Social Media Marketing
Here’s the deal: Your products won’t sell themselves — no matter how well-developed they are — if consumers don’t know about them. One of the most effective mediums to get your products or services in front of your target audience is having a website.
While it’s not exactly accurate to think of websites as tools that automatically turn visitors into customers. To facilitate the process, you should first generate traffic to your website.
Most modern-day consumers spend a lot of time online, browsing the web or social media. But how to reach out to them and establish a direct connection? In this blog post, you’ll find 33 different ways to increase website traffic. Whether you’re looking for free or paid options, you’ll find them in this extensive list.
Let’s get started!
- What is Quality Website Traffic?
- 33 Ways to Increase Website Traffic
What is Quality Website Traffic?
Some SaaS businesses invest money, sweat, and tears into boosting their website traffic but don’t see significant improvement in revenue. Why is that? This scenario occurs for a simple reason — not all website traffic is created equal, and it’s a very tricky truth to come to terms with.
If at any point you’ve successfully boosted the traffic to your website, but your sales haven’t reflected it, there’s a good chance you have targeted the wrong audience.
Let’s look at a quick example: you have a sustainable business that sells fully natural, say, skincare products. Being confident in the value your brand provides, you promote your products to a wide audience on Facebook or Instagram. You keep investing more in your social media ad campaigns but hardly see any returns. Why?
In this scenario, you’ve overlooked one critical factor: the majority of people can’t afford highly organic products, as those tend to cost more than massively produced items that contain harmful chemicals.
By no means does this mean that you have to neglect your sustainable business and participate in damaging people’s health and the environment? What it indicates is that you should simply target a different demographic — one that, perhaps, earns a slightly higher income.
More website traffic doesn’t always equate to more conversions, but with the right digital marketing campaigns, you can have both: more visitors and highly qualified leads. So without further ado, let’s begin examining the best ways to increase website traffic in 2022.
33 Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Keep Your Google Business Profile Up to Date
Google gives a lot of importance to business profiles and how fully they’re completed. And as the largest search engine with 92.26% of the market share worldwide, Google can direct a lot of organic traffic to your website. Local SEO is especially helpful for local small business websites, as it focuses on the visibility of a website in local search results.
Source: Google My Business
One of the best free ways to drive website traffic through Google is to build a strong Google My Business profile. Google examines all details of a business to find the perfect match for a search query.
This is why you should make sure to fill in all the fields on your profile: location, website, contact number, category, images, working hours, answers to FAQ, etc. Online reviews of your business will also increase your credibility.
Find Niche Online Directories
To gain more website traffic, get your business listed on online directories and review sites. Aside from the popular platforms such as Yelp, Yahoo, and Bing Places, it’s important to have a presence in directories that specialize in your industry. This is a great way to attract highly qualified traffic that’s more likely to be converted.
Be Active on Forums
Forums are the perfect place to find communities forged around a mutual topic of interest. Quora, Reddit, and Yahoo Answers have untapped groups of consumers that could become your future leads.
Source: Quora
Advertising on these forums is quite tricky, however. Users have a very low tolerance for promotional content and spammy links.
The solution to this is to work toward building a bond with these communities by offering them valuable, informative content before you start promoting your brand.
Create Videos and Share Online
People don’t always have the time or patience to read text, and they’d prefer to consume the same information through a video. Video has been popularized by Millenials and even more so by Gen Z for one simple reason — it’s an easier way to digest information.
Not only is video easy to understand, but it’s also great for search engine optimization. Statistics show that people spend up to 88% more time on websites that have videos. This increases time on page, which search engines see as an indicator that people enjoy the site’s content and push the website up the results pages.
Start a Blog and Share Educational Content
Blogging is perhaps the most intuitive way of driving organic traffic to your website. With a large number of blogs competing for the same traffic, it’s vital to develop a clever blog content strategy to cut through the noise.
There’s no one-size-fits-all for a blog post — each industry, and even each topic within the industry can have its unique requirements for blog posts. Look at successful blogs in your sphere and experiment with different types of content to find the optimal length, language, approach, and format for each blog post you create. No matter what type of content you choose, make sure to keep it 100% unique by checking it with the free plagiarism checker.
Know Your Target Audience
One of the most valuable pieces of advice for those creating online content is to have a set target in mind. Don’t write just for the sake of writing. Know who you’re writing for, what goal you’re aiming for, and how exactly you plan to achieve it.
Define your target audience — in this case, the group of readers you want to connect to. Create content tailored to their needs and make it specific, thorough, and relevant.
Create Landing Pages
If you still haven’t taken advantage of the enormous benefits landing pages have to offer, you should start now. A landing page is a specific web page dedicated to one particular offer, product, or campaign you have. These pages are conversion-optimized, concise, sharp, and focus on one goal — e.g., getting the user to download a template or sign up for a newsletter.
Because they’re so search-engine-friendly and effective, landing pages increase website traffic and bring a narrowly targeted audience to your website.
