How To Get Free Organic Traffic to Your Website

February 6, 2023 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

red and white freeway traffic lights at night to represent how to get free organic traffic

It’s every marketer’s dream: pull in tons of traffic from your target audience without spending a dime. That method might sound like a pipe dream, but for many companies, it’s a reality. There are ways you can pull more traffic to your website without shelling out tons of money on paid advertisements and search engine marketing (SEM). Today, we’re looking at how to get free organic traffic to your content and channels without eating away at your marketing budget:

What Is Organic Traffic?
10 Sources To Get Free Organic Traffic

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is any traffic visit to your website that comes from an unpaid online source. That means all organic traffic is free. The return on investment (ROI) for organic traffic is high compared to paid traffic. That’s because organic traffic is more permanent, especially if you create evergreen content that stays relevant to your audience longer than trending pieces.

10 Sources To Get Free Organic Traffic

You may think you know all the places you can grab organic traffic for your company, but there are likely some you haven’t considered. Here are 10 places you can snag free organic traffic online:

1. Search Engines

Search engines are where you get the majority of your organic traffic. Out of all search engines, Google is typically the biggest traffic grabber. The entire goal of search engines is to provide the best answer to a user’s question. The quicker someone gets the right answer, the more satisfied they are with the search engine. And if your content is what the search engine suggests to answer their question or solve their problem, that helps your traffic, brand awareness, and thought leadership.

The best way to get your content to appear on Google at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) or in a featured snippet is to focus on incorporating a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy into every aspect of your content strategy. Some SEO tactics you can use include doing keyword research and working on your linking strategy.

2. Aggregator Websites

An aggregator website is a site that collects data from sources around the internet and displays it in one place for easy access. There are multiple types of aggregator sites across the internet, including:

News aggregators
Service aggregators
Shopping aggregators
Social aggregators
Video aggregators

Most aggregator sites pull the content automatically from other sources, but others offer options for users to upload their own content that appears elsewhere online. Reddit and Medium are two examples of these kinds of aggregators. To gain organic traffic from aggregator websites, focus on creating high-quality content that meets niche needs. For example, to appear in the Google News aggregator, your content automatically gets considered for Top Stories or the News tab in search if it complies with the Google News content guidelines—no extra steps required.

On sites like Reddit and Medium where you can submit your own content for aggregation, you can look for more strategic ways to get your content to appear in the right places. On Reddit, for example, you can engage in relevant subreddits and share links to your website and content that answer other users’ questions.

With Medium, you can share shorter, relevant content pieces that point back to larger pieces on your primary website. Medium has strict policies about blatant attempts to redirect traffic from its domain to another, but the right linking strategy could help you get more attention on the platform without breaking the rules.

3. Social Media Platforms

Social media is similar to an aggregator site in the sense that it collects information from all over the internet and displays it in one place. But instead of bots doing the data collection, real audience members and users do the curation. Users control what shows up in their news feeds based on the content they view, the people and pages they follow, and their browsing habits.

Even without a solid social media strategy, having a presence on certain platforms increases the chances of getting discovered by new audience members. That leads to potentially more organic traffic to your website and other channels. Here are a few ways to gain more organic traffic on specific social platforms:

Facebook

Facebook is one of the original social media platforms that found a way to cater to businesses. It was one of the first to introduce business pages that users could like and follow to get updates about company happenings on their feeds. Unfortunately, Facebook hasn’t advanced with as many organic page recognition features as other platforms. The company prefers to push sponsored posts and paid ads over organic reach options.

But that doesn’t mean you should count Facebook out for organic traffic potential. Focus on getting people to like your page and then share content consistently. This ensures that your content appears in people’s feeds, as much as the algorithm allows. You can also engage with audience members in relevant Facebook groups to make them aware of your brand, products, and services. If the group allows, you may be able to share links to your content within them to drive organic traffic.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the easier social media platforms to use to help grab organic traffic. This is all thanks to its brevity. You can’t share a full article here or a lengthy text post. Instead, you can share a teaser for your content and a link, as long as it comes in under 280 characters. When people click the links in your tweets, they get redirected back to your website, increasing your organic traffic.

