Simply having a website isn’t enough. You need to tell people about your site and make it easy for them to find it. Luckily, there are plenty of strategies and techniques you can use to make doing so a whole lot easier.
In this post, we’ll explain the importance of choosing the right tactics to promote your site. Then, we’ll provide you with 15+ foolproof ways to increase your website traffic. We’ll cover how to use content marketing, email marketing, community, and much more. Let’s jump in!
Table of Contents
The Benefits of Increasing Your Website Traffic
There’s not a single website that wouldn’t benefit from more traffic. The more visitors you get, the easier it becomes to monetize your website in various ways. This includes:
- Getting paid to publish ads
- Selling your own products or services
- Signing up more people to your email list
- Ranking higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
- Being able to sell your website at a higher price
More traffic can also translate to additional followers on social media, which can open many professional doors. Ultimately, more website traffic means additional opportunities you can take advantage of.
Choosing the Best Digital Marketing Tactics for Boosting Website Traffic
There are a plethora of traffic-driving tactics you can use to boost your website traffic. However, figuring out which ones are right for you can be challenging.
Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. You know your business, your current situation, and your goals (and if you don’t, check out our complete guide to starting a business).
That said, there are a few things to help you determine which digital marketing tactics you should be using and what to skip, including:
- Your budget. Some of these tactics are free. Some have a cost attached. It should go without saying that you ought to spend some money if you want to be effective at driving traffic to your site, but your budget will help you decide how and where you should be allocating that money.
- Your knowledge level. Pick tactics you feel comfortable executing. Most of us, for example, could start blogging about our industry. Keyword research requires some knowledge to get going and ensure you pick the right data, but the barrier to entry is relatively low. Technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a step (or few) up from that.
- Your goals. If you’re looking to drive traffic to increase brand awareness, content marketing is essential. If you only want people to come to your site to make a purchase, pay for targeted traffic on social media. In all cases, SEO should form part of your traffic-boosting strategy.
We recommend taking some time to familiarize yourself with the tactics available to you, then starting with the ones you’re most comfortable with. It may take some trial and error to figure out a strategy that works best for you.
Foolproof Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Now that we understand the importance of choosing strategies for driving traffic, let’s get into what the best ones are. Below are 15+ foolproof ways to increase your website traffic.
1. Focus on a Specific Niche
We see a lot of websites that try to cover a little bit of everything. Some might include health articles, news, recipes, fitness tips, and more. That approach may work for massive organizations that can publish dozens of articles per day, but it’s a recipe for failure for new sites and blogs.
A smarter approach is to pick a niche and put everything you have into creating the best possible content or product for it. The less competitive the sector is, the faster you may see results. However, less competitive niches may also mean you have an overall lower-traffic ceiling (i.e., there’s simply not that much interest in the topic).
2. Create and Optimize Quality Content on a Regular Basis
Quality content is the most important ranking factor and not only should the content be unique, but also informative and engaging. One of the most essential ways to improve SEO is to create more valuable and informative content and incorporate it into your products. You can use friendly articles with good content structure, internal and external links, infographics, and many other attachments. Provide an opportunity and be one reason website visitors stop and spend time on the website. Publish content on your own blog regularly to help your traffic grow. Once this step is completed, everything else will follow.
The key idea, why not start blogging? Blogs are a great way to bring information content to your website visitors. You can provide information in articles, videos, etc. If the blog page does not exist yet, you should add it to your website. And start adding content regularly to make your website attractive enough to potential customers. Maybe you have personal experience with the product, or you have participated in an event to help you gain more knowledge that others find useful; all these can be applied to create wonderful content for your website.
Encourage visitors to take action by letting them know what to do. Give examples to illustrate the main points of communication. Use your experience as a guide to create interesting original content. Help create content related to your membership offers. Get more exposure (this applies to sites that were originally designed not to embed blogs).The more content you have on your website, the more opportunities Google has to improve your search ranking. Also, remember to optimize your content correctly for the keywords you choose. Once you get a high ranking here, you can generate one good traffic.
If you really want to increase your website SEO traffic, you need to optimize your website content first. Otherwise, the flow will be short-lived and temporary. You should review and delete all content that does not generate any traffic; as they are a waste of time and effort. If you have good content, people will visit your website regularly. Establish yourself as a market leader in your industry and write high-quality and valuable content (real information that people might find useful to them.) Remember, content should always be unique. There are some general rules of thumb for people to stick to your website and actually read your text. No one wants to read boring texts. Use your originality and some compromises. When people spend more time on your website, you end up with a lower bounce rate. SEO is not the only thing you need every time. If your content is not user-friendly and has nothing to do with the keywords you are working on, SEO will not help. Try to create high-quality, easy-to-read content.
