Websites run on the traffic they receive. Bringing visitors to your site is the most important part of making your site grow, and growing an audience is a core part of building your website online.
One of the easiest ways to improve the traffic to your site is through advertising. However, this costs money to do, and can be an expensive strategy – especially if you’re just starting out with a new website.
But don’t worry – luckily, there are a couple of methods you can use to boost the traffic to your website without paying a single penny!
In this handy guide, we’ll take you through 5 easy methods you can use to drive more free traffic to your website without having to pay for ads.
So let’s get started, shall we?
What Is Traffic, Anyway?
Before we get into ways you can boost your traffic, let’s take a closer look at what online traffic actually is.
Website traffic, in simple terms, refers to the number of visitors to and from a website. Traffic is made up of users who visit a website, along with data regarding each visit (such as how long a user stayed and when they visited).
These visits are often referred to as ‘sessions’ and are a great way of tracking how much reach and engagement your website has, as well as the effectiveness of any marketing strategies and advertising.
While ads can be a great way to boost website traffic, they aren’t the only option. Traffic is influenced by several factors, and it can be increased through many different methods that are 100% free!
Free traffic refers to visitors that aren’t brought to your site through ads or other forms of marketing that you’ve paid for.
Also known as ‘organic traffic’, these visitors are often seen as “higher quality” visitors as they tend to stay on your site longer and are more likely to engage with the content of your website.
However, free traffic is hard to attract and grows your website more slowly than paid traffic. With that being said, though, there are a couple of ways that you can boost the free traffic coming into a website.
How To Boost Traffic Without Paying For Ads: 5 Methods
Okay, so we’ve established what website traffic is – now it’s time to see how you can drive more traffic to your website! Here, we’ll take you through 5 of the best strategies you can use to boost the free traffic to your site.
1) Implement SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a great way to improve organic traffic. SEO involves using various strategies to optimize your website’s ranking, which determines how highly it appears in search engine results.
This is incredibly useful for driving more traffic to your site, as the top three search results receive more than 50% of all clicks – 25% goes to the first result alone!
Because of this, having a higher ranking will give your website the best possible chance for getting more organic traffic.
While SEO tools typically require payment, there are some simple strategies that you can implement on your website to help give it a higher ranking on search engines.
These strategies include using more keywords in your site’s content, building a solid connection of backlinks, and maintaining a consistent schedule for uploading new content.
Implementing SEO strategies is a great way to boost your website’s rankings, which in turn will drive more free traffic to your site.
2) Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Nowadays, most people access websites on their mobile devices. However, layouts that look good on a desktop aren’t always the most user-friendly when translated to mobile.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, any visitors on mobile will have a much worse experience trying to navigate your site. As a result, you’ll see much less traffic as mobile users won’t want to visit your website.
Making your website mobile-friendly is a simple and permanent solution to this issue that makes your site much better for mobile users to visit. This means you’ll get more free traffic, just by making your website nicer for mobile users!
3) Build Backlinks
Backlinks are incredibly important when it comes to building a website’s reach. These are links on other websites that link back to your website, directing visitors from the other site your way.
Building a backlink network might seem like an intimidating task at first, but once you’ve started getting backlinks it’s much easier to grow a network.
Creating partnerships with other website owners is a great way to start building backlinks, as is creating good content that other people will want to link to.
Good backlinks are also great for SEO, which (as we’ve already established) is a great way to drive more traffic!
4) Use Social Media
There’s no better free advertising than social media! Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be a great way to promote your site for free and allow you to easily link directly to your site for more organic traffic.
Don’t just stick to one social media platform, though, as this severely limits your reach. Use a variety of social media platforms to reach as wide an audience as possible, and share links to your site to drive free traffic.
Not only is this a great method that doesn’t cost you anything, but you can also build up a good reputation on social media. This has a knock-on effect of improving your audience further, as well as potentially creating backlink networks from other users sharing your posts.
Staying active on your profiles and posting consistently will give you the best chance here.
5) Guest Blogging
If you’re trying to expand your blog, then guest blogging can be a great way to do this. Guest blogging is somewhat similar to building backlinks, but involves getting another blogger to make a post on your blog (or vice versa).
Like a backlink network, this builds a community with other bloggers and is mutually beneficial to both you and the other blogger, as you will receive more traffic from each other’s audience.
Guest blogging on someone else’s blog is particularly lucrative – not only are you creating backlinks to bring more traffic to your website, but posting high-quality content will give you a good reputation and lead to more partnership opportunities in the future!
Free Traffic Vs Quality Traffic
Using methods to generate traffic for free can be a great way to save money while still attracting an audience, but free traffic isn’t the best way to build your audience. So is paying for quality traffic worth it?
The answer is mostly up to you, and depends on what your website is and what you want to get out of it. For the most part, though, paid traffic is better than free traffic.
The biggest benefit of paid traffic is that it expands your audience quickly and effectively. With free traffic, it takes a pretty long time to start building up an audience and generating any real growth.
Paid traffic, meanwhile, gives you great results in a relatively short time span. This makes it great for establishing reach quickly, which in turn makes it easier for you to maintain and grow your audience.
Paid traffic is also typically better quality than free traffic. Visitors attracted by paid traffic tend to stay longer and engage more with a website than with free traffic, making them more valuable to your website’s performance.
However, you’re more likely to see organic traffic with free traffic. This is where visitors arrive at your site naturally through search engine results, and provide long-lasting benefits and traffic for your website (especially if you implement SEO strategies!).
There are still plenty of benefits to free traffic, though. The most obvious advantage is that it’s (of course) free, meaning that you don’t have to splash out on marketing and advertising for your website.
This is particularly valuable if you’re just starting out or have a small-scale website that you don’t expect much revenue from; free traffic lets you bring visitors to your site while still keeping it financially sustainable.
Another advantage of free traffic is that, while it can take months or even years to start seeing benefits, once you implement these strategies you’ll continue to see permanent results.
Free traffic is more of an investment than paid traffic (in both time and effort) but can prove a lucrative and easy way to improve your website’s reach and audience.
Final Thoughts
And there you have it – 5 easy ways that you can boost the free traffic coming into your website! By using these handy strategies, you can start bringing in more visitors and give your site more traction – all without spending a penny!
Free traffic might not bring the same fast results as paid traffic, but it’s still a great way to increase your website’s reach and boost its performance.
So now that you know the best ways that you can boost your website’s free traffic, all you need to do now is put your newfound knowledge into practice!
These days, everything is online. You can’t get your business anywhere without a great online presence. With search engines forever changing, it’s difficult to stay on top of it all! That’s where I’ll come in.
Hello, my name is Jack O’Neil and I have been in the marketing industry for almost 10 years. I focus on online marketing, SEO, advertising, and more.
