Best Free Online Traffic Sources in 2020

Want more traffic to your website, or want to know the best ways to get traffic in 2020?

We asked business owners from all different industries all around the world what they found to be the best online traffic sources for their business in 2020.

Below are their responses…

Insurance Agent – Youtube

Hands down, YouTube. I’m an insurance agent and giving people an opportunity to interact and connect with a professional without worrying about being tricked into buying something has done wonders for my business.

Travis Price

 

Digital Marketing Agency – Podcast Guest

Here are some strategies that we help our clients leverage with fantastic and consistent results:

1. Podcast Guest Appearances – By far the high quality “free” traffic source that converts very well to leads and sales. It also helps businesses earn backlinks which helps with SEO.

2. Facebook Groups – Finding high quality, high engagement groups to participate in is a fantastic source of traffic and leads. While it’s not going generate impressive traffic numbers, the conversion rate on the traffic you can earn is extremely high because people in the group come to know you, like you, and trust you if you play your cards right. No spamming ever — just 100% value and consistent engagement wins the day.

3. Cross-Promotion – Hooking up with people in your market who are tangentially related to your business (but not a direct competitor) and who have similar size audiences is a fantastic way to drive free traffic.. Find a great way to cross-promote each other and you can instantly boost your email list, social media following, and earn sales.

4. SEO – Even though SEO is getting harder and harder, it still rules the day in terms of driving large quantities of high quality traffic.. It’s not an overnight fix by any means, but once it kicks in and starts working, it’s tough to beat.

5. Giveaways – Seems like this wouldn’t be a “free” option, but it absolutely can be. If you’re able to drive a lot of exposure and leads to a giveaway, brands will often “donate” prizes to the giveaway. They get cross-promotion in the giveaway, you get a ton of traffic and leads … everyone wins and it’s free for you at the end of the day.

Kevin Geary, Hamon Creative

Bill Management Store – Youtube

YouTube is a great source to drive traffic to your sites. Creating content people can relate to that is linked to you niche (Finance) can really help people find your site and resources better. A couple of thousand views per video can really make a difference. Invest some time in some useful videos and watch traffic build.

Ethan Taub, Billry

Digital Marketing Agency – Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

I started my SEO career in 1996, after a brief stint in the world of public relations, moved into the digital marketing world. As a result, I’ve mastered the art of securing free traffic. The best way to generate free traffic is via press coverage and the best way to secure press coverage is by answering HARO requests.

For the past few years, I’ve consistently and effectively pitched and secured press coverage via HARO. In fact, my pitches to HARO inquires have resulted in press coverage and mentions in publications including Business News Daily, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., New York Times, Reader’s Digest. In 2017, I generated ~80 mentions, ~90 in 2018, and over 120 in 2019.. One of my articles for AP was syndicated over 20 times globally.

Here are my pro tips for securing coverage in HARO:

* Provide context, so the editor knows which story you are pitching (just in case they have many requests coming in at the same time from HARO). I incorporate the topic into the subject and first line of my response (when possible)
* Provide credentials. I quickly outline my relevant experience and qualifications to maximize the opportunity to be selected as a source.
* Answer the question. Seriously, I’ve found that others I’ve coached ramble on or even forget to answer the question being asked by the reporter. They get side-tracked or somehow miss the point or can’t do it in less than four paragraphs, so it’s likely to get skipped over.
* Provide resources. I keep my pitch as short as possible, then I provide links to additional information, including relevant articles, research, etc. for the reporter to review as needed.
* Provide personal information. I always include my signature file, so all contact information, including links to social profiles, is easily available. I also include a link to my LinkedIn bio and a set of headshots they can pull from, increasing efficiency and likelihood of being selected. Make it easy for the reporter!

Kent Lewis, Anvil Media

Digital Marketing Agency – Instagram

One free traffic source that has been a big traffic driver for sites I manage in 2020 is Instagram. Many people fail to realize you can put your site in your Instagram bio link as well as in your stories as a swipe up to visit when you have over 10K followers as ways to use your Instagram audience to drive traffic directly to your site.

Stacy Caprio, Growth Marketing

Transcription Services – Google Organic Search (SEO)

As a B2B business (audio transcription for corporate, media, and academic clients), one of my best traffic sources is organic search. In my experience, leads from Google tend to be higher-quality than leads from other free sources, such as online business directories. Another advantage of organic search traffic is that it gives me a lot of control over the types of clients I work with, as I can focus more heavily on promoting certain landing pages.

Chloe Brittain, Opal Transcription Services

Home Brewing Information Site – Guest Posting

As a blogger in the homebrewing niche, a few of the best traffic sources that I truly enjoy doing are search engine optimization, responding to HARO queries, and guest posting. I find search engine optimization fun since it challenges you to follow rules such as using keywords and phrases while still creating genuinely informative articles. It’s a challenge to be technical and creative at the same time. I also enjoy responding to HARO queries and guest posting since it allows me to create relationships with journalists and other entrepreneurs and share my expertise with them. I find both of these techniques heart-warming and effective.