Some of the most consistently successful formats include:
- How-to guides
- Q&As and FAQs
- Step-by-step processes or tutorials
- Ultimate guides
- Product reviews and round-ups
- Training guides
One way to make sure this type of evergreen content continues to be successful is regularly updating it. Periodically review the content and make sure that the advice is up-to-date and relevant. That way, you’ll keep sending on-topic traffic to your site year after year. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!
3. Share Your Content on Social Media
If you’re running a website, we highly recommend having a social media presence as well. This provides you with additional channels to promote your content, engage with followers and influencers in your field, and more.
However, one mistake that many sites make is not knowing which social media platforms to focus on. As a rule of thumb, we recommend starting with one or two profiles on the networks that best match the type of content your site publishes.
For example, if you run a blog about food and recipes, it makes sense to be on Instagram and Pinterest. However, you might not get as much engagement out of Twitter or Facebook.
Focusing on one or two platforms makes it easier to actually keep up with and engage in conversations, rather than simply using your profile to post links. To grow your followers, you’ll want to participate in discussions, join groups, share tips with other users, etc. In other words, you have to provide value in some way.
4. Set Up Affiliate or Referral Programs
Affiliate marketing is a type of online advertising in which businesses or individuals promote and sell products or services on behalf of other companies. Affiliates earn a commission for each sale they generate, making it a lucrative way to drive traffic to your website
Affiliate or referral programs tend to be rather straightforward. If you sell a product or service, you can pay partners or publishers for every purchase made possible via their promotions.
By offering affiliates a commission on each sale they generate, you can encourage them to promote your business to their audiences. This can help you reach new customers and grow your business while also widening your professional network.
The beauty of an affiliate program is that it helps you get more traffic as well as direct conversions. As long as you pay reasonable fees, your publishers will be well-motivated to promote your products and services for you.
5. Participate in Question & Answer (Q&A) Websites
Question and Answer (Q&A) websites aren’t just fun places to spend a few hours reading about random topics. They also offer fantastic opportunities for building links and directing traffic towards your website.
Consider Quora, for example. If you look for questions related to your niche, it gives you the perfect opportunity to swoop in, show that you’re an expert, and link to your website while you’re at it.
That sounds simple enough. However, getting traffic from Q&A websites comes down to three main elements:
- How many views the questions you respond to get
- How good your responses are
- How many ‘up votes’ your answers receive
If your responses don’t get engagement, they won’t be as visible. Essentially, this means that users won’t click on the links back to your website.
This same technique also applies to comment sections on sites within your niche. However, it’s usually considered bad etiquette to ‘peddle’ links to your own website on other sites. In our experience, not only do those URLs often get ignored, but they can also make you look unethical. On the other hand, Q&A websites are fair game (although it’s still important to be aware of their Terms of Services).
6. Guest Blog on Relevant Websites
Guest blogging is one of the most time-tested approaches to getting more traffic to your website. It works because it’s a win-win for all parties involved.
If you’re running a new blog, guest posting provides you with the opportunity to get your ‘competitors’ to link to it. This can help with SEO and attract more users to visit your site.
The only catch when it comes to guest blogging is that it can be difficult to arrange. Typically, successful guest blogging involves the following steps:
- Researching competitor blogs in your niche
- Contacting blog owners to see who may be interested in publishing guest articles
- Agreeing on a topic for your guest post and how many links you will include
- Writing the article and getting it published
Guest posting works, but it’s time-consuming. Moreover, a lot of websites will ignore your contact efforts or try to charge you to publish your content. If another website wants you to pay for guest blogging, we recommend looking elsewhere. After all, you’re already offering ‘free’ content, which should be incentive enough.
For these reasons, guest posting is a technique that we suggest that you use sparingly. One or two guest posts a month is a fantastic start, and will still help you build backlinks faster than many other approaches.
7. Create a Multilingual Website
One of the best ways to find new visitors for your website or blog is to translate it into other languages. The more languages your site is available in, the bigger your potential audience becomes.
8. List Your Business For Free On Google
This free tool provided by Google is an effective tool for listing your business on the search engine. An optimized listing can get your business seven times more traffic when compared with an incomplete listing. Adding the website link to Google My Business listing would drive the visitors to your website, thus increasing the number of visitors. Also, getting listed on online directories can help earn more links. This could enable a higher number of visitors right from the beginning.
