How Can You Increase Website Traffic Without SEO?

What is “growth hacking”? And how could it help grow your business?
When it comes to increasing traffic to your blog or website, the conventional wisdom goes that organic SEO is the way to go. This means posting lots of content that’s filled with rich and popular keywords, and sharing it across social media with the intention that new visitors will find your page. While this is a reliable method, the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t always result in the kind of traffic increases you want.
For the time being, SEO will remain a primary method of increasing traffic, so if you haven’t done it yet, it’s still very valuable to your business. Get into the habit of creating original content on a semi-regular schedule, and make sure it’s full of the words that your target audience is likely to search for. But if you feel that you’ve already exploited SEO to its full potential and you’re still not getting the kinds of visitor gains that you’d like, there are other methods you can tack onto your SEO and content strategies.
The technical name for this kind of strategy is “growth hacking”, or looking to increase growth using unconventional strategies. As QuickSprout puts it, “every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing. Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around. Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent. Remember, the power of a growth hacker is in their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early on.”
While SEO is certainly part of growth hacking, it’s not the only way. Here are three ways you can focus on building your web traffic that don’t have to do with creating more keyword-rich content:
Invest heavily in your email list: You may think that organic search should be your biggest form of traffic, but clickthroughs from a robust email list can be even higher. Make sure you are giving website visitors an opportunity to subscribe to your email newsletter whenever you can. This will increase the chances that they visit your site again down the line when you post more content. So for a while, spend a little more time building a healthy email list rather than on your SEO. This will increase your number of engaged followers rather than “hit and run” visitors who come once, and then never return. Then, send out the meaningful content you are creating to this list on a semi-regular – but not too frequent – basis. Sending it straight to the people who have already demonstrated interest in what you do will almost certainly increase the likelihood they click to view it.
Focus on amplification, not creation: If you’re bogged down by creating thousands of words of content every single week in the hope of building your search ranking, chances are you are not putting enough time into promoting that very same content. For a while, try creating less content but amplifying it more. This can include the obvious, such as promoting it on social media, but also posting it to forums, submitting it to blog bookmarking sites, and sending it to influencers that might promote it on their own social channels.
Think outbound: How many people do you email in a given week? What about you and all your employees? There is an opportunity to drive traffic straight from your email account by including latest blog posts into your email signature. Putting a subtle promo for your latest post in your company email signature is a great way to drive organic traffic from across your network.
For more information about how SEO could benefit your business website check out this blog post.