4 Ways to Attract Traffic to Your Website Without Social Media

Since social media marketing burst onto the scene in the 2000s, it’s become a core part of many businesses’ digital marketing strategies. Some vast brands owe much of their success to social media marketing. For many more, it’s an important touchpoint for analyzing customer behavior and communicating with their most loyal audience demographics. Though social media may seem like a non-negotiable part of any modern marketing strategy, if you want to forego this channel for whatever reason, there are plenty of other methods you can leverage to generate a healthy flow of traffic. Here are 4 of our favorite ways to attract traffic to your website without ever touching social media.

Produce Valuable, Niche Content

Blogging is ignored by a lot of modern entrepreneurs in favor of social media because it’s often viewed as a legacy marketing channel that lends itself to wordier, less sharable content than the short-form posts popular on social media. Though blogging your way through a simple content calendar may not have brought you floods of traffic in the past, approaching it the right way can help you dominate high-volume SERPs and enjoy a lot of interaction from organic sources.

The secret to success here is twofold:

Firstly, ensure you’re optimizing your content for long-tail keywords, meaning the lower-volume but more specific keywords that clearly intend to find out more about a specific subject. Though their metrics may not be especially impressive on the surface, if you optimize for these keywords when your competitors don’t, you can quickly achieve a monopoly on relevant traffic.

Second, ensure that you’re not writing content to fill a content calendar but instead writing pieces that will provide a real, tangible benefit to your target audience. The internet’s a big place, and in order to convince your audience to stay on your page instead of bouncing to a competitor’s, your content will need to provide a tangible benefit from the very first line.

Invest in SEO and Monitor It Closely

Leading on from our previous point, devoting more of your resources to SEO is one of the most effective ways modern businesses can attract traffic to your website without using social media. Though the large majority of online transactions start with the use of a search engine, many businesses fail to devote enough resources to making their site as search-friendly as possible. SEO is a misunderstood marketing discipline, with many entrepreneurs taking a superficial and overly-simplified view of what it entails. In the words of leading SEO agency KAU Media Group, Google employs “at least 200 different factors to assess where a website should rank for a specific search query”, meaning you can’t just include a couple of popular keywords in your page titles and expect to dominate the top spots of your targeted SERPs.

While bringing on expert help is the most foolproof way to optimize your site’s SEO, there are plenty of free and cheap online resources you can use to audit the various aspects of your site, such as load speed, backlink equity, keyword optimization, and more. Carry out a thorough audit of your site and follow it up with some research and self-directed learning, and you’ll probably be surprised by the number of quick wins you can use to optimize your site and start climbing those rankings.

Review Your Web Design

Word-of-mouth marketing and social proof are two of the most potent sources of traffic that any business owner can hope for. Although these things may be facilitated by social media, they’re rooted in providing a positive experience for everyone who visits your site. Your site speed, the ease of navigation, how your CTAs are positioned, and a whole host of other factors can significantly impact how your web design affects the customer experience. The experiences they have here will feed into how consistently you can start customer relationships on the right foot and how likely you are to gain new brand advocates with every sale.

When you come to review how well your web design is working for you, the one thing that should always make the top of your list is responsive design. According to a tech review aggregator TechJury, “mobile phones generate 60.66% of website traffic, while desktops and tablets are responsible for 39.34%”.

Despite the fact that mobile-first browsing has been the norm for some time, many brands are still subjecting their site visitors to clunky, counterintuitive site experiences through non-responsive designs. To keep customers singing your praises and bringing in repeat business, make sure your design aligns with their browsing habits and ensures a smooth, hassle-free mobile experience.

Supercharge Your Email Marketing

When it’s executed correctly, email marketing can promise an incredible ROI. Despite the massive potential of this marketing channel, many small businesses are hesitant to get started with it, often because they see it as arcane or overly complex.

Though there’s certainly a big gap between email marketing experts and total novices, making it work for you with your in-house resources is far from impossible. If you’ve been burned by a bad experience before, or you’re trying email marketing for the first time, the best piece of advice we can offer is to make sure you have good analytics in your corner.

Finding a quality email marketing tool that shows you a granular view of your open rates, audience segments, engagement based on times of day, and other metrics will immediately give you a 360-degree view of how your campaigns are performing and make it easy to plan incremental changes that will align your campaigns with audience behavior for higher engagement and better returns.

How to Attract Traffic to Your Website – Final Thoughts

Social media marketing has been a linchpin for some hugely impressive campaigns over the years. However, it’s certainly not the be-all and end-all of gaining website traffic or getting a high return on your marketing efforts. As you define your approach to marketing, we hope these methods help you get your site in front of the people searching for it and achieve a more consistent flow of high-intent sessions!