If there is ever a time to prioritise driving traffic to your website, it is now.
Despite all the emerging tools like TikTok Shop, Stan Stores, etc. selling products or services directly from your website is still the most profitable way to sell online.
And even though I am an SEO specialist, I’m also an online business owner who gets a lot of website traffic from sources other than search engines. So even though it goes against the grain of what I do, in this post I’m going to share with you how to get website traffic without SEO in the hopes this boost in traffic provides you with the profit you need to invest in your search engine optimisation in the future.
Before you get started with trying to gain organic traffic without SEO, it’s important you have a few things in place so you can measure the success of each method you try out.
To do this, you’re going to need to set up Google Analytics. This will give you all the web traffic source data you need so you can see which methods are generating the most website traffic and where you need to double down your efforts.
Once you’ve got that set up, it’s time to dive into increasing your website traffic without SEO!
Social Media Marketing
As a content creator, most of my website traffic comes from social media marketing. So even though I do get traffic from all the other methods mentioned here, SEO and social media platforms are my two main traffic drivers.
But we are here to talk about increasing website traffic without SEO, so I’ve broken down each social media platform into its own section so we can dig deep into methods for each.
TikTok
Video marketing is hands down the best way to do online marketing in 2023 and the best platform for this right now is TikTok.
If you have used TikTok before, you’ll know that it’s not easy to link to your content on the platform. You need 1000 followers on a personal account before you can include a website link on your profile, or you can sign up for a business account but you’re limited on trending sounds.
To drive website traffic from TikTok, you need to focus on sharing helpful content through your videos and organically mention your offerings within that content. And whatever you do, do not say “link in bio” or anything similar in your video as it’s well established by now that TikTok suppresses content where this is spoken or written on the video.
You may think this sounds like it won’t work but I assure you, if you post helpful content related to your business offerings, you will see more referral traffic from TikTok than most other platforms right now.
Instagram makes it fairly easy for you to generate more traffic to your website from social media. You can include website links in Instagram stories and multiple links on your profile.
In my experience, both work well however if you want a quick traffic injection on a specific day, sharing a website link to your Instagram story should do the trick! Whereas a profile link will generate a steady flow of traffic over time.
I’m not going to lie to you, Facebook makes it really hard to generate website traffic. They tend to suppress organic posts with links in them and, to be honest unless you’re posting a Facebook Reel you’ll probably find a lot of your organic content marketing efforts on Facebook yield little results.
For 2023, I’ve found the best method is to post Facebook Reels to my personal profile and include my website link in my featured “About” information on my personal profile. If you’re comfortable utilising your personal Facebook profile, this is definitely the best way to go to generate website traffic from Facebook right now.
Pinterest is one of the best strategies you can use to increase targeted traffic to your website. Even though it’s classed as a social media platform, it actually works very similarly to search engines like Google in how it drives organic traffic to your website.
Pins are clickable on Pinterest, meaning you can link each pin to a different page on your website. I recommend creating multiple pins for each page so you can find what pin style converts best for your industry. You can also add your website link to your Pinterest profile.
On Pinterest, users search for something they are interested in and the search feed will serve thousands of pins related to that search. As users use Pinterest more and more, their home feed is curated with pins relevant to their interests.
This makes it really easy for you to get your business in front of potential customers who are interested in what you offer (aka the perfect target audience). If you only decide to add one thing to your digital marketing strategy in 2023, make it Pinterest!
LinkedIn, like Instagram, offers a few different ways for you to generate more traffic to your website. You can include multiple links to your website on your LinkedIn profile, with images and text to accompany them to really encourage clicks. If you regularly post on LinkedIn, this is a great way of generating traffic to multiple pages on your website.
As for your LinkedIn posts themselves, you can include links within your content but they tend to be suppressed by LinkedIn’s algorithm. The best way to include links is to add them to the comments section of your post or go back into your post an hour or two after it’s been published and add your links then. Don’t ask me why it works, but it does!
YouTube
Like all the other platforms, YouTube allows you to link to your website on your profile. However, this doesn’t perform anywhere near as well as YouTube video descriptions do. Ideally, you should be including multiple links in your YouTube video descriptions and ensure you give viewers a reason to want to head to this section to find your links.
