Top ways to get more traffic to your website
Whether you have just started a website to earn money online, have an eCommerce business, or just enjoy blogging – traffic should be important for you.
The truth is – just having a website isn’t enough. You need to tell people about your site, and you need them to be able to find it.
In this post, we’re going to show you how to drive more traffic to your website. We’ve separated the different methods into a couple of categories – SEO, Technical, Paid Advertisement, Social Media, and Content.
All of the methods listed below actually work, but that doesn’t mean you need to immediately implement them all.
Instead, see which of the ways you were neglecting thus far and could be easily applied to your website.
Good luck!
Paid Advertisement
If you’ve got a decent budget you can spend on marketing, you can pay for digital advertising and get instant results in traffic.
There are a couple of different platforms and ways to advertise your website:
1. Social media
A popular choice for getting your content in front of the global population is advertising on social media networks.
you can advertise on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. Try aiming to advertise on the platform that your target audience mostly uses.
As long as your offer is enticing enough, and you can convert that traffic into sales with a great sales page or free offer, then you can scale this marketing initiative out infinitely to drive nearly unlimited sales.
2. Google
With Google Ads, you pay to have your website (usually a landing page) show up at the top of search results for particular keywords. When a query is entered using those keywords, Google looks at all accounts bidding on those keywords and will display and rank the paid results according to the quality and relevance of the advertisement.
Paid search results show up first, at the very top of the results pages. This type of exposure is a great way to generate more traffic to your website by qualified visitors. Furthermore, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
You can also select preferences through the Google Ads platform so that your business shows up at the top of Google Maps search results.
3. Retargeting ads
Retargeting ads focus on people who’ve already visited your site and have left for whatever reason without completing a sale. This involves the usage of a conversion pixel for purchases and it’s a great way to reach people who’ve already been to your site and aggressively market to them after they’ve left.
4. Ad networks
If you’re a publisher or blogger that also tries to monetize your website, you’re probably familiar with ad networks.
While displaying ads on your website is a great way to monetize it, you won’t make a decent revenue unless you actually get a significant amount of traffic to your website.
A great solution is to use the ad networks as an advertiser as well as a publisher! This way you’ll be getting more exposure and potentially increasing your earnings in the long run.
For example, If you are a fitness blogger and your ad appears on a webpage about athletic gear, your ad is likely to drive relevant traffic to your site.
Social Media
Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around and plays a role in driving traffic to your website.
Use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote blog posts and other useful pages on your website. This way you can turn your social media followers into website visitors, and draw traffic from their networks if you post shareable content.
If you’re not using social media to its full potential because you’re short on time, try a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.
These types of tools will help you schedule posts ahead of time for multiple social media sites, which allows you to handle your social media marketing all at once. Not only does this reduce your workload – it makes it easier for you to create a social media marketing plan and stick to it.
5. Answer questions on Quora
Quora is a great medium for driving traffic to your site. Answer questions on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content on your site or blog.
However, don’t use this platform to spam, or your answers will be blocked. Ensure that your answers are detailed and that you know what you’re talking about.
6. Comment on relevant subreddits
The Reddit community has the potential to drive a huge amount of traffic to your website and become a great source of leads for your business.
Topics on Reddit are quite varied; you can find subreddits with news, science, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, image-sharing, and much more. And just to make things clear, subreddits are like topic categories.
Try to be active on subreddits relevant to your niche, comment, and share useful information to gain other Redditors’ trust and potentially drive them to your website.
7. Create YouTube videos
YouTube is a great resource for driving free organic traffic to your website. In fact, it’s the second most popular search engine in the world, after Google of course.
This means exposure on YouTube could be huge for your website. Create useful tutorials and videos that add an immense amount of value and be sure to link to your content through the description.
It’s free to be active in online groups and on websites that are relevant to your business and community — and it helps you obtain more traffic.
- Instagram – Instagram is a wildly popular platform for sharing photos and connecting with others from around the world, especially younger audiences. You can use Instagram to create engagement and direct followers to your site.
- Facebook – Facebook is an incredibly strong platform. 43% of adults in the US get their news from Facebook. This means Facebook has the potential to reach a major amount of people, as long as you can get their interest. You should also join some Facebook groups related to your niche and share your content inside them.
- Twitter – Lots of people use Twitter, in fact roughly 46% of Twitter users log into the platform every single day. If you aren’t promoting your blog on Twitter, you’re missing out on opportunities to let people know about your content. Driving traffic to your blog can be almost as important as the writing itself. If you use Twitter effectively, it can drive tons of traffic back to your website. But just tweeting the title of your blog post now and then with a link back to your site won’t work.
- Linkedin – LinkedIn’s publishing platform is a great method for marketing the content that’s already on your website. Publish a unique, high-quality post on LinkedIn that delivers an enormous amount of value and ensure that you link that content to anchor content on your blog or website. If you can get even normal posts to go viral on LinkedIn, you’ll certainly be getting lots more traffic and attention.
9. Email marketing
You can also boost traffic to your website by implementing email marketing. Email marketing is email outreach to your target audience. This can be conducted in a variety of ways, such as:
- Welcoming new subscribers
- Informing customers of new products and updates
- Announcing promotional deals
- Providing educational materials
So long as your email copy is compelling enough, email marketing can easily draw users to check out and explore your website further. Although you’ll have to handle drafting the emails, services like MailChimp and Constant Contact make the formatting and design process a breeze.
Boost Traffic with SEO
10. Perform on-page SEO
Investing time in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be very rewarding in the long run. Following some SEO best practices, content will be rated higher on search engines, making it easier for new visitors to reach your site.
