- Add a popup that can appear every time a visitor leaves the website.
- Don’t bombard subscribers with too many emails. Send concise weekly or biweekly emails.
13. Promote your writing on social media
Even though the steps that I have explained above are ways to increase organic traffic that comes from the Google search engine, you also need to promote your writing on all social media that you have.
You could say social media is an effective source of traffic considering that many people like to share interesting posts with their friends or family.
To be interesting and worth sharing a lot, make sure your writing is of high quality!
Here are tips on promoting posts on social media:
- Make sure blog articles are easy to share with share buttons on several social media.
- Use an attractive featured image and title
- Use relevant hashtags
Customize content with social media. For example, if you share it on Twitter, make a thread that will interest readers, if you go to Instagram, make a microblog that contains a summary of your writing, and so on.
14. Ensure your website or blog is “Healthy”
A “healthy” blog will be preferred by both Google and users. For this reason, you need to ensure the “health” of your blog or website so that the goal of increasing traffic can be achieved.
A website can be said to be healthy if it meets several indicators, including:
- Content can be crawled by search engines
- Website pages can be indexed properly by Google
- Mobile-friendly website
- The process of loading website pages is fast.
15. Update Old Content
While both search engines and readers prefer fresh, new content, updating old content can also be a great way to increase traffic.
Every time we make an update to existing content, it’s like telling search engines or Google to re-crawl that content.
So then, Google will reassess and rearrange the page’s ranking based on the updates that have been made.
Use Google Analytics to see which content you want to increase traffic for.
Among the things you can do to update are:
- Update title and meta description
- Add relevant topics that are currently being talked about by many people
- Add some new, relevant keywords that are increasing in popularity
- Update old data, statistics, or information
Conclusion
There are many ways to increase website traffic that bloggers and website owners can do.
The above method points are easy, free, and work well.
The point is that website owners must consistently apply it, surely website traffic will increase significantly.
Hope the ways I mentioned work for you. Good luck!
Originally published at https://tealfeed.com.
