How to attract free traffic to your website

You often have to grow a website when the marketing budget is quite limited. In that situation, paid advertising tools become unavailable. So how do you attract visitors without paying for views, visits, clicks or conversions?

We will try to cover the main tools for attracting targeted visitors that require no financial spend. But don't treat them purely as a way to save money. They are also useful as additional traffic sources for websites that have no trouble with a promotion budget.

Free search traffic

SEO can hardly be called a free channel. Optimizers' services cost money, and promoting a site on your own only works in segments with very low competition. But this is not quite about SEO - it is about getting visits to your site through additional search tools.

Image search

Text is not the only content that ranks in search and can bring traffic. Don't forget about images. Google image search can bring you additional visits. Besides, high-quality, relevant photos significantly increase visitor engagement. Here are a few recommendations for raising the positions of your own images:

1. Fill in the alt and title attributes for every image on the site. These attributes describe images for search engines and users. Alt is visible to the user only in search results or when an image fails to load for some reason. Title is the interactive tooltip that appears when hovering over a picture. Both attributes must fully match the image content and be unique.
2. Before uploading photos to the site, rename them so the file name matches the content.
3. Try to use images that give the user additional useful information more often. These can be infographics, illustrative visuals and photos.
4. Don't use a search engine to find images for your site. Most likely you will find images protected by copyright or hosted on competitors' sites. It is best to create images yourself or use free stock photo services.

It is also important to optimize photo size so as not to slow the site down. If a page contains many images - for example, photos in a product card - the optimal size is up to 70 KB. If there are only a few pictures on the page, you can use larger images, but no more than 1 MB.

Video search

Video is another type of content that can bring you extra traffic and increase user engagement. This format is the one users take in best. That makes videos a great way to deliver important information to potential clients.

Here are the main tips for optimizing both the site and the video itself to get maximum traffic:

1. Use keywords in titles and descriptions. But don't overdo the keywords - the text must remain meaningful and readable.
2. Choose a video thumbnail that can catch internet users' attention. Both the views on the site itself and the clicks from search results depend on it.
3. Work on the off-page optimization of the pages containing video. The more backlinks from trusted domains you get, the higher the video will rank.
4. Optimize the video size to reduce load time. Services like Blazemp or HandBrake can help.

You don't need professional camera operators and scriptwriters to create video content. If you want to tell internet users about something genuinely important and interesting, a camera and basic editing skills are enough. Even non-professionally made video content is better than nothing.

Search engine services

Registering in services like Google My Business is necessary for two reasons:

1. You provide additional information about your company in enriched search results for queries that mention your name. This significantly increases potential clients' trust.
2. You also place complete information about yourself in navigation services such as Google Maps, and your company becomes visible to users searching the maps.

Registration in these services is especially important for companies providing services offline: shops, cafes, car workshops and so on, because when users search for services on maps, your physical address and key information will be among the results. In addition, your company will show up in the "related searches" section for your competitors' brand queries.

It will also affect your rankings and raise the CTR of your snippets in general local search. Search engine representatives themselves, John Mueller in particular, have repeatedly spoken about its importance. From local results the site gets the visitors most interested in the company's services and ready to place an order.

Besides the address, it is important to provide the following when registering:

• your field of activity and the main services you provide;
• working hours;
• contact details;
• a short company description;
• the website address;
• photos of the office, the team and so on.

After registering, keep the data up to date. For example, if you changed your working hours or phone number, don't forget to update the information in the service itself.

Content marketing

Informational content placed on well-visited sites can become a source of interested visitors. Besides, it earns you backlinks that positively affect your resource's positions in search results. And many informational resources and blog-carrying sites allow publishing for free.

Let's look at the two most popular formats of free publications: guest posts and content exchange.

Guest posts are welcomed by info sites that attract their audience with quality content. For your article to be published, it must meet the editorial requirements:

• contain useful, unique information for the platform's readers;
• match the site's topic;
• be unique and not repeat previously covered themes;
• contain no direct advertising of the company or its services.

With content exchange, you publish an article on a partner's site and host their content on yours in return. The more similar your sites' topics are, the more visits you can attract. Content exchange is often practiced even by competing resources, as well as by companies providing the same services in different regions or working with different audience segments.

Social media as a traffic source

If you run social media pages, it is important to convert them into site visits - otherwise all that activity is wasted. To do that, you need an effective content mix - the optimal ratio of different post types that holds subscribers' attention and nudges potential clients to click through.

Social media posts are commonly divided into three types:

• Entertaining. They raise readers' interest and get reposted most often, which expands the reach.
• Informational. They hold the interest of the most engaged audience segments because they deliver useful information.
• Selling. They increase the value of your product for the reader and stimulate a visit to the site or an order.

Entertaining content is needed to attract new users' attention and add pleasant variety for subscribers. Site visits come from informational and selling content. Let's talk about those:

1. When publishing a new article on the site, announce it on social media. This brings targeted visits and grows the number of regular visitors.
2. Share any information about discounts and promotions on your page. Extra benefits are the best stimulus for potential clients among your subscribers to place an order.
3. When talking about your products or services, add a link to the relevant page of the site.

Remember that the goal of such posts is to raise the interest of the target audience specifically and increase the number of orders - not to please the maximum number of social media users.

Publications in online media

You don't have to be a large international company to get into the media. It is enough to pick the right news angle or share useful information with readers.

A service like Pressfeed can help. There, journalists look for experts who can cover topics of interest by answering various questions. To interest a media representative, you need to give a detailed answer.

Another way to get free publications is to negotiate with media representatives directly. But in that case you must come up with an interesting news angle yourself - a topic that will definitely interest the editors and the readers.

Materials tied to current news and trends get published most often. So follow the latest news and use Google Trends to track the popularity of the queries you care about. The opinions of recognized experts are also highly valued - the only problem is that you need to be a recognized expert.

Registration in online directories

Almost every niche has sites that provide information about other resources and companies: directories, price and RSS aggregators, review sites, ratings and so on. Some are considered relics of the times when search engines did not always return relevant results and people had to look for resources in online directory listings.

But many such resources are still popular, which makes them decent traffic sources. Registration is free, and on top of that you get backlinks that affect the site's ranking.

Conclusions

It is entirely possible to attract traffic to a website without spending a marketing budget. But it is hard to call the available methods completely free: instead of money, you invest two equally valuable resources - time and work.

We hope this article was useful. If you want to learn more about promotion tools, follow our blog.