9. Use Right Hashtags on Right Social Media Platforms
Social media is a boon for all the growing businesses as it is the most relevant platform to promote the business digitally. Websites that need more traffic should promote their posts on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Optimizing the social media profiles with the website link in the description or about us section would increase the number of visitors. Thus, it is essential to make effective use of social media platforms for driving traffic to a newly launched website.
10. Post Content to LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become much more than how of finding another job. The world’s largest professional social network is now a valuable publishing platform in its title, which suggests you need to be posting content to LinkedIn regularly. Doing so can boost traffic to your site, also increase your profile within your industry – especially if you have a moderate to large following.10. Post Content to LinkedIn LinkedIn has become much more than how of finding another job. The world’s largest professional social network is now a valuable publishing platform in its title, which suggests you need to be posting content to LinkedIn regularly. Doing so can boost traffic to your site, also increase your profile within your industry – especially if you have a moderate to large following.
11. Leverage the Power of Email Marketing
Yes! The traditional methods of email marketing still work. With engaging subject lines, valuable content and great bargains – email marketing remains a powerful tool for automation and driving profitable action to your website.
So many businesses are focused on attracting new customers through content marketing that they ditch more traditional methods. Email marketing is usually a robust tool, and even a moderately successful email blast may end in a big uptick in traffic. Just look out to not bombard people with relentless emails about every single update in your business. Also, don’t overlook the power of word-of-mouth marketing, especially from folks that are already enjoying your products or services. A friendly email reminder of a couple of new services or products can assist you to spice up your traffic, too.
12. Submit Your Content to Aggregator Sites
Firstly, a disclaimer – don’t spam Reddit and other similar sites hoping to “hit the jackpot” of referral traffic, because it’s not getting to happen. Members of communities like Reddit are extraordinarily savvy to spam disguised as legitimate links, but now and again, it doesn’t hurt to submit links that these audiences will find genuinely useful. Choose a pertinent subreddit, acquiesce your content, then watch the circulation pour in.
13. Incorporate Video into Your Content Strategy
Text-based content is all well and good, but videos are often a valuable asset in both attracting new visitors and making your site more engaging. Data shows that information retention is significantly higher for visual material than it’s for text, meaning that video marketing is superb thanks to grabbing – and hold – your audience’s attention, and boost traffic to your website at an equivalent time.
14. Get listed on Directories & Review Sites
Another easy and free way t increase website traffic is getting listed with online directories and review sites. Actively updating these listings and keeping your business details consist not only helps increase your inbound traffic, but it promotes your local SEO efforts as well. A great starting point for building directories include:
Additionally, review sites and directories have strong domain authority on search engines. This means your business’s free page on their site could begin ranking in relevant searches. Actively update these listings to ensure your contact information, address, and links to your website are up-to-date.
15. Update Old Content
If you have a piece of resourceful content that’s dated, maybe it’s time to repay it a visit. All fresh content eventually degrades over time. Take an old blog post and revise it with newer resources, statistics and up-to-date subject matter. Sometimes refreshing old content can be a more useful way of investing your time than trying to write new content to boost your organic visibility and leads.
Here are some ways you can repurpose your content marketing:
- A presentation can be recorded and uploaded to YouTube or a podcasting service
- The same presentation can be transcribed using a service like otter.ai and can become a blog post with a bit of tweaking
- Visual content for guides and blog posts can be repurposed for social media
- Blog posts can be periodically sent out to an email marketing list
- Take internal processes and turn them into whitepapers
- Combine blog posts with new content for whitepapers and eBooks
- Curate your teams’ tweets for tips and tool roundups
The list is almost endless. The more places your content appears, the more chances you have to drive traffic back to your site.
Wrapping Up
If you want to create a successful website that attracts more and more visitors every day, which means increasing your SEO traffic, you can start off by using these techniques and strategies as part of your overall SEO strategy.
Learning how to increase website traffic is easier than you might expect. Anyone can implement the methods we’ve looked at in this post. The real challenge lies in not giving up before you start to see positive results.
Ready to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website?
Now that you have these tactics in your toolbox, you should be able to put together a simple strategy for getting more people to your site. Remember, though, that this isn’t a one-off exercise, nor do you have to try everything at once or use only one tactic at a time.
Try something. See if it works. If it fails, stick at it a little longer but bring something else into your roster. Most importantly, make sure the technical aspects of your site are running smoothly — if you need targeted audience, for example, we’ve got plans to suit any budget!