Simon Hansen, Home Brew Advice

Mobile Brake Repair Service – Nextdoor

One of the best free online traffic sources for our mobile brake repair service website is Nextdoor. We created an account and told past customers go and review our service to create a web of traffic throughout our Austin, Dallas, and Houston locations. It now drives organic traffic to our site since other people in the area have recommended us before and neighbors trust other residents.

Carter Seuthe, NuBrakes Mobile Brake Repair

Tech News Website – Email Newsletter

I’m Victor Cortés, CEO and founder of Contxto, Latam go-to site for tech news and data. Here are the best free traffic sources for 2020:

1. SEO: King of free traffic. Search Engines are still the main traffic source of many websites at no cost other than optimization of content and distribution. Nevertheless, as it becomes much more saturated by the billions of blogs available online, it’s harder to rank. Also, Google’s efforts to insert all the info in snippets and voice search is seriously reducing click-through rates.

2. Podcasting: building a community is crucial and podcasts are a very way to do so. Nowadays tools like Anchor allow everyone to create and distribute a podcast for free. Direct traffic from podcasting has a lot of conversions.

3. Untapped Social Media: although the biggest platforms are also great ways to get free traffic (everyone should), upcoming networks should be taken advantage of when starting out. Pinterest, TikTok, Lasso, Byte, all of those are great ways to reach untapped audiences.

4. Building a Mailing List Referral Program: email marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. It can take time to build a list but referrals and giveaways can help a lot.

5. Push notifications: for both mobile and browsers, push plugins are great ways to get traffic back to your site.

Victor Cortés, Contxto

Roofing Contractor Online Marketplace – Social Media

MyRoofingPal is an online marketplace that connects people with the best local residential and commercial home improvement contractors in 4,000 cities across the U.S.

Social media is still our biggest source of free traffic, but it does take a lot of hard work and consistency. You can’t just post self-promotion into a void and hope to do well. You need to track relevant hashtags, interact with relevant accounts, and post relevant content.

For us this means following home improvement accounts and highlighting them in hopes of our own content being shared. We make videos and written content that helps answer the common questions our users have in easy-to-follow (and easy-to-digest) segments. We ensure the content is shareable, and we post new content at least once a week to stay relevant.

The aim of this isn’t to get new users immediately: It’s to get interested people onto a list where we send them more free content, slowly funnelling them toward our site. Gone are the days of just putting SEO-loaded junk out into the web and hoping to appear in search engine results. These days if you don’t want to pay a premium for advertising, you have to be willing to work for your traffic.

Courtney Keene, MyRoofingPal

Pet Photography – Pinterest

I find that alot of my traffic nowadays comes from both Instagram and Pinterest. Pinterest always surprises me as I don’t expect people to follow links out of it, but they do seem to for whatever reason. Pet photography is quite a niche market so maybe they are looking for a very specific look and when they find it they want more of it?

Simon Woodcock, Pupparazzi

 

Sales Training Online – SEO

My best traffic source is definitely search.

I recommend all business owners pay attention to learning SEO, and writing great content that’ll answer questions your potential clients are looking for.

Best of all – it’s free!

Khabeer Rockley, The 5% Institute

VoIP Services – SEO

Organic traffic is still the No. 1 free traffic source for us, and it’s still the highest ROI channel available for businesses looking to expand brand awareness.

From my perspective as a CEO, I want to invest in activities that will deliver a long-term benefit over time, and that’s exactly what happens when you invest in SEO and organic traffic. It’s very different than social media or PR strategies, which drive a spike of traffic once, but don’t deliver results over the long term.

If you’re looking for long-term free traffic, SEO is still the best game around.

Reuben Yonatan, GetVoIP

Gardening Information Website – Google Search (SEO)

The best source of free traffic for my online gardening niche business has been Google. By selecting the right keywords that people are searching for and writing quality content, Google does provide a good source of such traffic.

The second best source of free traffic has been Facebook. This is not as good as Google but having a Facebook page and posting content does provide another decent source of traffic.

Name: Kevin Rodrigues, Gardening Mentor

Home Buying Service – Google My Business Listing

Without a doubt my best free traffic source is my Google Business listing. I have gotten a good bit of traffic from there lately. They keep you updated monthly on how your listing is doing as well.

Anthony Bostic, Anthony’s Estates

Personal Finance Blog – Quora

Writing long form answers on Quora with a link back to my blog I managed to drove over 50k visitors to my blog in less than 6 months. Even, today I get up to 20 referrals from those answers that are written more than a year ago.

Peter Koch, DollarSanity

Digital Marketing Agency – Google Featured Snippets

What we are finding, so far in 2020, to be the best source of free traffic to our website is ranking in Google’s featured snippet. Here, you don’t need to break the bank, you simply need to write a blog post to be hosted on your site, and then written in a certain way so that Google looks upon it favourably for a spot in the infamous Position 0.

The general formula you need to use for your blog post is a list format, with an introduction, and then H2 tags as your headings with information underneath these H2 tags giving more information, following that you need a conclusion and that is pretty much it. Providing your content is written properly and has a good on-page SEO score (you can get this from Yoast SEO for example), you have a good chance of landing in the Featured Snippet.

