Ten free ways to bring traffic to a website

Sorted by payback. The first three are where a new site should spend its first month, and the last three are worth doing once and then leaving alone.

Days

1. Rewrite the titles on pages that get impressions and no clicks. Search Console shows both per page. A page shown often and clicked rarely is being rejected on its title. Rewrite it as the answer to the question, in under sixty characters.

2. Move the answer to the top of your longest pages. If what a reader came for sits after eight hundred words, they never reached it. Neither did the featured snippet.

3. Link your best pages from your most-read pages. Body copy, descriptive anchor text, pointing at the pages you want to rank. Fully under your control and it works within weeks on a site with any existing authority.

Weeks

4. Merge your thin posts. Five shallow pages about one subject compete with each other. One good page plus four redirects usually outperforms all five.

5. Claim and complete every profile in your category. The business profile, the industry directories, the supplier lists. Exact same name, address and phone in each.

6. Answer questions in the places your buyers already gather. Without a link, until you are known. It converts because people saw you be right in public.

Months

7. Write the answers to the questions asked on sales calls. A day per page, returns for years. This is the highest value item on the list and the slowest to show.

8. Build a small free tool. Something that does a job your reader repeats. It gets used, bookmarked and linked, which an article on the same subject does not.

9. Publish data only you have. If you operate anything, you can measure something nobody outside can. Publish the analysis on a schedule and it becomes the thing your field cites.

Once, then leave it

10. Fix the technical obstacles. One canonical per page, pointing at itself. No redirect chain on the homepage. Content present in the HTML. A sitemap listing only pages that return 200.

None of this creates traffic. All of it stops the other nine being wasted.

The honest part

Free means the cost is your time, and the time cost of item seven is roughly a day per page. Ten pages is two working weeks, and that is the real price of the best item here.

Items one to three are genuinely cheap and genuinely quick, which is why they are first. Do them this week before committing to anything longer.

What to skip

Buying followers. Posting your link in comment sections. Mass directory submission. Anything described as a traffic exchange.

They cost hours and return visits that do nothing. Some leave a pattern on your domain that takes longer to clean up than it took to create.

If you want items one to four done as a single pass with the findings written up, that is how our SEO work starts.