As always, helpful content with supporting information on your website will usually do the trick to help!
Guest Blogging
Websites accepting guest posts are a great way to increase website traffic without SEO. This tactic to drive traffic to your website has the added bonus that when you do come to work on your SEO, you’ll have some great organic links to get you started!
Guest blogging is a fairly simple concept. Rather than writing blog posts for your own blog, you write them for other websites that are looking for guest blogs.
The easiest way to find websites looking for guest blogs is to head to Google and search for one of the following:
- “website name or keyword here” guest blogging
- “website name or keyword here” guest post guidelines
- “website name or keyword here” submit a guest blog
Anything along those lines should bring up a page dedicated to guest blogging either on the website you searched or a website related to the keyword you used.
Once you have found the guidelines and submission form, all you need to do is get to work writing your guest posts and make sure you submit your URL with the finished article.
E-mail Marketing
E-mail lists are often underutilised. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve spoken to a business owner who has an e-mail list they never send e-mails out to.
So if you already have an e-mail list then this is an easy method for increasing web traffic without SEO.
For e-commerce business owners, start sending out special offers, new product launches and exclusive discounts to your e-mail list straight away. If you start doing this once per week (or more if you’re feeling confident with your offers!) then you should see a spike in website traffic pretty much immediately.
For service-based business owners, I recommend sticking to once per week. Use these e-mails to educate your e-mail list about your services and always include website links within the e-mail content itself, not just in your e-mail sign-off.
As an example, I would send this blog post out to my subscribers with a subject line like “How to get website traffic without SEO”, summarise all the methods in the e-mail and then link to this blog post for the full deep dive!
If you don’t have an e-mail list already then your first step should be to add an e-mail sign-up form to your website and then use the other methods in this blog post to drive traffic to that page. Then come back to e-mail marketing once you’ve got your e-mail list in place.
Podcasts
You don’t need to start a podcast to take advantage of podcasting to get more website visitors. Simply being a guest on a podcast is enough to generate more interest in your business and it’s common practice for podcast hosts to include a website link for guests in the episode show notes.
It’s also usually common practice for you to have the opportunity to plug a product or service when you are a podcast guest, so you can use this opportunity to quote your website URL (avoid using long URLs and just stick to your domain) and direct podcast listeners to your website for more information on what you’re plugging.
If you’re really lucky, your podcast host will also turn the episode show notes into a blog post for their own search engine optimisation, which means you’ll get links to your website from there too!
Paid Ads
If you want to get traffic without SEO and you want to do it quickly, paid ads are the best way to go. Whether you decide to go straight for Google Ads or dip your toes in with running Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, etc. providing your ad content is solid you should have no problem trying to drive traffic from paid ads.
The only issue with paid traffic is that you are often at the mercy of the ad platform’s algorithms as to how well they place your content. For example, you might spend £200 on Facebook Ads and generate no sales because Facebook didn’t push your ads out to the right audience. If you’re running your own ads (and setting up your own audiences), this can make for quite a costly learning curve before you drive traffic to your website.
If you have done some SEO work on your website already and generated some search engine traffic, you may find it useful to use this data when working out your paid ads, particularly for Google Ads. For example, your keywords generating organic traffic already are probably worth exploring inside Google Keyword Planner when coming up with your ad campaigns.
Wrapping Up
Phew, now if all of that isn’t a deep dive into how to get traffic without SEO, I don’t know what is! As you can see, I’ve placed a heavy emphasis on social media marketing here because it’s one of the best ways to generate website traffic without SEO. Of course, it’s not the only way, but in my opinion, it’s the easiest and will generate the quickest results for you.
Your social media followers can very quickly become website visitors through organic content, particularly if you throw yourself into video marketing which is the best form of content marketing right now.
As I mentioned earlier in this blog post, by generating more organic traffic to your website, even if you are looking to increase website traffic without SEO right now, you will notice the SEO benefits when you do come to prioritise it.
From link building to brand awareness, everything you do within the online marketing world has a knock-on effect with search engine optimisation, so whether you like it or not, you are working on it!
