5 tips to get more free traffic to your business website! 

For businesses, digital marketing means bringing more traffic to websites. Taking an analytical approach to digital marketing tools and how to use them can easily generate significantly more free traffic - and, therefore, more conversions for your business.

In this article, we put together five very useful ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors regarding digital content that can cost-effectively drive traffic to your business website.

1. Keyword planning for more free traffic

To drive traffic to your website, you should know what and how people search for information online. The most common platform for searching information is search engines, especially Google. To attract people interested in your product or business, you need to identify the most searched keywords on search engines to lead potential visitors to your website. 

The wording is also very important, so you should find out the most popular versions of different search terms in the first place!

Google AdWords is probably the most useful tool for keyword research. There are several reasons for this, but probably the most important is AdWords suggests suitable keywords and provides estimated search volumes. 

The keyword ideas you can use from AdWords can easily be used for content planning on your website and other technical search engine optimization, which is also discussed in more detail later in this article.

Figure 1: Google AdWords Keyword Planner

The length of keywords, short vs. long tail, also plays an important role. Long-tail keywords have a lower hit rate, as longer keyword groups are searched less than single keywords. 

On the other hand, competition is also typically higher for single keywords. Therefore, it is essential to study what keywords potential visitors use to search for your website in search engines.

2. Optimized URLs, titles, and meta descriptions

The title and meta description of your website should be unique from page to page. From a search engine perspective, the URL structure should be simple and unique on each page. Each URL should contain relevant keywords and include a dashed line to separate the keywords. 

Broadly speaking, the appropriate number of characters for a blog title should be lower than 65, while for meta description, it is lower than 150 characters. 

If the title and meta description is incomplete or missing, your website will not generate any traffic. For many companies, these are very poor, and investing in them can increase traffic considerably.

The title is one of the most important and visible parts of a web page. From a search engine perspective, the optimal title should be as concise and informative as possible. Therefore, a good headline should contain the most important keyword for the web page that would lead the searcher to the web page (see Keyword Planning). 

However, be sure not to overcrowd the title with keywords.

Figure 2: URL, title, and meta description

Meta descriptions also play an important role in search engine ranking. A good meta description summarizes useful information about the landing page to the searcher. 

This, in turn, generates clicks and sessions to your page. A good and appropriate meta description will help your website’s click-through rate (CTR). From a search engine’s point of view, click-through rate is essential information, as it means how many people end up visiting your website.

3. Sitemap and indexing

Does your website already have a sitemap? If you are not sure, you should check this with your webmaster as soon as possible. In the worst-case scenario, you could lose a significant amount of traffic if you do not have a sitemap on your website. 

From a search engine optimization perspective, the sitemap is the second most important page immediately after the website’s homepage. A sitemap has many benefits, as it allows the search engine to index changes to the site more quickly. 

This, in turn, helps to improve your ranking in search engine results. If your website is relatively new, create a sitemap as soon as possible.

Figure 3: Visualization of the sitemap

Creating a sitemap is relatively easy. In practice, it’s a crawler page that links together all the pages on your website. Of course, if you are optimizing your e-commerce site, you will then need to index thousands of individual pages. 

Using sitemaps to index your website’s content properly will help them rank higher in search engine results.

4. Inter-linking is a must for more free traffic 

In Google’s case, the search bot scans web pages by tracking both internal and external links. Cross-referencing internal links between different pages on your website is therefore highly recommended from a search engine perspective. 

Inter-linking is useful from the reader’s point of view to find more relevant content on the website and from the search engine’s point of view to improve the search result ranking.

Check and make sure that you are linking together relevant pages, taking into account the following factors:

• Pages that you want to rank better in search results shall have a higher number of internal links.
• Pages that you want to rank better in search results should be linked to your home page.
• You should have 2-10 internal links per page.

From Google’s perspective, three factors play a major role in inter-linking: 1) the relevance of the linked pages to each other, 2) the relationship between the linked pages, and 3) the value that the linked pages bring.

5. Invest in helpful content

The content on your site must add value to the person who is looking for it. This is the most important factor that will ultimately bring interested people to your website. 

For the searcher, useful content requires persistent effort and genuine value addition to the person visiting your website. Useful and relevant content reduces the bounce rate and helps to increase conversion rates.

It is of paramount importance that the content on your website matches the keywords and search terms that the visitor is searching for. It is not practical to try to serve as many people as possible but to focus on the specific group of people interested in your website’s content. 

From a technical point of view, it is essential to eliminate duplicate content and ensure that each site is unique and not too cross-content.

Appropriate and quality content (note: keywords) combined with internal linking, optimized URLs, headlines, and meta descriptions will increase your ranking in search engine results and thus increase the number of visitors to your website in the long run. 

While you can significantly increase the traffic to your website using various tools, creating useful content that adds value is a long-term effort.

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