8 SEO alternatives to drive traffic to your website

Website traffic is an essential driver of business growth. It helps you rank higher on search engines, analyse the effectiveness of your digital marketing, gather data to make better decisions concerning your audience, generate more leads and increase conversion.

Digital Marketers invest a good portion of their marketing budget into SEO. Google’s search engine receives over 66,000 searches per second, which means that SEO is certainly important. However, search engines are not the only way to reach your target audience or beat the competition. Depending on your consumer base, your clients might not be visible on search engines, social media or other platforms. Subsequently, search engines shouldn’t be the only way to get results. Diversifying the traffic that comes to your website could help your business stay alive.

Here are eight SEO alternatives to drive traffic to your website:

Online Ads

In an instant, an online advert can generate thousands of clicks to your site. With recent innovations to social media platforms, where targeted marketing is a priority, it’s now easier than ever to reach your target audience. However, you’ll need to compile and plan your adverts in a way that generates ROI if you want to advertise for a prolonged period. The ultimate goal is to generate traffic and boost conversion.

Two factors to consider when creating an online ad include the design of the advert in question and the targeting of that particular advert. So, study the high performing adverts amongst your competition. You can use a free PPC spying tool such as Moat to view hundreds of PPC from advertisers or even WhatRunsWhere for a more in-depth analysis.

Influencer Marketing

Influencers are recognised as being social media celebrities who have a huge following. Their fans (or ‘followers’) pay attention to what the influencer says and will suitably trust any endorsement from them. Therefore, influencers are perfectly placed to spread awareness about your website and its products. If the fans like what they see, they’re more likely to share the post with their followers or communicate via word of mouth. Instagram is an excellent platform to find influencers, while most of your competitors will have a Facebook presence (and a large audience), which is a win-win situation for you. If you're interested in SEO alternatives like this one, you can check out our blog on harnessing the power of influencers. 

Social Media Marketing

In 2025, the number of monthly active social network users in the UK is projected to reach 50.89 million individuals. This would be an increase of over 12 million new users from 38.01 million users in 2015. These figures show how important social media is to every marketer. An effective campaign raises brand awareness, increases website traffic, improves engagement with your audience and boosts your profit margin.
The key is to create a unique campaign for each platform. For quicker updates, use Twitter and follow influencers in your industry. If you want to attract traffic from images, go to Instagram and Pinterest. The idea is to post images that people want to share; if you’re in B2B marketing, LinkedIn is your best bet. Four out of five LinkedIn members influence decisions in their company, while LinkedIn accounts for over 60% of traffic from social media to company websites. As SEO alternatives, either focus on one social channel that suits your business best or a combination of several channels, either way, don't spread your content too thin as it could lead to time wasting and ineffective social impact.

Host bloggers on your site

This is a strategy employed by top websites like Search Engine Land, Small Biz Trends, and Moz. Simply share guest posts from other bloggers on your website and after posting the content, you and the publisher promote the link to drive traffic from both audiences.
The power of two makes this a win-win situation for your website and the publisher. The publisher utilises the traffic from the post back to their website, via which you’ll then attract get more traffic. The example below is from a post published by Neil Patel on Searchenginejournal.com. When accepting guest posts, Kieran Ried (SEO Account Executive at Synapse SEO) advises that you inform the publishers to only send original content, backed by data, related to your niche and up to 1,000 words in length.

Join the conversation in the ‘Comment’ section

When you read an informative post on a thought leader’s website, scroll down to the ‘Comment’ section, reply to some comments and share your own thoughts. You’ll make a name for yourself if your comments are insightful and thought-provoking. This piques the interest of other commenters, who want to learn more about you, thus driving further traffic to your website. However, DO NOT DROP SPAM LINKS. Rather, engage with people in your niche, as they are more likely to click on the link that leads back to your site.

Interview influencers in your niche

In our list of SEO alternatives, this isn't the easiest, but it can be accomplished. As you gain traction in your niche and establish a name for yourself, influencers are bound to take notice of you. So, invite one of them to be interviewed on your blog. This will increase the chances of their followers (and yours) reading the interview to hear what the influencer has to say and sharing the content with those followers thereafter.
For example, if you read a blog where someone like Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro was being interviewed, you would assume that the blogger was fairly important.

Go big with YouTube

After Google, YouTube is the largest search engine in the world, with over 2 billion active users per month. Have you noticed that when you search for something on Google, it integrates results from YouTube as part of the search results? In the image below, I typed in the search query, “How to make hamburgers” and this is the result that came back:

When you post content on YouTube, you can share it on social media or embed it in your blog post, so readers can watch the videos directly from your site. YouTube is an essential tool if you’re marketing to a younger generation, considering the core of its users is aged 18-49 years old.

Take advantage of email

Email is undoubtedly the best tool via which to reach your consumers. In an Adobe email survey, 61% of participants stated that they preferred emails. According to Smart Insights, the average click-through rate is 3.4%, while Neil Patel states that you’re more likely to attract subscribers from email than social media. Subsequently, there are many benefits to email marketing as one of your SEO alternatives; it’s cheap to execute, versatile and delivers a high ROI.

To convert visitors into customers, they’ll first need to find your website. SEO is a great strategy, but diversifying your marketing with some of the tips we’ve listed ensures you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. So, take advantage of these SEO alternatives, increase your social media presence, start blogging, guest post on influencer sites, share viral videos, spice up your content with infographics and shift your focus to lead generation. You’ll then be able to increase traffic using any of these strategies.