Ryan Jones, Imaginaire Digital

Branding Company – SEO

If you want to drive free traffic to your website, there is nothing like good, regular blogs. If you have an online business, plug in products in intelligent ways, and you are more likely to guide your customers to your product pages. Know this- if you write SEO-sensitive blogs and update your website regularly, you will get organic traffic for free. Enrich your content with useful videos or infographics, write interesting and informative blogs and post them regularly. This will likely increase your chances of conversion.

Avinash Chandra, Brand Loom

Sleep Science Coach – Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

My name is Liz, a certified sleep science coach and founder of SleepingLucid, a company that aims to raise sleep problem awareness by creating informative sleep product reviews and other helpful sleep-related content.

As someone who specializes in the sleep industry, I must admit that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea which only makes it harder for us to increase our brand visibility. However, I’ve realized that responding to HARO queries and sharing my expertise is one of the best ways to get our name out there. What’s great about HARO is that it’s a bridge that can help you create bonds with journalists and other entrepreneurs while expanding your audience reach.

Liz Brown, Sleeping Lucid

Merchant Services – SEO and Youtube

Google, YouTube, Quora and LinkedIn are amongst the top performing sources that drive free traffic to our website. Writing content to be published on Medium is also an effective strategy.

Search engine optimisation- SEO is, and will continue to be, one of the best sources of free traffic. Ranking in one of the top five positions in the SERPs for key search terms relating to your industry is a great way of boosting your profile and profits. Some people argue that ranking is difficult and that Google is constantly lowering the CTR (Click-through rate) by offering featured snippets that show direct answers to the question, but this is not exactly true.

Depending on how you look at this, featured snippets can be more of an opportunity than a problem. Providing concise and informative answers to frequently asked questions is an easy way of appearing in featured snippets and outranking your competitors.

There are concerns about Google and the longevity of SEO, but our research shows that more search engines are being created that are willing to adapt to become more user friendly. For example, many search engines are competing to offer better organic ranking opportunities for creators and more secure privacy settings for users, with one even planning to give 90% of profits to content creators. Therefore, we are confident that organic traffic from search engines will continue to be a top performing traffic source.

YouTube- YouTube is a great source for internal and Google ranking (Google loves to rank YouTube videos in its organic results). This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUurzvS3DlY) is a simple example of how content can gain thousands of views without any optimisation.

Quora- the key to driving traffic from Quora is finding topics that rank well in Google and receive a large amount of organic exposure. Then, write informative content that answers the requirements of the questions. The strategy outlined in this article is useful: https://ahrefs.com/blog/quora-marketing/

Medium- Medium is a great platform attracting more than 30 million readers each month. If you provide great content you will receive both followers and readers on Medium and increase your ranking position in Google. Therefore, writing SEO content for your Medium page will generate organic traffic from two different sources.

Georgi Dyulgerov, eMerchantPay

Online Courses – SEO

I create online courses and blogs that teach people how to build a successful blogging business. To drive free traffic to my online business, I leverage SEO, YouTube, and Facebook groups.

Implementing a targeted SEO strategy significantly increases the discoverability of my content. Tapping into search habits, SEO serves up my content at the top of the results without the need to pay for ad placements. YouTube is another great way to drive people to my site. It allows me to give a preview of my work and expertise, hooking viewers so they’ll want to click on my call-to-action to learn more.

With video now being an important part of content strategy, this can be repurposed for other social channels, newsletters, embedded in blogs, and can show up in Google search results.

Lastly, Facebook groups have benefits that go beyond a regular Facebook page. Not only do my posts gain better visibility by beating the frustrating algorithm (and even alerts members of new posts), but it’s a way to engage and nurture fans, converting them into customers. Again, this is a way to showcase my expertise, bring awareness to new blogs/courses, and provide exclusive offerings to loyal followers.

Sam Rexford, CHILLREPTILE

Food and Kitchen Blog – Reddit

Thanks for the HARO query. As someone who runs an online business (a food and kitchen blog), I depend on driving traffic to my site in order to keep my business afloat. Here are some of the free traffic sources I’ve taken advantage of:

SEO: Professional SEO services cost an arm and a leg, but you don’t have to hire someone to do it for you. By watching a few YouTube videos and taking advantage of some of the free SEO courses out there, you can learn how to optimize your site yourself. It’s certainly an investment of your time, but there’s no better way to drive traffic to your site than to rank for niche search terms.

Guest blogging: There are thousands upon thousands of bloggers out there who are looking for people to contribute to their site. And usually, they’ll let you include a few links back to your own site in your article. By reaching out to those people and pitching ideas for guest blogs, you’ll be able to direct some of their readers toward your site. Plus, the backlinks are great for SEO!

Social media: Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms are great for getting your name out there. If you can manage to create a viral post (or even a post with a few dozen shares), your account will show up on thousands of people’s timelines. If the content is good, people will be curious about your brand and will head to your site to learn about it.

Reddit: Reddit communities are where niche experts go to talk about their favorite topics. If you’re able to provide useful information about your niche in a relevant Reddit community, you can establish yourself as an authority on that topic. Other people who belong to the community will head to your site because they’ll trust that it has good content.

Heloise Blaure, Home Kitchen Land