Creating a stunning website isn’t enough if you want to monetize it. You need to be proactive in order to drive conversion-ready traffic to your website.
Traffic, in website terms, is your foundation for growth.
Increasing traffic to your website improves your brand and product awareness. It should come as no surprise that this kind of exposure will almost always lead to more sales.
An increase in visitors will also give you more options to make money, such as selling ad space and implementing affiliate links.
Don’t worry if you’re not sure where to start. In this article, you will learn key techniques and proven solutions for how to drive traffic to your website.
This is the only eCommerce guide you’ll ever need.
What types of traffic are there?
Before we get into the nitty gritty of the mechanics of driving traffic to your website, here’s a quick crash-course on what types of traffic there are.
Organic traffic comes ‘naturally’ when people find your site on other platforms. Big brands, like Apple and Nike, get lots of organic traffic due to their market share and popularity.
Paid traffic, on the other hand, comes from paid advertising on search engines, social media, or other ads. So, one of the best ways to attract more traffic, in general, is to rank high on SERPs (search engine result pages).
The first organic result of a Google search will get 31.7% of all clicks, while almost 80% of the people searching will ignore paid ads.
It’s important to know that only 0.78% of people using Google click on a link from the second page. That’s why learning how to turn search traffic to website traffic is important for all website owners.
The work needed for moving up in the rankings may be time-consuming and difficult, but for a business owner, the benefits of higher rankings should not be overlooked.
18 ways to increase website traffic
There are various techniques and methods to drive website traffic. You can’t use them all – it’d simply be too much for a single person to handle.
If you have a team, however, you can expand your traffic driving efforts and choose which methods would work the best for your target audience.
Read through the following 18 ways to increase traffic on the website that you manage and become a true web traffic master.
1. Create quality content
A strong content strategy is an essential part of any website that wants more traffic.
Not only will quality blog content drive traffic to your site, but it will encourage your visitors to come back again.
Content marketing is the first part of the sales funnel. It helps to build brand awareness and trust between your business and your potential customers.
By creating posts relevant to your niche, you’ll also be able to build authority in your market.
There are a few steps to keep in mind before you start crafting your posts.
- Tailor the content to your niche of expertise. But don’t forget the needs of the types of people you’re targeting, too. Provide relevant, factually correct information. Your goal is to inform and showcase your mastery of the field.
- Ensure that your blog content is well written. Follow a consistent style guide, create a logical structure to all your blog posts and articles, and ensure that there are no grammar mistakes. Your visitors are likely to leave your site if the content is hard or even impossible to understand. Use tools like Grammarly or the Hemingway app to be on the safe side of any grammatical or stylistic mishaps.
- Don’t forget the visual side. Illustrations, images, GIFs – visual content is extremely important when it comes to reader engagement. Never make them face a wall of text with nothing ‘fun’ to look at.
2. Take care of on-page SEO
SEO ties in very closely with content marketing. Paying attention to SEO will help you to drive traffic to your website, because it makes your business easier to find through search engines.
On-page SEO involves optimizing your blog content, layout, and linking architecture of your website to improve search engine rankings.
A good on-page SEO strategy includes creating great content with relevant keywords. This is done by conducting proper SEO research, finding the keywords your audience is likely to use, and creating content around them.
Let’s say you’re selling t-shirts made from organic cotton in your online store.
It would make no sense for you to create content around keywords like best ways to lose weight, that has nothing to do with your products. Long-tail keywords like ‘best organic cotton t-shirts,’ on the other hand, would work much better.
Make sure that your on-page SEO is done right:
- Add meta titles and meta descriptions to all of your pages
- Include alternative text to your images
- Create proper SEO titles for your content by including keywords
You might be tempted to ‘stuff’ your content with keywords.
That doesn’t work anymore and might actually even get penalized, because search engines have smart algorithms that will recognize lazy on-page SEO strategies.
3. Don’t forget off-page SEO
Off-page SEO involves gaining a better ranking by working on everything else except your site, hence the name.
For example, having other websites link back to your, creating lead generating content, or writing a guest post or two are all possible approaches.
The more your page is mentioned or linked back to, the higher its authority will be.
If you create content for your blog that’s unique and highly informative, chances are that other people will find it to be a useful resource that they’ll want to link to.
Maybe you’re a dog expert and you share your knowledge through your blog. Perhaps you have an in-depth article on the new research that’s come out about how dog owners can train their dogs better.
The more other people link back to your original article on dog training, the better the search engines will consider your content to answer questions like ‘how to train my dog’ or perhaps ‘dog training trends’.
In short, the goal of off-page SEO is to get the rest of the internet linking back to your original content.
