10 Free Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website in 2021

6. Create high-quality infographics and imagery

We live at high speed these days, and much can be communicated to our short attention spans with a well-designed infographic.

What is your customer searching for, or what is their unknown unknown? (i.e. what do they not know that they do not know?)

Infographics for home and car maintenance routines have been a home-run. Everyone needs a reminder once in a while to clean their dryer lint trap, replace their furnace filters, and de-ice their freezer.
How does this apply to your industry?

Three quick tips on creating useful imagery:

• Use a site like Canva to quickly create images that can be directly shared to social media. Small, frequent, and useful images are more effective than once-per-year supermassive infographics.
• Do something that someone did before, but do it BETTER.
  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and you can use existing content to build yours. Just don’t plagiarize.
• Make sure you tell a story that is interesting and useful to your audience. Random information and statistics about your industry are not engaging unless you are posting to a forum specific to your trade.

7.  Submit your site to search engines

This is so simple that I wasn’t sure if I should include it, but too many site owners believe that they can “build it and they will come”.

Google will index your site if somebody else is linking to it, but how will someone link to it if they can’t find you? And how will Google find you if no one is linking to you?
Submitting your site to Google also verifies the ownership of the domain, which increases your domain authority.

Three quick tips on connecting your site to search engines:

• Connect your site with Google Search Console. They will also give you useful information on which keywords are best for bringing users to your site.
• If you want to go the extra mile, also submit your site to Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
• Make sure you sign up for interruption-of-service notifications. If your site goes down, you want to be the first to know.

8. Host or participate in a podcast

Do you like to hear yourself talk?

Do you often go on long and intense monologues?

Well, then podcasting may be for you.

Podcasts are one of the best ways to engage with your audience these days. The podcasting platform is still new enough that there are giant market gaps, especially in construction and trades-related categories.

Look around for podcasts that you can participate in as a guest, or start your own if you have the voice and personality for it.

Three quick tips on using podcasts to your advantage:

• Search Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts for relevant shows in your market. Reach out with a topic in mind and ask if you can be a guest host. Remember to sell yourself and your story.
• Getting started with your own podcast show takes little more than some time, about $100 in recording equipment (a decent microphone), and some editing skills.
  Here’s a great guide by Buffer on starting your own podcast.
• If you’re set on starting your own podcast, see if you can find a good co-host or partner. If you don’t have the editing skills, maybe find someone that does.

9. Optimize for longtail keywords

Popular shorttail keywords like “edmonton electrician” might generate the most traffic, if you manage to rank for them, but targeting competitive keywords like that is not that useful for finding the right customers.

Why?

Let’s say you’re a local commercial electrician, and you specialize in new commercial construction and high-rise buildings.
What you really want to rank for are keywords like “commercial electrical contractor edmonton”, because Google will only place so many links to your page on their first page of search results, and using highly competitive keywords is crowding out your niche long-tail keywords.

If your page is optimized for “edmonton electrician”, you’re going to get a ton of people looking for someone to fix their breaker box or install new outlets in their house. This is a waste of your time.

On the other hand, the “commercial electrical contractor edmonton” longtail keyword will not have as many monthly searches, but because it’s longer and more specific than the shorttail keyword, you will more easily rank in the search results and generate more qualified leads.

Here’s a screenshot of “edmonton electrician” and how many searches are done per month:

And here’s a screenshot of “commercial electrical contractor edmonton”:

What are we seeing here? Way less volume for the second long-tail keyword, but these are the exact customers you want.

Three (longer) quick tips on using longtail keywords:

• Think about your ideal customer. What problems do they have and how are they looking for a solution?
  In the example of a commercial electrical contractor, they may go to Google and search for “edmonton commercial electrical contractor wcb cor”, because they’re looking for a qualified and experienced contractor with all of their safety requirements in order.
• Write for the modern-day search algorithm. Google no longer ranks the sites with the most keywords or exact phrases on their site. We have progressed to user intent searching instead of keyword targeting. This means users are becoming more accustomed to typing in their exact problem into search instead of keywords.
  E.g. They used to search “edmonton electrician”, but now they are starting to search for “electrician to fix my breaker panel”.
• Create useful content (ABU!). In our experience, we discovered that it’s easier to rank for longtail keywords in long-form blog posts and case studies.
  Instead of creating just another blog post, focus on actionable guides and data-driven posts that are helpful to your audience.
  

  SEO has evolved from strictly keyword targeting, so it is absolutely essential to have content that is highly specific and niche.
  Constantly study your customers, gather feedback, engage with them on social media, and understand what problems they are facing and how you can help them.

10. Optimize your highest traffic source

Google Analytics is a powerful tool when used properly. Unfortunately, most people don’t use it properly. Pulling useful information and valuable insights can be tricky, especially if you have a low-traffic site, but there are a few tricks to it.

You need to familiarize yourself with two areas of Google Analytics: Acquisition and Behavior.

Acquisition breaks down the data on where your visitors are coming from, and Behavior breaks down how they interact with your site.

Acquisition – How your customers are finding you.

Behavior – What your customers are doing on your site.

On the Behaviour page of Macsson Snow Removal, we can see that most people land on the homepage and then click on their Request A Quote form. After that, they return to the homepage and go to the About page or Contact page.

This is extremely useful because you can find out what your customers are after and how they look for it. Sometimes it’s just a quick quote, and sometimes they want to know more about your company.

Three quick tips on using Google Analytics:

• Find easy and low-effort opportunities to boost traffic. Does one of your blog posts get 10x more traffic than the others? Use it to link to your other posts and update it as often as possible.
• Look for your high-converting pages and improve their SEO.
  Our goal with SEO and content marketing is to drive potential customers to our site, and to engage them in a way that they trust us with their business.
  One of the best ways to do that is to capitalize on one of your best pages and use it to drive traffic to other parts of your site.
• Find new keyword opportunities by tracking your internal site search. Does your site have a built-in search bar? If you do, you can analyze all of the inputs to gather information on what your customers are looking for.
  If you have a large search volume for “products”, it may mean that your products page is not visible or obvious enough for people to find.