How to Draw Traffic to Your Website without Paid Advertising

Whether you are selling paper clips, vehicles, or merely selling your own private consultation online, you will need to attract lots of traffic to be able to convert a portion of those people viewing your offerings into quantifiable sales.

Two ways to do that are either to pay for it or to generate it for free. Paid traffic is generated through online advertising campaigns and can be very costly, but has a quick turnaround. Free traffic is labeled “organic” traffic because it stems from the natural process of attracting your own customers via content marketing and other online strategies.

Unlike paid advertising campaigns that come to an abrupt end when you stop paying for them – along with your traffic stream, organic traffic continues to grow year after year, making it a far more sustainable and more profitable option.

In this article we’re going to explore three ways to target your ideal customers and generate a stream of organic traffic to your website.

1. Publish niche-specific content regularly

Content can be one of the best sources of organic traffic to your site. The way this traffic-generation method works is directly related to the way Google, as the biggest search engine and the biggest source of web traffic, crawls the web.

Google tends to favor more recent content than older material so it checks your website from time to time to see what’s new. If it notes any changes, it comes back again, notes the newest content you’ve published and adds it to the Search Engine Page Results (SERPs). This content can then appear whenever it’s relevant to a web user’s search query.

Thus, to get yourself noticed more by Google and by people who are looking for information to solve a problem in their lives, you must make sure your content is:

• original,
• reader-friendly,
• useful,
• interactive enough to comment and share,
• and, irresistibly attractive via killer headlines.

Above all else, keep publishing on a regular schedule to keep both your content and website fresh. This will inspire your visitors to come back regularly and will help you to transform them into loyal followers.

2. Drive traffic to your website with SEO

Before mentioning two key search engine optimization (SEO) strategies you can use to drive traffic, I’d like to point something out that. Even though Google currently holds more than 70 percent of the market share, there’s really no reason to miss out on opportunities that can come from other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. Definitely make sure you register with their webmaster tools and submit your website there.

To get back to SEO, two techniques you should focus on are: using niche-specific keywords and leveraging on-page SEO.

Niche-specific keywords

The majority of search engine traffic comes from the so called long-tail keywords. They are 4-5 words long expressions that a user types in the search box to find something online. They usually have low competition and a decent search volume and you can find them via the Google Keyword Planner.

Another way to do this is to look at the suggested searches at the bottom of the SERPs for a specific term. For instance, if you are trying to sell water purification systems, the long-tail suggestion might be something you’ve never thought of, like “portable water purification systems” or “whole house water purification systems.”

Once you have a good set of long-tail keywords, create your own variations and use them in your content and titles, but not so much that Google thinks you’re stuffing keywords.

On-Page SEO

Pay attention to the functional aspects of your website, like the time it takes to load a page and linking your website internally. Relevant internal links can not only drive a lot of traffic to other pages on your site but also play a key role in capturing visitors’ interest and keeping them on the page longer.

You should also avoid broken links, add ALT attributes to images, and optimize your titles and meta tags.
3. Get noticed with social media

Establishing presence on a few prominent social media networks can vastly increase your organic traffic by improving the outreach of your content.

When you publish to your site, send out updates to your social media profiles that announce the new content and bring those social media connections back to your website.

Even if you have few friends or followers, as long as you connect with those who have wider audiences, they can share and comment on your content and thus promote it for you online.

This will draw more people to your social profiles and consequently to the source of your content – your website.

Taylor Moore is a freelance copywriter with a passion for small business and retail marketing. For more talk on content marketing, conversion optimization, branding and customer service, follow her @taylormtweets.