Use these tools to drive traffic to your site
Google Analytics – tracks, reports, and measures the traffic on your site
Ahrefs – performs keyword research, helps you find your rank and competitors’ rank
SEMrush – finds out who’s linking to your site and tracks your site’s ranking
Ubersuggest – finds keywords and content suggestions and comparisons
4. Learn technical SEO
A great way to drive more traffic to your website is by taking advantage of what people call technical SEO.
This type of SEO focuses mainly on how well search engines are able to go through your site (aka crawling) and index all your pages.
One way of improving your technical SEO is to create a sitemap of your website. This is easily done through free tools like Google Search Console.
You should also check for any broken links or broken redirects, and fix them before Google catches up with you.
Faulty links don’t just get taken badly by search engines, but they also make your site less attractive to return to.
And if you fail at getting people to return to your site, you will not see any improvements in your site traffic either.
5. Take advantage of local SEO
Local SEO is one of the more overlooked aspects of search engine optimization.
It refers to the details that search engines have about your business activities in your local area.
Let’s say you’re a hairdresser and you use your website for taking bookings and for showcasing the best hairdos you’ve created so far. Chances are that you also rent out spaces in your salon or you do home visits.
If your business is hyper-local, focus on boosting your local SEO.
Get more traffic by making sure that your business details are correctly listed on Google and are always up-to-date.
There is nothing worse than checking the opening hours of a business, only to go there and find out that they now close 1 hour earlier.
And don’t forget to check that everything’s displaying correctly on Google Maps too.
6. Make your web design responsive
Having a responsive website design ties in closely with SEO and your SERP rankings, and therefore the amount of search traffic your site could be getting.
Google promotes mobile-first design. This means that it uses the mobile versions of websites for their primary ranking and indexing, rather than the desktop versions.
Not having a responsive website will hurt your search ranking and makes it harder to get traffic to your website from search engines.
Other website qualities that will affect your search rankings include:
- Site usability. Visitors to your site won’t stay if they have a difficult time navigating through it.
- Page loading time. Google considers your page loading time and can penalize your site if it’s too slow.
- Bounce rate. This is when a visitor lands and exits on only one page in a matter of seconds. High bounce rates can lower your site’s search ranking.
- Duplicate content. Google will penalize your site if it finds duplicate content that looks suspicious; are you trying to trick Google to boost your rankings? It’s important to link any legitimate duplicate content, like a mobile version of your site, back to your main site to avoid penalties.
- Site security. Often referred to as SSL, this is what verifies your website as legitimate and protects your visitors’ data.
If you’re looking to build a responsive website, look for platforms that offer responsive website templates.
The easier they are to customize, the better. You want to be able to preview your website on all devices. This way, you’ll avoid any weird mishaps like having your blog text blocking an image, for example.
7. Run email marketing campaigns
Use emails to inform people about sales, new features, or content updates. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website.
By building a strong email list and crafting a proper email marketing strategy, you can increase both traffic to your website and your conversion rates.
Users must consent to receive your newsletters, however, so don’t ‘borrow’ or buy emails.
Once you have an extensive email list, pick an email marketing service to help you with your marketing strategy.
You’ll be able to track how the campaign is doing, craft newsletters, and perform A/B testing. Some tools you might consider using include:
- ActiveCampaign. This is a platform that helps you design sophisticated, automated email marketing that will save you time, and generate revenue for your company.
- Constant Contact. One of the original email marketing companies, Constant Contact is a good option if you are looking for an easy-to-use tool.
- SendinBlue. This software can be used for transactional emails, like forgotten passwords, or sending invoices and receipts.
- Hubspot. Need help with your email marketing schedule, creating blogs, and analyzing and tracking campaigns? Hubspot has got your back.
- Drip. This software offers many tools but specializes in scheduling multiple emails to be sent to subscribers during a campaign.
It’s crucial that you tailor your email marketing campaigns to the needs of your audience.
Take things a step further by segmenting the campaign by demographics. This way you’ll be able to tailor your newsletters based on people’s interests.
8. Advertise on social media
According to The Next Web, over 3.48 billionpeople were using social media in 2019.
With this kind of reach, social media marketing has a huge potential to generate traffic, leads and increase brand exposure, which eventually improves conversions.
When crafting a social media marketing strategy, make sure you:
- Know your target audience inside-out and carefully create a plan according to their needs
- Set measurable goals
- Choose the right channels
- Create a schedule for your content
Keep in mind that different social media platforms require different strategies, so ensure you conduct thorough research.
A successful social media campaign will help you raise brand awareness and can significantly increase site traffic.
For example, Dove #ShowUs is a great example of a successful social media campaign.
