As we are well into the new year, it is a great time to start reviewing your traffic generation strategies. For many businesses, organic traffic is key to success. Organic traffic is technically free, since the visitors will come from non-paid search engine results, YouTube videos, social media sites or other places. Of course, they are only free in that you don’t have to pay for every click, or to have an advertisement put up. In order to get your site in a position to be seen by people, however, you need to invest in time and energy (or money) to get ranked.
The following strategies will be effective in 2014. While they will take some effort, the results will be a steady stream of organic traffic for months and even years to come. In addition, they will help drive targeted traffic to your site, so you’ll have a much better chance at converting them into subscribers or paying customers.
Video Marketing
While videos have always been an excellent source of organic traffic, they will be even bigger in 2014. This is largely because of the fact that more and more mobile devices are able to access videos quickly and easily. In addition, people are moving toward unlimited data packages for their mobile devices, or at least packages with high data limits. This is important because mobile internet usage is going up rapidly, so targeting people where they are is critical.
Whether you’re just posting simple videos to YouTube, or you’re creating a funny or interesting video that could go viral, it is important to use video to drive traffic. Even something as easy as repurposing a text article into a slideshow style video can help bring in new traffic. In addition to the direct traffic from the video posts, these can also help you with your search engine rankings.
Content Marketing
Publishing high quality content is one of the most important things for a successful website today. Google and the other search engines are becoming experts at discerning the quality of the content, so filling a site with spun articles won’t work anymore. In addition, it isn’t enough to just post content on your own site and let it sit there, hoping it will attract traffic.
Actively marketing your content is more critical than ever. This can be done by posting links to the article on social media sites, and places like Reddit and Digg. There are dozens of sites that allow links to content to be posted, and they can all drive a significant amount of traffic. Spread your posts around on all of them, and you’ll be getting good links, as well as direct traffic. In addition, finding other sites in your niche to syndicate your content to is a great way to build high quality links, and get extremely targeted traffic.
On-Site SEO
Everyone knows that onsite SEO is important, but most people just set it up when they first start out their site, and then forget about it. Consider doing a review of your onsite strategies at least once a year. In addition to things like meta descriptions and heading tags, look at how your internal link structure is setup. Do you have links from one post to another related one? These things can help improve the user experience, which will help keep visitors on your site longer. This can also affect your rankings on Google and other search engines.
Social Media Marketing
While several of the other strategies listed mention using social media, it is important to look at it on its own as well. Social media has quickly become one of the biggest drivers of organic traffic, and that will only grow this year and beyond. Setting up pages for your website on all the major social media sites is essential. It can help you to build relationships with people who are following you, and it will also drive traffic to your main website.
All of the Above
Unlike in years past, you can’t just focus on getting links or focus on posting videos to help drive organic traffic. You really need to have an ‘all of the above’ strategy. Using a variety of social media sites, as well as posting videos to multiple video sharing services, and having your content published in all different locations will all work to help improve the amount of organic traffic you are able to attract. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that when done properly, it will drive much more targeted traffic, which you can then convert into customers.
