Many businesses struggle to come up with new and innovative ways to increase website traffic. There’s a lot of misinformation online about how to attract more visitors, which can lead to using the same tired strategies over and over and not seeing positive results.
If you’re looking to increase website traffic with both organic and paid ways, here are 10 methods that are proven to yield results.
1. Perform Keyword Research
Always include relevant keywords in your content. Keywords should be used naturally, not stuffed into the content so much that they detract from the main idea or distract the reader. It’s important to use keywords throughout the content, like the meta description, the page title, the URL, headers, and a few times throughout the piece.
You can utilize tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to conduct keyword research. These sites display what keywords competitors are using, how frequently people search for keywords, how expensive the term is for pay-per-click ads, related keywords, and much more useful data to help with keyword planning.
Hiring an SEO agency is always an option, as well, as they can offer valuable insights and perform audits to identify issues that may be keeping your site from being shown in search engines.
2. Create Memorable Content
It’s not enough just to post content; you need to create content that’s memorable and cuts through the noise. In fact, useful and memorable content is one of the top ways to increase website traffic.
People turn to Google for specific, complete, and correct answers to their questions, and your material should be there to supply them. In fact, websites with blog content have 434 percent more pages indexed by search engines than those without.
Furthermore, sites that publish more than 16 articles per month receive roughly 3.5 times the amount of traffic as sites that publish zero to four articles per month.
The bottom line is that when you care about the content you produce, post regularly, and research what your audience wants to see, web traffic should improve.
3. Write Guest Posts
Guest posting for other websites is an effective way to generate backlinks, boost referral traffic, and increase search engine results page (SERP) rankings. You should always thoroughly research websites within your industry to pitch.
First, look at a website’s content and make sure it’s high quality, check its domain authority, and study its guest posting guidelines. Also, ask the publication if they’ll promote the post on social media and if they’ll tag you.
4. Keep Active Social Media Pages
Social media is huge for attracting visitors. Here are some ways it should be used to increase website traffic:
- Post content (blogs, e-books, white papers, infographics, videos, etc.) across your social media platforms
- Interact with followers by replying to them, reposting their content and tagging them
- Use relevant hashtags
- Update the link in your bio to promote new content when it comes out
- Change a cover photo to promote new content
- Tag influencers who may be interested in the content
- Include enticing information from the content to encourage people to click the link to it
- Reply to other people looking for answers with links to your content
5. Use Advertising to Increase Website Traffic
Paid search, social networking, and display ads can all be effective ways to drive visitors to your website. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages — for example, users can block display advertising, and the average cost per click for Google Ads on the search network is between $1 and $2 per click — so it’s critical to define budgets and goals before plowing money into it.
When it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) ads, for example, it’s crucial to start with just one campaign and a few different ad groups that contain the terms you want to target the most. Once your ads are up and running, monitor how audiences respond to various terms.
Perhaps one term merely resulted in impressions and did not improve website traffic, whilst another keyword resulted in clicks and increased website traffic.
6. Send Email Newsletters
Promoting content through email newsletters is an effective way to increase website traffic. Here are a few email marketing best practices:
- In the subject line and body of the email, provide appealing information from the material.
- Subscribers can click a link or a button to read more of the material.
- Check to see if your emails are mobile-friendly. Because mobile devices account for 46% of all email openings, links should be easily visible.
- Make use of personalisation techniques by including the subscriber’s name.
- Use well-designed themes to make the email aesthetically appealing.
- A/B test different versions of emails to discover which ones get more opens and clicks.
7. Influencer Outreach
Industry influencers are eager to share content that their followers will love. Businesses can connect with influencers in a few ways, including:
- If your piece mentions the influencer’s content or research, mention them in a social media post.
- Request an interview/Q&A with the influencer, then tag or email the influencer when the content is published.
- They’ll almost certainly share your stuff with their followers.When marketing the piece on social media, do a round-up with many influencers (e.g., “10 Experts Predict Small Business Trends for 2020”) and tag each of the participants.
- Influencers can be paid to publish sponsored content on their social media profiles.
If you’re not sure where to start, try using tools like HypeAuditor and BuzzSumo to find the right influencers in your industry, or reach out to a digital marketing agency who can do influencer outreach for you.
8. Create a Helpful Industry Tool or Content
Giving potential customers something useful is a terrific approach to increase traffic. For example, at our content marketing agency, we designed a free editorial calendar template that anyone could use. We wanted to provide marketers with a tool to help them create and distribute content more efficiently.
Create a variety of tools and content that will benefit people in your sector, and then make them available for free on their websites. You may maximise your returns and find new leads by publishing gated content/tools (content and tools in exchange for the user’s contact information).
Promoting the content/tools on relevant LinkedIn groups or forums where people in the industry connect is another strategy to enhance website traffic.
9. Submit Press Releases to Influential Publications
When businesses create press releases to promote themselves or their clients, they shouldn’t just place them on a press release syndication website and wait to see what happens.
They need to actively push the release and send it to influential websites and publications in their industries.
When we want to announce our client’s good news, we send it to industry blogs and publications that their audience reads. As a result, we can collect dozens of new leads and boost referral traffic for the client.
10. Exchange Backlinks
With so many businesses trying to increase website traffic, there are many opportunities for backlink exchanges. Reach out to relevant sites and offer your content as an additional resource to include in one of the sites’ posts.
To add an extra incentive, you can offer a mutually-beneficial backlink exchange, offering to add one of their links to a post of yours as well.
That’s exactly what we did for one of our clients, Rainbow Muffler & Brake. We created a blog post for them called, “The Essential Road Trip Checklist for Your Car.” We then found relevant websites through Pitchbox and reached out to those sites to see if they wanted to promote our post.
The website WheelScene agreed to a backlink and social media post exchange, which led to a 23,245% increase in views! If businesses find the right partner for their backlink exchange, they can score big.
Increasing Website Traffic Today
By taking these steps, businesses can expect to see an increase in website traffic over time. While many of these tactics can provide instant gratification, others will take more time and patience. Keep pushing forward by trying a variety of methods and analyzing the results.