They used 4 platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, to launch its #ShowUs project, where they asked their audience to send in photos of themselves and show what they thought beauty is.
Another good example is the Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino campaign.
Starbucks used Instagram to help roll out its annual Frappuccino Happy Hour with an infamous, pink, and purple creation. It’s hashtag successfully generated nearly 155,000 Instagram posts during that time.
Another way to increase website traffic through social media is simply by using social sharing buttons.
With a share button, it’s a convenient one-click for your followers to share your content or purchases on their Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms.
9. Give guest bloggers a platform
Guest blogging is when you contribute content to another site or when you invite another blogger to publish a blog post on your site.
Guest posts are usually written for websites within the same niche.
Having guest posts is about leveraging your industry’s experts and their followers. Being a guest blogger is about promoting your brand to an already established audience. Both techniques are great for cross-promotion.
There are more benefits than just reaching out to different audiences.
When you share your knowledge through a guest blog post, you can establish yourself as an authority or expert in your trade.
This has a ripple effect by improving your site’s domain authority, thereby increasing your search standings and eventually, your traffic volumes.
Inviting a guest writer can bring new website ideas and content to your audience. If you are falling into a routine, a guest post is a great way to keep your readers engaged and happy.
10. Run giveaways
A simple and fun way to drive traffic to your website is through contests and giveaways.
This is a great way to give your site a quick traffic boost and to reward followers,. But before you post or promite your giveaway, you should have a strategy in place.
You’ll need to decide on what to give away and which platform to use for the promotion.
Set up clear rules, so your competition is professional and fair. Publish content on your website and post it on social media, add it to your email campaigns, and so on.
There are various tools to help you with the giveaway. One of the most popular is the Rafflecopter – it makes creating giveaways and promoting them quick and simple.
11. Update old content
Did you know that you can still attract targeted website traffic with older blog content? You can do this by adding up-to-date information and making on-page SEO improvements to your content.
Be extra vigilent with the more newsy content on your blog. With its Freshness algorithm, Google prioritizes websites that regularly update their content.
For example, a person searching for ‘Disney movie showtimes’ is looking for the up-to-date information about showtimes in their area, probably. So, they should get a list of times for the latest Disney movies, and not last week’s information.
Additionally, revisiting older content is an opportunity to check if your links are still good.
Nearly 90% of online customers are less likely to return to a website when they’ve had a bad experience, so having a site with broken or outdated links can send your visitors the wrong message, and hurt your SEO.
But don’t go at it alone. You can use tools to help you find and fix broken links on your website.
With Google Search Console, you can look to see if your site has any search indexing errors. Screaming Frog is a free tool that can check for broken links.
12. Dabble in paid ads
You should consider investing in paid ads if you’re looking for a fast way to get more traffic to your site.
You can buy ad space on most websites and search engines, including social media platforms and news sites.
Plus, most search engines show paid adverts on top of the search results pages before the actual search results themselves.
Making use of search engine traffic and using relevant keywords can quickly drive steady and high-quality monthly traffic to your website.
It’s a particularly useful strategy if you’re starting out and your website isn’t yet ranking high on search engines.
Get started by analyzing the search trends with tools like Google Analytics. Since most search engines use pay per click pricing (PPC) models for paid advertising, you want to pay attention to:
- Choosing the right keywords. You should aim to target long-tail keywords (‘black 13-inch laptop bags’) over more generic search terms (‘laptop bags’). You will get more targeted traffic, which not only converts better, but also keeps your overall PPC costs lower.
- Understanding the factors that make up the overall price per click. Your ad should be relevant to the keyword and of high overall quality. The popularity and competition for particular keywords also influence the price you’ll pay for each click. It helps to keep the cost of your paid traffic as low as possible.
13. Optimize your website flow
Paying attention to the pages your visitors spend a lot of time on, or click away from, is another form of optimizing your traffic flow.
Using tools like Hotjar to analyze heatmaps of your pages can help you understand which pages visitors find engaging, and which they don’t spend any time on.
It could be that you’re losing traffic because your order process is too long or complicated, or because you’re prioritizing the wrong type of content.
Take time regularly to go through the main flows or your site and be critical. One poorly placed call-to-action button could be cutting your traffic by a lot.
14. Partner up with influencers
Influencer marketing is a relatively affordable way to get traffic to your site.
In a nutshell, influence marketing is a marketing strategy where companies have an endorsement deal with a social media influencer. The influencer usually gets paid for featuring a brand or a product in their content, and the brand gets exposure and acknowledgment in return.
Compared to celebrity endorsements, marketing campaigns with social media influencers can be up to 4 times more effective at creating brand familiarity within the target audience.
