You have worked hard on building your website, and you’re now ready to spread your word to the internet. However, when you finally press publish, the anticipated rush of visitors doesn’t happen. It’s crickets! However, this is normal. No new website gets instant visitors. But don’t worry, because in this post I will show you how to get your website noticed for free.
Optimise your site for search engines
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a process of making your website more visible to search engines like Google and Bing. And it should be high up on your list of priorities. By optimising your website, when people search for keywords related to your business, your website will appear at the top of Google and other search engines.
Now, SEO does not happen overnight. It takes a long time for search engines to pay attention – we are talking months here. However, the sooner you start, the sooner you will see results.
Some aspects of SEO I will cover in this post. But, I will only scratch the surface. For more in-depth learning, I highly recommend you check out the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s a free course and will teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimisation from A to Z. There are lots of other great SEO and marketing resources online, but the Moz guide is an excellent place to start.
Add a blog to your website
A blog is a section of your website where you publish content (blog posts) relevant to your industry and helpful for your audience, such as how-to articles, tips, insights, and news. Having a blog, and blogging can provide many benefits to your business. It gives visitors more value, helps you convert more leads and sales, helps you grow your email subscriber list, positions you as an authority, and last but not least, a blog will help power your SEO efforts.
One of my favourite examples of the power of a blog is that of Markus Sheridan, the owner of Riverpools & Spas. Marcus has a company that installs fiberglass swimming pools. Back in 2009, his company was struggling, and in an effort to improve sales, he created a blog where he answered every question that a customer might have about fiberglass pools. Through his blog, he grew his struggling company into a million-dollar business.
Answer questions on Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer platform with over 300 million monthly active users. People ask questions about nearly every topic under the sun there. Your audience is probably on Quora asking questions too. And providing answers to their questions can help get your website noticed.
Here is how it works: Find topics related to your audience and see what questions people are asking. Pick some popular questions and write detailed answers; within the answers, you can add a link or two to relevant blog posts on your website.
Aside from links within your answers, which will drive traffic to your website, you can also add a link to your website in your profile bio. If people see that your answers are authoritative, and you seem to be an expert in your niche, they might view your profile bio and visit your site.
To learn more about how to get your website noticed for free and get traffic from Quora, check out this post from Smart Blogger.
Join Facebook groups
Facebook groups are another great way to get your website noticed. To do this, you simply join groups relevant to your niche, and where your audience are hanging-out. Once in these groups, you will see there are common questions that people ask. If you create blog posts that answer these questions, you can drop a link in the group in response.
Now, with this tactic, you have to be very careful. If group admins think you are spamming, they will boot you out. Admins are usually cool if you are an active member who adds value to the group, and you only add a link to one of your posts when it answers a question asked by another group member.
Guest post on other websites
Guest posting will help you get eyeballs on your site, it will also help you build authority in your niche, and it’s good for SEO because you get a backlink. So what is guest posting?
Guest posting is when you write content and publish it on other websites. Many blogs online allow people to write guest posts because the site owners get fresh new content for free. They also gain insights from other experts that their audiences will value.
The key to effective guest posting is to find blogs and sites in your niche that have a cross over with your audience. If you reach out to the owners of these sites, you can pitch some topic ideas. If accepted, they will publish your post and allow you to have an author bio at the bottom where you can talk about you and your business and add a link to your website.
Jeff Bullas wrote a great post on how to guest post, even if you are totally unknown. You can read it here.
Publish your content on Medium
Medium is a blogging platform with over 60 million monthly active users. It’s a captive audience of people who want to read great content. Medium covers a broad range of topics, and if your business niche is within one of those topics, you should start publishing your content there.
But here is the great thing about Medium. You don’t have to write new content for the platform. You can republish posts that are already on your website blog. Of course, you can also write unique content for Medium.
When you publish a post, Medium will automatically add a link back to the original post, and readers can follow that back to your website. Just like with Quora, you can also add your website link to your profile bio. If people like the content you publish, they will read your profile for more info and visit your site.
Create a Google My Business account
If you have a local business, create a Google My Business profile. This is a free platform offered by Google, where you can add your business details, open hours, and other information such as a link to your website.
When people search for keywords related to your business, your Google My Business profile might appear at the top of the search results. However, before these searchers go to the physical location of your business, they will visit your website for more info.
Having a Google My Business profile is a no-brainer. It’s free to set-up, and it can help get both your business and your website in front of people actively searching for your services or products.
Over to you
Ok, so now you know how to get your website noticed for free it’s time to put some of these methods into action. SEO, as I said at the top of the post, takes time, but you would be crazy not to get started straight away. While you wait for your SEO efforts to pay off, implement some of these other methods.