Learn On-Page SEO
On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing website pages for search engines to attain higher ranking and more website traffic. On-page SEO consists of well-structured content, meta tags, title tags, optimized images, internal links, and URLs. Make sure all your important web pages, such as landing pages, the home page, and products pages, are optimized, as those are the main drivers of your online traffic. You can go ahead and find those pages with a website page counter.
Keep Your Content Fresh
One of the key factors algorithms consider when ranking web pages is content freshness. The more frequently a website is updated, the more relevant it appears in Google’s eyes. Whether it’s a blog post, landing page, or a customer testimonial page, keep refreshing it with new data, descriptions, reviews, etc.
This signals search engines that there’s constant activity on the page, which will work in your favor when it’s time for page indexing.
Source: Moz
Aim for Long-Tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords typically attract more traffic but are also tougher to compete for. While a short-tail keyword like “freelance photographer” will have a higher volume than its long-tail peer “freelance photographer NYC,” the latter will give you a better chance to rank first and will bring more qualified traffic. To check your ranking, you can make use of any online rank tracker tool.
Do Off-Page SEO
A backlink is a link from another domain to yours, and by learning to work with backlinks, you’ll increase your website traffic and authority. It’s better to get backlinks from sources related to your business industry. In addition, make sure that the websites linking to yours are trusted. Spammy links from weak domains will do you more harm than good.
Strengthen Internal Linking
Your site’s link profile includes both external and internal links. Strong internal linking helps your website in the following ways:
- Indicates connection between pages — Links connect the topics and pages on your site, helping search engines crawl and rank your website with ease.
- Improves site navigation — Internal links make it easy to jump from one of your pages to another, enhancing your website navigation.
- Increases time on site — Website visitors will be more likely to check out other pages on your website and spend more time on it.
Write Clickable Titles
Titles are where the user’s attention lands before they decide to visit a page. A catchy meta title can be the very thing that attracts people’s attention and urges them to click on your link instead of a competitor’s.
Besides being compelling, the titles have to be easy to grasp and relevant to the content they present. Don’t be afraid to brainstorm and come up with dozens of titles for the same piece. It’s a proven way to eventually land on the best possible option.
Offer Exclusive Content for Free
To go a step further with the free value you offer, create original materials that can’t be found anywhere else. This can be a whitepaper, course, ebook, infographic, interview, slideshow presentation, or anything else. You can utilize the free content as a lead magnet to collect contact details from users in exchange for access to the materials.
Examine Competition
Competitor research is not a one-time task but an ongoing one that you should keep returning to in order to stay on top of the competition. Tools like SEMrush, BuzzSumo, Hootsuite can help you throw a glance at your competitors, their strategy, traffic, posts, targeted topics, and more.
Being up to date with what your competition is doing will help you identify popular topics you might be missing out on and find gaps on the market to fill in.
Use Analytics Wisely
You need accurate data on your website performance and audience to assess your current situation and determine how close you are to your goal. Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free tools available, and it’s great for beginners. If you’re looking to upgrade your analytics toolset, find more e-commerce tools here.
Make Your Web Design Responsive
Website traffic is almost equally split between desktop and mobile devices, so you need to make your site fully functional on both device types. Responsive web design ensures your site seamlessly adapts to any screen size and gives users a comfortable browsing experience on any device type.
Large images, text, graphics, and other elements should be cropped and rearranged on smaller screens; otherwise, you might end up with an awkwardly cut header image and indecipherable text.
Optimize Your Website Speed
The speed with which your site loads plays a bigger role in your site’s success than you might imagine. Slow web pages have high drop-off rates, as a lot of web visitors don’t stick around if the site doesn’t load immediately. Google interprets this as a negative user experience and drops the site’s rankings on results pages.
It’s crucial to run a website audit to determine what might be slowing down your site’s performance. There are numerous useful tools to help you with this — Page Speed Insights, Google Search Console, Semrush Website Audit, GTmetrix, and others.
Source: Page Speed Insights
Place Google Ads
The quickest way to get your website at the top of search results is through Google Ads. Be sure to pick the right keywords that are most relevant to your content, as Google considers the quality and relevance of the web page when indexing paid search results. If done right, your website will come at the very top of a relevant search query and get more exposure for your content with the help of Google ads.
Be Active on Social Media
Social media marketing can be used for a lot more than distributing ads. In fact, staying active on social channels is a free and proven way to achieve long-lasting results. Develop your social media profiles with on-brand profile and cover photos, engaging bios, completed About sections, and regular posts.
Provide a link to your website in your social media bios and find opportunities to link back to your site with your social media posts. Try to keep your channels engaging with interactive, diverse content such as Instagram reels, polls, videos, games, etc.
Keep Posting Consistently
Irregular activity on social media doesn’t produce regular results. Consistency is one of the most vital factors in social media marketing, so if you’re determined to grow your audience on these networks, keep posting consistently.
