Having a strong online presence is crucial for the success of your website. What’s good is that you can promote your website without having to spend a fortune on ads or paid marketing. There are a few different ways to increase your website’s visibility and drive more traffic while only spending in key areas. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore 9 powerful and lower-cost ways to promote your website.
Table of Contents
1. Improve Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key in promoting your website organically on search engines like Bing and Google. By optimizing your website’s content and structure, you can increase its visibility and attract more users without spending a dime. Start by understanding the basics of SEO and develop a comprehensive strategy to improve your website’s search ranking.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which involves optimizing your website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your website ranks, the more visibility and organic traffic you can generate. There’s more than one type of SEO – you have technical SEO, and non-technical SEO.
Technical SEO Improvements
Technical SEO involves improving your website’s technical aspects. Factors such as website speed, accessibility features, as well as the actual hosting you use for your website are all technical in nature. Here’s how you can improve your technical SEO:
- Get a better hosting provider: Using a high-quality managed hosting provider is a quick way to further improve your technical SEO. These quality providers usually use high-end enterprise-grade hardware. That kind of hardware is a lot more performant compared to a cheap VPS or shared hosting.
- Improve accessibility features: You can use an online tool such as PageSpeed Insights to take a look at your website’s accessibility score. This covers items like text contrast, text size, and overall layout. The idea is to make your website as accessible as possible for those with visual impairments.
- Improve your website’s speed: Depending on what website platform you use, there might be some room for improvement with your loading speeds. If you use WordPress for example, there’s many different caching plugins and performance plugins that can improve your page speed with no visual changes. Alternatively, optimizing your images is also important in improving page speed.
- Set up a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml page: Doing this helps tell the search engines what pages you have and where they are. This improves Bing’s, Google’s, etc. ability to crawl your website and learn what pages exist.
Non-Technical SEO Improvements
Non-technical SEO is also important, especially since it normally is an ongoing process. Here’s what you can do to help make your SEO better:
- Keyword Research: Identify relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for and incorporate them strategically into your website’s content.
- Content Optimization: Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that satisfies user intent and aligns with the keywords you’ve identified.
- Update Content Regularly: It’s important to not let your site get stagnant, as that lets competitors get ahead with fresh content.
- Link Building: Build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to increase your website’s authority and credibility. The lower your DA (domain authority), the less likely it will be that others will want to link to you as it will lower their DA.
- User Experience: Pay attention to the overall user experience of your website, including navigation and mobile optimization.
After you adjust your website’s technical SEO and target keywords relevant to your brand, you should see an improvement in your website’s visibility in search results which will help attract more organic traffic.
2. Start a Blog
Starting a blog is an excellent way to provide valuable content to your audience while positioning your website as an authority in your niche. By regularly publishing blog posts that help to solve your target audience’s pain points and interests, you can attract more organic traffic and establish a loyal following. To run a blog successfully, you’ll need to do this:
- Keyword Research: Search for and identify topics that resonate with your target audience. You could use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to see what keywords are competitive and which get zero searches.
- Content Creation: Develop high-quality, informative, and engaging blog posts that address your audience’s needs and offer actionable solutions.
- Promotion: Share your blog posts on social media platforms, relevant online communities, and through email newsletters to increase visibility and generate traffic.
- Guest Blogging: Collaborate with other websites in your niche to contribute guest posts that provide value to their audience while promoting your website.
Running a blog can significantly contribute to your website’s visibility and authority, ultimately driving more traffic and conversions. Trying to pull some of your blog visitors to your website can also help increase brand awareness. To learn what kind of posts you should be creating, you can check out our guide on getting more people to read your blog.
3. Target Lower-Competition Keywords
When optimizing your website for search engines, it’s ideal to target keywords that have low competition but high search volume. Low-difficulty keywords with high search volume almost never happens since you likely have competitors. Try to start with lower difficulty keywords first and work your way upwards as you gain credibility. By focusing on these less competitive keywords, you have a better chance of ranking higher in search results and attracting relevant organic traffic. Here’s how to find and leverage these keywords:
- Keyword Research Tools: Utilize keyword research tools like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to identify low-competition keywords with significant search volume.
- Long-Tail Keywords: Target longer-tail keywords, which are longer. These more specific phrases can have lower competition but higher intent. Short-tail keywords have way more searches but are also much harder to rank for. Only go for those once you have built up a brand.
- Optimize Content: Incorporate these low-competition keywords into your website’s content, including headings, titles, meta descriptions, and alt text. Search engines take these into consideration when ranking your content.
With these improvements, you’ll help make search engines know what you’re about and also help improve your brand awareness with new visitors. Throughout all of this, you have to remember to create compelling and useful content. If you are just trying to target keywords with poorly written articles, you likely won’t get anywhere fast.
4. Offer Valuable Content Beyond Your Blog
In addition to your blog, providing other valuable resources can further engage your audience and enhance your website’s visibility. By offering free resources like templates, infographics, videos, webinars, or eBooks, you can establish your website as a go-to source for valuable content. Here’s how to make the most of these resources:
- Create Unique Content: Develop high-quality, informative, and visually appealing resources that address your audience’s pain points and provide practical solutions.
- Promote Across Channels: Share your resources on social media platforms, relevant online communities, and through email newsletters to expand their reach and drive traffic to your website.
- Re-target Visitors: You can offer more information to visitors that agree to provide you with their email. You can then follow up with them when you release new content for example. That can help boost initial impressions on your content.