Making use of the right keywords and hashtags in your tweets can help them appear in the right feeds or under trending topic headings to reach a wider audience. But make sure you’re only using hashtags and keywords that actually relate to your content. Spamming your tweets with a bunch of hashtags that don’t relate to your content can work against your brand’s credibility.

LinkedIn is the premier social networking site for business and professional networking, especially for B2B companies. Thanks to features like article publication, you can share your content right on the platform, but also use it as a place to link to your website and other channels. To get more organic traffic from LinkedIn, focus on sharing links to your website in posts or within the articles you publish. You can also start or join LinkedIn groups to connect with the right target audience.

Focusing on other social media optimization tactics like using the right keywords and hashtags also helps your content appear in the right feeds and searches through the platform. This should help get more eyes, and hopefully more clicks, on your content.

Instagram

Instagram is a unique social media platform because it does a little bit of everything. It has space for text, pictures, videos, and even shopping. It also takes advantage of algorithms that suggest relevant content to users based on their browsing habits and lets users follow accounts and hashtags to get content for their feeds. With a business account, you can track analytics for even more information about your audience based on how your content appears in the algorithms.

Posting regularly, interacting with your followers, and optimizing posts with keywords and hashtags are just a few of the ways you can increase your chances of gaining traffic on Instagram. One of the primary downsides of this platform is that you can’t link to off-platform content within individual posts. You can, though, link to external content or websites in your stories and your profile.

Pinterest is a popular visual social media platform that allows users to save images and links to other websites as “pins.” Users can save pins to different broads and categorize them any way they want. You can optimize your pins for search both within Pinterest and on Google by using relevant keywords and eye-catching images or videos. Pinterest also has a “shop” feature that allows users to browse items and then return to your e-commerce site to buy them.

To get the most possible organic traffic out of Pinterest, optimize your content for search within the site. Most of a user’s feed comes from “suggested” content from the platform’s algorithm rather than the boards, companies, and other users they follow. It’s important to use content tags, hashtags, and relevant keywords in every description. You may also work with influencers to get your content featured on their boards and profiles. This could help your links appear in the right searches and recommendations for other users.

YouTube

Though YouTube isn’t exactly the same as some other social media sites, it does offer feed and suggestion features worth targeting. Though, this platform only works if you produce video content for your audiences. YouTube works as a two-way street for your content. You can link to your website or other content within your videos using cards. You can also share your YouTube videos on your website or another social platform using linking and embed features.

As with other platforms, the best way to get organic traffic from YouTube is to optimize your content. Focus on the keywords you use in titles and descriptions. Use YouTube’s content features to your advantage and try to get your videos placed in relevant playlists for even more exposure.

TikTok

Though one of the newer social media platforms, TikTok still has the potential to pull organic traffic to your website. Unlike YouTube, clips on TikTok are brief, coming in at 60 seconds or less. But these short clips can work to your advantage to act as a teaser for long-form content on your website. An important thing to remember about TikTok is that it often draws a younger audience, with the primary age of users falling between 16 and 35.

TikTok is also built on trends. If you have time-sensitive content you’d like to share to draw attention and traffic to your website, this could be the right social media channel for you.

4. Guest Posts

Guest posting is a content writing partnership between two organizations where one team writes content that appears on the other’s website and social feeds. When you guest post, you often do it to gain backlinks and create solid partnerships with other brands in your industry. But this strategy can also help you gain more organic traffic.

Because guest posting is a link-building tactic, you already know you’ll receive backlinks to your website in that content. They go right in front of the other company’s audience and refer people to your website. The more relative the links you share in the guest post, the more likely readers will click and come back to your website. That helps you gain more organic traffic and more targeted traffic than you may be able to do with other methods.

5. Partnerships With Subject Matter Experts

Working with subject matter experts is another way you can grab organic traffic from new, targeted audiences. Using a subject matter expert to develop your content helps make the pieces more valuable to your audience. They can trust that any advice or information they get from the experts is true. That helps increase your thought leadership in your niche.