Find a publishing schedule you can realistically keep up with, whether it’s twice a day or twice a week. An editorial calendar will help you plan and keep track of your posting timetable as well as synchronize your activity across multiple channels.
Advertise on Social Media
If you don’t mind spending a bit of money to attract traffic to your website, social media ads are another effective means to achieve it. You can advertise on major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn. Each of these channels has its own unique user base, requirements, popular topics, etc.
First and foremost, choose the right platform(s) to advertise on based on where your audience is most active. Then, hyper-target your ads for a specific user segment to increase the effectiveness of your ads.
Follow Trends
Trends swiftly come and go, but you can use them to gain new followers if you learn to catch the right wave. The trend could be a popular challenge that customers and businesses in your field are participating in or a particular topic that’s widely discussed. Google Trends is a free tool you can use to find trending topics across different regions and years.
Boost Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn is the world’s most influential professional platform that gives businesses various opportunities to build and extend their following. As a part of your LinkedIn lead generation campaign, you can repurpose your website content as LinkedIn posts to reach a new audience and lead them back to your site. Use LinkedIn video to diversify your content and get prioritized by the algorithm.
You can manage your account manually or simply turn to LinkedIn automation tools to save time. A robust LinkedIn profile will strengthen your company’s online reputation, so don’t let this opportunity slide.
Try YouTube Marketing
YouTube is another powerful driver of website traffic that not many companies utilize. Essentially, there are three main ways of doing YouTube marketing: creating your own content, promoting your brand through partnerships and ads, and doing both simultaneously.
For those who have the budget, collaborating with YouTubers and placing ads on the platform is a great strategy to tap into new markets. But if you’re looking for a more hands-on approach, creating and growing your own YouTube channel is the way to go.
Keep in mind that YouTube success isn’t built overnight, and you’ll have to be patient with learning the game of the YouTube algorithm.
Write Guest Articles
Invite an influential figure in your industry to write a guest post or do an interview for your blog, which then will be promoted to attract the attention of their followers. The alternative option is to write guest posts yourself for an authoritative platform and get a backlink to your website to drive referral traffic. Either way, you’ll be gaining access to an untapped audience through sources that your targeted audience trusts.
Build Your Email List
After establishing contact with a client, it’s equally as important to keep nurturing the connection. Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to do so. Regular email newsletters sent from an email marketing CRM foster top-of-mind awareness and customer loyalty, as your clients see that you’re putting in a constant effort to provide value to them.
Of course, you have to be mindful not to spam your subscribers with too much or the wrong type of content. You can use behavior data to understand your clients better and send out offers and news that will interest them. Use email subject lines that are more clickable and can ensure higher open rates. Don’t forget to include relevant links and CTA buttons that take the user to your website.
Consider Starting a Podcast
Podcasts are booming in popularity! It seems in our fast-paced world, people are pushed to multitask more than ever — and that’s where podcasts shine. The enormous army of podcast listeners is an audience you shouldn’t overlook.
You can start your own or star in others’ to direct more people to your website. Be sure to give a verbal shout-out to your site in the podcast and put your website link in the description.
Create Shareable Content
Intuitive, we know, but in order to maximize your website traffic, you need to make your web content easily shareable.
Add social share buttons to your blog posts, products, services, videos, and any other piece of information you’d want visitors to share. Social shares are key to generating more traffic and increasing social proof.
Try Influencer Marketing
We already talked about guest blogging and working with YouTubers, but there’s a whole lot more to influencer marketing that you can use to your advantage. With the rapid rise of influencer marketing and brand sponsorships, users have become more selective of the influencers they trust.
It’s a better approach to partner with niche influencers that have a smaller but more loyal follower base. This way, even sponsored posts will look more natural and authentic due to the fact that they’re targeted at a specific audience.
Pitch Though a Press Release
Share your exciting news or product launch through a press release to capture the attention of the public. You can collaborate with popular publications in your industry and use their platforms to drive more website traffic. HARO is an excellent platform that connects sources with journalists, helping both parties create influential press releases.
Source: HARO
Create Excitement With Contests and Giveaways
Create a strong incentive for users to come back to your website with contests, giveaways, and other fun projects. These types of campaigns tend to generate a big hype around the brand and are very likely to pique people’s interest. Most contests require participants to tag friends and share the link, which leads to more exposure and website traffic.
Retarget Your Audience
You can reach an audience you’ve previously established contact with through retargeting ads. Considering the importance of repetition and follow-ups in building brand awareness, retargeting will give you a second (and better) chance to win over an audience. User behavior data will once again come to your help, allowing for a personalized approach to each customer.
Summing Up
There you have 33 of the most reliable ways to drive more traffic to your website. Keep in mind that more website traffic doesn’t always mean more sales and revenue. Be intentional with the website traffic you bring in. Set your goals beforehand and go for the tactics that align with your overall strategy and drive traffic to your website that is qualified to convert.