That’s because many consumers feel that influencers are more relatable and trustworthy than A-listers. Influencers are treated more like friends and that’s why their words can weigh a lot when it comes to purchasing a product.
Get started by:
- Identifying the types of influencers that work best for your website and brand
- Reach out to relevant agencies and start discussing how you can work together
- Consider what type of content your brand or product suits the best
- Share a unique discount voucher code or tracking link with your influencers
15. Engage with your community
The more engaged you are with your audience and online community, the more you will be able to drive traffic to your site.
Consider doing what the financial blog The Financial Diet does: encourage community members to take part in guest posting by sending in blog posts.
If you run an online store, make sure that you’re replying to product reviews and get back to any customer queries promptly.
For those with a strong social media marketing strategy, reply to comments and direct messages on the relevant platforms. This will build trust with your audience and show them that you’re indeed a real person managing your brand.
It’s also a great way to truly feel the pulse of your audience. The better you understand what your product or brand does well, and where it falls short, helps you to improve your business.
That’s why you shouldn’t shy away and ignore negative comments.
In fact, a negative review or a comment could be your chance to show that you care about your customers. Offer them a discount or advise them on how to make the most out of your product.
After all, you’re the expert, right?
16. Produce videos
There’s never been a better time to start creating great content in video format to boost your traffic.
Cisco forecasts that by 2022, videos will make up over over 80% of all traffic. So the sooner you get started, the better prepared you will be for the future.
Video works wonders in both paid and organic social media advertising, so introduce videos to your Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram accounts.
Host live behind-the-scenes events or answer questions about your brand and product. Later on, you can include the videos in a blog post about the event or product.
Remember to add the relevant keywords to your video title and description, and use tags and categories when possible to have an even bigger chance of driving traffic to your website.
17. Optimize for voice search
Smart speakers and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home are becoming more and more mainstream.
Optimizing your content for voice search is a fool-proof way of getting ahead of the competition.
PwC found that over half of people aged 25-49 use voice search at least once per day. And no wonder, since the market is worth $11.9 million globally.
Especially if your website has lots of informative content or how-to guides, creating voice searchable content can bring you a lot of new traffic.
Do some research on the most common types of queries people ask their voice assistants and see if you can generate content around those particular topics.
For example, if you manage an online store that sells cooking utensils, you could create recipe-based content. And it could be that next time someone asks their Google Home how to cook a soft-boiled egg, your article will be referenced.
18. Get media coverage (PR)
Another great way to drive traffic to your website is to catch the eye of the mass media.
Being discussed in the public eye by mainstream media gives your company or website instant exposure.
It also gives your brand external validation, which is great for building trust with potential customers.
Depending on your market, you might already be creating press releases for new product launches or research results.
Maintaining a section for press-related news on your website makes it easy for media representatives to find all the information they need in one place. Post a new update every time you have crossed a new milestone or are launching a new project or product.
You could also include interviews with the key people behind your site or brand. Make sure your press content is easy to understand and has some good quotes media outlets can use.
You could consider setting up a press release newsletter to support the new content that you publish. Media people are busy, so spoon-feed them newsworthy content and they’ll be happy to oblige and publish it.
Get networking and approach media outlets that are relevant to your field, and ask if they’d be interested in a demo or freebies. Use sites like LinkedIn to find relevant media connections, and participate actively in conversations.
This way, you’ll not only establish yourself as a thought-leader, but can also reach people who are not directly connected to you. It could be that while Mike from Daily News doesn’t care for your product, his acquaintance from another newspaper would love to run a story on you.
Get started and generate traffic to your website
Driving high-quality and high-converting traffic to your website can seem like a daunting task.
But, it doesn’t have to be difficult if you follow our tips:
- Be mindful of paid and organic traffic results. Decide if it’s worth paying for an ad or if it’s more important to improve your rank organically.
- Apply SEO to your content and take advantage of tools that will further assist you. Update your old blog content and post frequently.
- Keep your subscribers informed with email marketing. Remember to always ask for permission to use someone’s email address.
- Take advantage of social media marketing. Figure out which platforms you can use to reach your target audience. Try hosting giveaway campaigns.
- Master guest posting. Pitch your expertise to established blogging platforms. In turn, invite writers and bloggers to write a guest post on your site.
- Keep your audience in mind when designing your site’s layout. Be sure that your design works well on smartphones and tablets, as well as desktop.
Lastly, since there are many ways to drive traffic to your website, it’s important to remember why people come to visit your site in the first place and amplify that.
Whether your visitors love your blog content or you offer just the product to fix their problems, make sure you put your ‘it’ factor at the heart of your website.
This is the only eCommerce guide you’ll ever need.
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