Plus, when you work with subject matter experts, they’ll often share content they contribute to on their own channels. They may link to it on their blog, share it on their social media feeds, or recommend it as reading for their other followers. Finding subject matter experts your audience already trusts and creating collaborations with them is the best way to get more organic traffic through this channel.

6. Influencers

Another way to gain traction on social media, or even through guest posting, is to connect and collaborate with influencers. While some influencers in certain industries and niches work with companies in exchange for discount codes, product samples, or free trials of service. Every influencer you encounter won’t be free and won’t be the right choice to help you get organic traffic to your website. It’s important to do your research and discover the prominent influencers in your niche. Then narrow those down to people who are best connected with your target audience.

You can then do outreach and find out if these influencers are willing to work with you for compensation other than cash. Most influencers share content and posts about your products and services on their own channels with links back to your website or e-commerce store. As their followers browse through the content, they’ll click the links that lead them to your channels, ushering in new organic traffic.

7. Email Marketing

Using email marketing might not be a channel you’d consider for gaining organic traffic. After all, everyone on your email list is already part of your audience. They had to sign up to receive communication from you. But just because someone signed up for your emails doesn’t mean they’ve ever visited your website. You can encourage them to do it through your email content. Adding lead magnets to your copy encourages clicks away from the email content and onto your website.

Through this channel, you can direct different audience segments to exactly the content you want them to visit on your website. This not only helps you get more organic traffic but targeted traffic, too.

8. Online Directories

Online directories like Yelp, Google My Business, and Yellow Pages can help you get your website in front of people looking for specific products or services. While plenty of people may just run a Google search to look for something like “plumbers near me,” having your content listed in directories helps your website show up for those searches. Remember, search engines pull content and information from across the web, including these directories.

Listing your brand for the right categories, geographic area, and keywords helps you get discovered both through the directories themselves and in search. Plus, if people find a directory service they trust, they may even visit there first before trying an online search. Similar to social media, it’s important to optimize your directory listings so that you show up in the right feeds or searches. It’s also important to make sure all your company information is correct across your directory listings.

Check for things like misspellings in your street address or brand name and transposed numbers in your phone number. These tiny mistakes not only take away from your company’s credibility, which could deter organic traffic, but they also make it harder for search engines to find and understand your content. And if you don’t show up in search, it’s harder for you to grab organic traffic.

9. Press Releases

Press releases are another source of organic traffic you may not consider when trying to distribute your content and bring more people back to your site. But a press release is particularly helpful for bringing in organic traffic from a local audience. Sharing information about your company and its events with your local news media and other niche and industry websites can attract a wide-reaching but targeted audience.

In the digital age, most press releases include links back to your company website and landing pages. For example, if you share a press release about a webinar your company is hosting, it doesn’t just get printed in the local newspaper. It also appears on the paper’s website with interactive links. And it may go out on the newspaper’s social media pages, also with relevant links.

The best way to get organic traffic from press releases is to make the right connections with media partners. Where does your target audience get its news or information? What sources do they trust for quality content and recommendations? If you can find out that information and send your press releases to those organizations for promotion on their channels, you could see an uptick in your organic traffic.

10. Question and Answer Forums

Question-and-answer websites let users ask questions about any topic they can think of and then other people in that same audience can provide answers. Similar to aggregator sites like Reddit, your team can browse specific questions forums, and categories to find ones you can answer with your content. Then you can share links to those pieces that provide the answers. You may also give a little preview in your text post that entices the audience to click and follow the content link back to your website.

The best way to get organic traffic through this channel is to answer the most relevant questions in your niche with truly helpful content. If you’re spamming the boards with self-promotional content without focusing on what’s going to help your audience, most people on the forum will discount your posts. Think of it like the “boy who cried wolf” effect. Don’t jump in with a “good answer” until you actually have a good answer to give.

The True Best Way To Grab Organic Traffic

Organic traffic comes from more than just search engines. The more you focus beyond SEO strategies to content distribution across channels, the more organic traffic you can nab. As always, creating high-quality content should be your top priority. No matter what strategies you try or where you share your content, it’s important to make sure it’s something your audience wants to engage with and finds helpful. Those simple tips will help bring you more traffic over time because it keeps bringing your audience back for more.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer