6 Effective Ways to Get More Traffic Without Building Links
People always build links and drive more traffic to their sites. These two things usually go together, side-by-side. Many marketers recommend focusing on link building if you want to get more organic traffic to your website.
Link building is an effective strategy that can help you reach your goals, but it has a few disadvantages. First of all, everyone is trying to follow this strategy, but you can face much competition in your industry. Secondly, it can be costly and time-wasting, especially if you choose to do influencer marketing or paid promotion. Finally, you always need to act quickly and follow the trends, and it is not a sure thing that the results will recover the expenses and all the time you have put into it.
The good news is that you can still generate more organic traffic and improve your website’s SEO without building links. In this article, I will tell you how to do that to get success without spending much time and effort.
1. Create evergreen content
The best and quickest way to drive more traffic without building links is to create viral content. Fortunately, you can find many resources like Buzzfeed, Reddit, and Playbuzz to show you how to make this kind of article. Try to check out some articles, and you will better understand the main idea of how viral content should look like and what content you should create.
You can use BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to find out what is trending right now in your field and using this data to write viral content. Another great way to help you create viral content is to use Quora and Youtube to see hot topics and write content around these topics. According to my experience, YouTube that inspired blog posts can usually do well.
2. Offer freemium products
If you have a great product, you don’t need to fight for links. And if you already have a paid product, it will be a great idea to offer it for free to market your paid version. This model is known as a freemium one.
For example, HubSpot has a tool called Website Grader that helps websites run an audit based on different factors and give them a grade. This tool is free, but it doesn’t provide a well-detailed audit analysis. It just gives you actionable recommendations on how to improve your website, but if you want to find out more, you can offer to pay for the upgraded product.
The only drawback of freemium products is that it takes some time, effort, and money to create something valuable. That’s why, before stepping into this model, you need to do some research to make sure that it makes sense for your business and fulfill all your expectations.
3. Create Linkable Assets
If you are on a shoestring budget, you can always have an excellent opportunity to build linkable assets. The best thing about them is that it is simple to create and make people link to them. Linkable assets are any type of content made to build links, generate more shares and traffic. It can be a case study, blog post, infographic, or even scholarship page.
When you do everything right, these assets can increase your brand awareness and your website rankings. Moreover, you don’t make reasonable efforts to generate traffic and build links. Sure, it can require some time and creativity to create linkable assets, but it will pay the bills. To get started, you can use the following examples:
- Tools: You can create any tools (simple or complicated) to meet any needs and interests of your target audience.
- Guides and tutorials: This is an excellent piece of content that can attract your customers’ attention. They always want to know how to do this or that thing correctly to reach good results. For example, Stephens Law Firm, PLLC created a detailed guide on hiring a car accident lawyer and getting compensation. You don’t need to create a separate site for this purpose – you can just create a detailed guide and offer something like “check out our how-to guide.”
- Visual assets: That includes different infographics, graphs, diagrams, presentations, and maps. You can easily accompany your visual content with stats about your field or a map of the most powerful influencers in your area. You just need to put more creativity and effort to build significant visual assets that make other people share in your space.
- Interactive content: These are your quizzes, games, apps, and another type of interactive content that gives your customers a great chance to learn something new about themselves in a funny way. This content can always be a great idea to increase your leadership and shares.
- Research: If you want to get data, you can run different surveys and include these results in a detailed report. The best thing about it is that you can use these stats for your news articles, roundups, and blog posts. Using stats and data can increase trust among your readers and make them share links.
As you can see, this is not so difficult to create linkable assets. It can also get much fun and pleasure to build them because there are many types you can start with and scape up to something more useful for your target audience.
4. Use Social Websites for Press
If you are looking for social websites to build your tool or linkable asset, you can always use Quora, Reddit, Product Hunt or other websites related to your niche. Quora and Reddit are suitable for any field to use.
If you want to promote your product or services using these websites, you should carefully read these communities’ rules. Reddit has stringent regulations regarding any product promotion before publishing. Otherwise, you can be banned for being too spammy. The more industry websites you use, the more qualified customers you can get. As a result, they can end up linking to your post if they love your product or blog post.
5. Give Something For Free
While your competitors spend much money on improving their products, you can take a chance and build the same tool for free for your audience. For example, Keyworddit is a free keyword tool to generate topic ideas from Reddit. Today you can find many keyword suggestion tools, but you can use this one totally for free without strings attached.
Another great example is Website Grader from HubSpot that doesn’t do much outreach and promotion, but it helps them generate thousands of quality links and organic traffic to their website every day. Do you know why? Because people don’t want to pay money and get products or services for free. That is why this approach is the most effective in the SEO game.
They don’t market these tools a lot, but they provide a lot of useful information on their websites. When people visit them to learn something useful, they can find how to fix their problems using their services or tools. And people make the best of them.
6. Answer The Most Burning Questions
As you may notice, many people enter questions or excerpts of questions while searching for something in Google or other search engines. These types of questions can be low hanging fruit to generate a lot of organic traffic. To find these long-tail phrases, you can use Quora, Google’s Autocomplete, or Wikipedia for the most popular questions.
When you see a page ranking high in Google, you should focus on using this result for your website and attracting more links. The best way to answer your target audience’s most burning questions is to create a separate user-friendly FAQ page. That will help customers better understand what they need to do to meet their needs.
You can see a great example from Allen Law Firm, P.A that has created a separate page with the most common questions about personal injury and detailed answers to all of them. So, their customers don’t need to spend time and effort to fix their problems as this page provides all the necessary information.
Bottom Line
When we talk about SEO and organic traffic, we used to create useful and detailed content to generate more links. This is a great strategy, but you can meet much competition out there. To stand out and get high rankings, you don’t need to do a lot of outreach. Just go beyond endurance and do something opposite in your niche. Put more creativity and be different from others.
Every time Google updates its algorithm, people try to keep pace with it. But the most important thing that still stays permanent is the opportunity to provide value. And all you need to do is to give it to them in a unique way. Just try to be the best and exceptional in your niche. Once you understand unique values and start presenting the best content on your website, you will improve the overall user experience and get higher rankings in Google.