How to get traffic to your website without social media

Have you ever wondered if it was possible to market without social media? Do you hate it but feel like you need it for business? I feel you on this one. I’ve been using social media for marketing since 2009 or 10, the early days of social media marketing. Back then, it worked pretty well. Brands got good visibility and engagement on their social media channels. Today, getting traffic to your website from social media is hard because of the algorithms. Social media apps are designed to keep people in the app rather than send visitors off the app to your website. If you’re wondering how to get traffic to your website without social media, it’s a lot easier than you may think because social media doesn’t want to send traffic to your website even if you’re super active and engaged on their channel. 

Why do social media apps not want to send traffic to your website?

Most of the popular social media apps today sell ad space as their revenue model. If they send people from their app to your website, they lose the chance to serve them more ads and charge advertisers for the ads. By keeping people on the app longer, they can sell more ads.

How can you market without social media?

If you want to use social media as part of your marketing plan because you absolutely love it, you can. You need to realize that it won’t send traffic to your website because that’s not what the algorithm is designed to do. If you want to grow a following on social and nurture your followers there, go for it. But it is completely possible if you want to market your business without social media. I started in marketing before social media existed. We did it all day, every day. 

Listen to the podcast here.

I’ve always been a huge fan of organic marketing, using optimized content as my core piece. Blogging and podcasting can do more for your business than social media will. With a blog, you can create content to bring people into your world, nurture them, answer their questions, and turn them into lifelong customers.

A podcast can do the same thing by helping you to build the like, know, and trust factors with your audience in a new way because they hear you talk to them every week, or they see you on screen if you record in video. They add you to their routine and listen to you each time you release a new episode. They learn from you.

How to get traffic to your website without social media

Your podcast or blog can help drive traffic to your website without social media. Your blog posts: if you do blog SEO and target keywords, your website can rank high at the top of Google and can drive lots of traffic to your website for free. Your podcast can drive traffic to your website, too.

How does your blog send traffic to your website?

As long as your blog and website are on the same main URL (I’ve seen a few situations where people have had their blogs on a subdomain or another website altogether; don’t do that if you want organic traffic to your website), your website will benefit from the content you create for your blog.

When you write new blog posts that help your ideal customer, use keywords they’re searching for, and start to rank high in Google’s search results, you’ll get more traffic to those posts. If you link your posts to your products or services, you’ll start to sell more, too.

How can your podcast send traffic to your website?

People who listen to your podcast get to know you and become more interested in what you offer or teach. They’re more likely to visit your website for freebies or learn about your products and services. You’re building your like, know, and trust factors and nurturing them through your podcast, and then they will visit your website.

Is social media even sending traffic to your website?

Before I decided to stop regularly posting to social media, I looked at my Google Analytics to see what return I was getting from social media. Over a year, organic social media sent less than 8% of my website traffic, while organic search sent 43%. Direct traffic, which my podcast helps to send, was 37% of the traffic for that timeframe. If you’re wondering if social media is working for your business, look at your Google Analytics for a minimum of 90 days, preferably a full year, and see. What percentage of your traffic comes from social media? How many opt-ins are you getting from social? And then think about the amount of time you’re dedicating to social media marketing. Are you getting enough back for the hours you’re putting in, or is it time to do something else? It was time to stop social media marketing, even though I felt I was supposed to be there. It wasn’t producing the results that I wanted for the amount of time that it required. Doing this allowed me to focus more on what was sending traffic, organic search, and my blog. Doing this will allow my traffic to continue to grow each year without me having to spend more time on my business than I was already. 

Have you ever thought, I hate social media but need it for business?

If you hate social media but feel you need it for business, know it’s okay to stop posting on it. If your goal is to increase your website traffic, social media isn’t help you much with that anyway. 

If you want to build your followers and engage with them on social, that’s OK too, but if it’s not where you want to spend your time marketing your business, you can choose to leave social media.

I don’t post regularly on social media. I love it in my personal life. I love catching up with old friends and family, watching the kids grow up, seeing things friends are doing, etc. But I’ve never loved social media for my business. Not that I don’t love you and all of my students, but I don’t want to share my entire world with everyone. I don’t want to post photos every time I go out to eat or spend my vacation thinking about getting the perfect photo for social. I want to be present in the moment and enjoy the time with my friends or family. Plus, my life is fairly boring and typical for a late 40s married mom who lives in the suburbs. I take my kid to school, work out, work, volunteer at school, enjoy date night with my hubby less often than we’d like, get together with the girls from book club, etc. It’s not that exciting, and I don’t believe sharing all that will let me help more business owners with their blog, podcast, or website SEO.

If you think it might be time to stop posting on social media, look at your analytics, see what the data shows, and decide. You can always go back on social in the future if you find that you miss it and want to be there. But if you’re not loving it, or it’s draining you, and it’s not sending website traffic, it might be time to do something different. If you’d like to learn how I drive my website traffic via my blog – I teach the exact process I use in Simple SEO Content. I’ll teach you how to find blog post ideas that your ideal customer is searching for and then how to optimize that content for the search engines so that it gets traffic.