- Collaborate with Others: Collaborate with influencers, experts, or complementary brands to perform website promotion or co-branded content. This benefits both sides and introduces new content to each other’s audiences.
By doing all of this, you can attract more visitors to your website and establish your brand as a trusted source of information. Just remember to keep your content somewhat relevant in relation to your blog. The less similar your site content is compared to your blog, the harder it will be to keep visitors interested.
5. Promote Your Website through Link Building
Backlinks, or links from other websites to yours, play a crucial role in improving your website’s authority and visibility. By actively building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, you can enhance your website’s search ranking and attract more organic traffic. Here’s how to effectively build backlinks:
- Guest Blogging: Contribute guest posts to authoritative websites in your niche. If possible, include mentions of your website or a backlink to your website in your author bio. Even better, try to include links within the content itself.
- Broken Link Building: Find broken links on relevant websites and offer your content as a replacement. This is a win-win – you provide value to the website owner and earn a backlink in the process.
- Content Promotion: Share your high-quality content on social media platforms and forums if possible. This increases the chances of other websites linking back to your content.
- Collaborate with Others: Partner with complementary brands or influencers to create content together and earn backlinks from their websites.
Backlinks are powerful but also some of the most difficult (and expensive) ways to promote your website. Lots of business will ask top dollar to post your link on their site. Unfortunately, in most cases you won’t know what it will cost you until you reach out and ask for yourself. While it’s difficult and expensive, this is also one of the most effective ways to promote your website.
6. Engage with Other Websites in Your Niche
Actively engaging with high-authority websites and online communities in your niche can significantly boost your website’s visibility and attract new audiences. By participating in discussions, contributing valuable insights, and building relationships, you can establish yourself as an industry expert and drive traffic to your website. Here’s how to effectively engage with others:
- Guest Posting: Write guest posts for authoritative websites in your niche, showcasing your expertise and providing value to their audience.
- Round-Up Contributions: Offer your insights or expertise to be included in industry round-up articles or expert opinions, earning backlinks and driving traffic to your website.
- Social Media Engagement: Participate in relevant social media discussions, answer questions, and provide valuable insights to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
- Online Community Participation: Join online forums or communities related to your industry and actively contribute by answering questions and sharing valuable information.
Be careful with how much you interact with online communities. You don’t want to push your content or websites too often. Trying to promote your website too often will lead visitors to feel like you’re just there to advertise.
7. Promote Your Website Through Social Media
Social media platforms provide an excellent opportunity to promote your website and engage with your target audience. By creating compelling and shareable content, actively participating in discussions, and building a strong social media presence, you can increase your website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic. Here’s how to take advantage of social media:
- Choose the Right Platforms: Identify the social media platforms where your target audience spends the most time and focus your efforts on those platforms.
- Create Engaging Content: Develop content that is shareable, visually appealing, and tailored to your audience’s interests and pain points.
- Consistency is Key: Regularly post relevant content, engage with your audience, and respond to comments and messages to build a loyal following.
- Collaborate with Influencers: Partner with influencers or industry experts to create and cross-post content, reaching a wider audience and attracting more traffic to your website.
Being present on social media is great, especially if you have new content to post frequently. This could include sales & discounts, special offers, featured items, and more. There’s lots of flexibility here, but it is time consuming to manage and consistently post to social media platforms.
8. Increase Your Branding Efforts
Your brand is a powerful asset that can help promote your website and establish a strong online presence. Do what you can to get your brand out there more often. The more your brand is present, the better your brand recognition and drive more traffic to your website. Some ways to get your brand out there include the following:
- Consistent Branding: Maintain consistent branding across all platforms and marketing materials, including your logo, colors, and messaging.
- Email Signature: Include your website’s URL and logo in your email signature to increase brand visibility and encourage recipients to visit your website.
- Social Media Branding: Use your logo and website URL in your social media profiles, cover photos, and posts to reinforce your brand identity and drive traffic to your website.
- Cross-Promotion: Collaborate with other brands or influencers in your niche to cross-promote each other’s websites and increase brand visibility.
The more you present your brand in the content that you create, the more it will stay in your visitors’ minds. Your end goal is to be “the” name in your industry, so anything that associates your brand with your market is worth doing.
9. Improve Your Local Visibility
If your website targets a local audience, it’s essential to leverage Google My Business and Bing Places for Business to improve your local visibility. By creating a business profile on these platforms, you can enhance your website’s visibility in local search results. Doing so will attract potential customers in your area. What you should do is the following:
- Claim Your Business Profile: Register your business information and ensure that all details are accurate and up to date. This includes your website URL, physical address, and so on.
- Optimize Your Profile: Add relevant photos, business hours, contact information, and customer reviews to make your profile more enticing and informative for searchers.
- Encourage Customer Reviews: Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on your business profiles. Reviews will increase your online reputation and will help attract more local traffic.
Businesses lose potential sales all the time by not posting vital information online. Think of all the times you’ve looked up something about some store and can’t find any details online. If you eliminate that problem, you will probably see more visitors and ultimately more sales.
Doing all of these at the same time is next to impossible alone. Pick and choose the most relevant options for your business and market that you’re in. If something’s not working out, you can swap out one of the options for another and continue trying new things. It’s crucial to continuously do something, even if that something is very basic. Doing something basic is always better than doing nothing.
We hope you found this guide helpful in promoting your website. If you have any ideas on how else you can promote your website, we’re all ears! Post it in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!