When it comes to implementing practical & affordable tactics for growing your site’s traffic it is important to have an arsenal of supporting tools at your disposal to power your content creation.
Targeting keywords with high search traffic potential forms a core part of growing organic traffic sustainably, but for highly competitive terms it may be hard to gain a foothold in the SERPs. So our bonus tool at the end of the article covers a free tool that helps you find topics before they reach the peak of their popularity.
Whilst many premium SEO tools are great for content optimization, & discovering new opportunities, they may not be an option for smaller businesses operating under modest marketing budgets, especially when you take into account young start-ups & technology sites.
The methods I’ve cited below make use of free & freemium tools I’ve personally used across many websites I’ve worked on across technology, Ecommerce & a variety of niche sites for sustainable organic traffic growth.
Free – Google Alerts
Looking for content ideas driving traffic to your competitors? Then look no further than Google Alerts. For any search term or trending topic you want to follow you can use Google Alerts to send notifications that will deliver the top trending content on your chosen subject straight to your inbox, at a time that suits you.
This will assist in informing your ongoing content strategy & give you valuable insights on what your visitors are expecting to read from your industry.
Even though I personally also use paid brand mention tools often to keep track of topics I care about, I always back it up with a matching alert in Google Alerts as typically there are mentions that many of the paid-for tools miss out on regularly.
It is interesting to note that Google Alerts has very good coverage for brand mentions if you are also looking to implement PR strategies into your wider content marketing playbook.
Freemium – Siteliner
If you’ve recently created some great content for your site & are wondering why you’ve not started ranking you may wish to use Siteliner to double-check that your content is as unique as originally intended.
Siteliner offers a free option up to 250 pages for crawling your site and checking if your internal pages are competing with each other as duplicates, which even paid tools like SEMrush & Ahrefs tend to miss when duplicated copy occurs in the body of the content.
Their free option gives you more than enough data to pull together a top-level audit of what pages you desperately need to start improving & reworking.
If you need to do a complete site audit then you’ll have to pay for credits which are still only $5 per 500 pages crawled. This is still a lot cheaper than most SEO tools on the market specializing in checking duplicate content.
Free Membership Option – Exploding Topics
Looking to create content on the next big topic in your industry before everyone knows about it? Then consider Exploding Topics for discovering new content topics before they become popular & are included by the likes of Google Trends.
My favorite aspect of Exploding Topics is that I get a weekly digest that tells me which opportunities are likely to yield the most organic traffic as well offering a gradient of how much the traffic is growing by & the categories it is relevant to.
The value of the tool is going to be more or less helpful based on its relevance to the niche you’re trying to increase traffic for. Primarily a lot of their featured topics cover technology trends, startups gaining traction & upcoming marketing trends.
These three tools will help to provide a foundation that allows you to make the most of content marketing for relevant site traffic growth & are easily comparable to their premium counterparts.
Author Bio
Eleanor Bennett is a digital marketing specialist at cloud monitoring & log management platform Logit.io. She writes on technology & marketing, with a special focus on informative pieces to help IT decision-makers consider tools and software to secure their operations and scale for business growth.
