SEO strategies can be a great way to improve your website traffic; however, it can take months or longer to achieve the desired results. During this period, you could lose out on potential customers.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that helps you improve the visibility of your website in search engines, making it easier for visitors to find your website, get to know the products you sell and services you provide, and gain knowledge about the topics in which you have expertise.
This is one main reason many marketers focus on other channels to keep their website running and engage their prospects without the time-consuming wait for organic SEO-driven traffic. Here are five important tools that will help you drive traffic to your website without relying on search engine optimization techniques.
Social Media Marketing
More than half of the world’s population uses social media. Posts about your brand on social media platforms could be seen by a large number of people, especially if the post goes viral. However, you need to plan well before you kickstart your social media campaign because every social media platform has its own unique features and audiences.
Posting about your brand on every social media platform across the board is not an ideal strategy. Identify the right channels that align with your business and use those platforms to market effectively. If you run an online store that sells dresses and cosmetics, aim to capture traffic by sharing images on picture-focused platforms full of fashion aficionados, like Instagram.
If you are looking to collaborate with other businesses, consider using LinkedIn for its B2B-centric nature. If you aren’t sure where to begin, you can always start with Facebook, as it is an all-purpose network used by people across demographics.
Email Marketing
Email marketing isn’t just relevant, it’s extremely important. This is probably the only strategy that will help you reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way. This makes your prospects realize that you are thinking of them individually, and aren’t just sending wide-blast emails to a huge audience.
Email marketing can yield great results for your business; however, you should adhere to certain rules and standards. Secure permission from your users before you start sending them emails. This can be done through a call-to-action (CTA) button on your website. There are chances that they may view the emails you intend to send as spam. Therefore, you can inform them that they will get access to some exclusive offers when they sign up.
Once you get their permission, do not start sending multiple emails right away. It is important that you stick to your promise. If you have assured them that you will be sending just one email a week, stick to that. If your content is interesting, informative and engaging, your users will be happy to receive your emails and will eagerly look forward to receiving your next email.
If you are launching a new product or service, promote it and immediately inform your audience about it via email. Whenever you run a promotion, include the promotion link in your email so that it becomes easier for the users to locate it on your website.
Influencer Marketing
When you work with influencers to promote your brand, you expose your brand to the influencers’ audience and to their audience’s contacts and friends.
Once the individual decides to promote your brand, then many of their followers will follow suit, because these followers put quite a lot of trust into their opinions. So, influencer marketing is a smart approach that can help you save time and effort you would have otherwise spent trying to attract thousands of users yourself.
It can be an expensive technique, as some influencers tend to charge a hefty fee. However, many influencers accept free samples or products instead of money from your brand in return for promoting your brand on their channels.
Content Marketing
In a way, content marketing is like SEO, as it takes some time to generate the desired results; however, it is an effective strategy to drive more traffic to your website in the long run. High-quality content helps in building trust and developing a strong relationship with your audience. And we all know that trust drives revenue.
There are several ways of presenting your content. It can be either in the form of blog posts, articles, PDFs, audio files, case studies, ebooks, infographics, and so on. Infographics are a popular choice among content creators, as many readers prefer visual content over text because the human brain tends to process visuals better than text. Another reason is that readers expect you to back your data with facts, and through infographics, you can show charts, graphics and statistics that support your data and numbers.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
As a business owner or marketer, you need to look at certain things practically. Ask yourself “What should I do to get the maximum number of users to click on my site?” The answer is simple: “Many users will click on your site only if they’re interested and know what your site is about.”
While advertising on Google, PPC, or pay-to-click advertising, gives you the opportunity to use ad extensions on your ads, which helps users gain a much better understanding of your website, thereby increasing the likelihood of them clicking through.
PPC also helps you find out how your campaign is performing in terms of clicks, impressions and conversions. You can measure and track this data using the Google Ads tool combined with Google Analytics. This helps you find out what’s working and what isn’t so that you can tweak your campaign accordingly.
SEO shouldn’t be ignored completely even if you are working on non-SEO strategies. Ensure that SEO and non-SEO strategies run in tandem.
The non-SEO strategies mentioned in this post can boost your website traffic. However, non-SEO strategies are not just limited to the ones mentioned in this post. Display advertising, referral marketing, affiliate marketing and video marketing can also drive traffic to your website without too much reliance on SEO. All can increase brand awareness by attracting more users to your website in a short period of time.
However, that does not mean you can abandon SEO practices altogether.
SEO can boost your website traffic and ensure that your website ranks higher in the search rankings in the long run. SEO shouldn’t be ignored completely even if you are working on other non-SEO strategies. Rather, ensure that both SEO and non-SEO strategies run in tandem.