If you are a blogger using WordPress, try using Yoast SEO. This plugin will tell you exactly what changes you need to make to your content to optimize it for better search engine rankings.
Some of Yoast SEO’s features include telling Google exactly what your page is about, optimizing for keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords, and all word forms, improving the readability of your posts and pages, and much more.
For example, Yoast SEO may suggest incorporating more or less of your keywords into your posts, changing the meta-description, and breaking up paragraphs. All inside of your WordPress editor.
11. Target long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords usually consist of 3+ words per phrase. These types of keywords are very specific to the topic you’re discussing.
Given that these keywords are very specific, they have less competition than generic, broad keywords, making them easier to rank for on search engines.
This is an insane benefit since the higher you rank the more likely you are to get traffic.
So, how to find long-tail keywords?
- Google gives lots of long-tail keywords suggestions. When you search for your main keywords, google suggests related searches at the bottom of the page. These suggestions can make for wonderful long-tail keywords.
- Google autocomplete is another place to find long-tail keywords. Just start typing your main keywords and suggestions will pop up.
- Google’s “People also ask”:
- Long-tail keywords search tools like KW Finder and Moz
12. Internal linking
Interlinks are links that point from one page on your site to another page on the same site.
By incorporating more internal links, visitors will be better able to navigate your website.
Moreover, internal links help search engines like Google understand which pages make up your website’s most important content. Which again, helps boost the ratings and credibility of those pieces of content.
13. Guest post on other websites
Creating guest posts for other people’s websites may sound excessive, after all, you already have to worry about creating content for your own website, why spend time on other people’s?
Well, guest posts can be just as beneficial as publishing new content for your website! Guest posts get your name out there to other audiences, expanding the reach you would have otherwise had.
That doesn’t mean you should guest post for websites in a completely different niche. Aim for posting on sites in the same or a related industry, as this will direct the most relevant traffic your way.
14. Get guest posts on your website
Similarly, having others write for your blog can also cause a traffic boost given that guest contributors typically promote their work to their followers.
Just make sure that the posts you publish on your website are of good quality, don’t accept just anyone.
15. Exchange links
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Backlinks from complementary businesses or industry influencers will not only get your business in front of a larger audience but also drive qualified traffic to your website.
You can try reaching out to relevant websites in your niche and offer them to link to your content as a resource or a recommendation. It may take a lot of time and effort to cold reach in this way, but it could really help boost your website’s rankings and bring more organic traffic.
Technical
Fast websites are successful websites. According to BigCommerce, A one-second delay in page load time has been shown to cause a 7 percent loss in conversion and 11 percent fewer page views.
In addition, faster websites will also rank higher on search engines = more traffic = more monetization value.
16. Perform a speed check
If your site takes forever to load, your bounce rate will be sky-high. Make sure that your pages are as technically optimized as possible, including image file sizes, page structure, and the functionality of third-party plugins. The faster your site loads, the better.
You can use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your website loads. The tool also analyzes possible culprits that may be slowing down your site and offers suggestions on how to fix them.
17. Caching
Page caching is another method that can help you to improve the load time of your web pages, and as a result, optimize your site for the search engines. As previously mentioned, page load time can significantly impact your user experience and your site’s ability to monetize.
What is caching? Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page to avoid potentially time-consuming queries to your database. Cached pages are created when search engine companies like Google store a “back-up” version of your page which can be served up to a user in place of the most recent version of your page.
The benefit for the user of viewing a cached version of the page is that they can get the information they’re looking for quicker. In fact, page caching can lower server load by up to 80%.
18. Compress and formatting images
Images make any content more interesting and appealing by helping readers understand your content better. Plus, images add value to your SEO efforts by increasing user engagement and accessibility of your website.
There are many good next-gen image format options, including JPEG, PNG, GIF. Each has its own benefits and downsides but all of these types generally load faster than older image formats.
In addition, you can try and size images down whenever possible, as bigger images take longer to load
19. WordPress users – choose a light theme
This tip is for those using WordPress for their website. Whenever possible, try going for a lightweight theme.
Your WordPress theme is your site’s foundation, which means it plays a big role in how quickly your site loads. There are many resources and lists online listing popular lightweight themes. Here are a few:
- aThemes – 7 Best Free Lightweight WordPress Themes 2021
- Web Design – Best Lightweight Themes for WordPress 2021
- Kinsta – 11 Fastest WordPress Themes Ranked (Based on Testing)
Content Optimization
It doesn’t matter what type of website you have, if you want to bring in steady traffic, you need to have good content. This is especially important for bloggers, whose websites are content-heavy.
If your content doesn’t make people stay on your website, you’re losing opportunities to monetize.
Here are a couple of key ideas you can follow and implement into your site to make your content more engaging:
20. Convert your written content into other media forms
Visual social media is on the rise. Slideshare, YouTube videos, tutorials, ebooks, online courses – you name it!
The top social media platforms specialize in visuals. For example, Google Insight reveals that on mobile alone, YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any broadcast or cable network. Pinterest has 200 million active visitors per month, and of all those Pinners 93% use it to plan purchases. Instagram alone has 1 billion users. These are powerful presences that are all geared towards visual content.
It can be helpful to take some of your existing content and turn it into visual form.
21. Use powerful headlines
The headline of your content is the first thing visitors see.
According to copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people on average will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of your title, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.
That’s why when it comes to writing headlines, you want to grab your prospect’s attention fast. The easiest way to do this is by presenting the promise right away.
22. Include visuals in your written posts
When it comes to engagement for content, visual content provides an advantage that written content falls short of. Photos and videos get shared much more often than written content and are a great way to increase website traffic. For one, we can see an image and interpret it in the blink of an eye.
In a study, researchers demonstrated 80% higher readership rates when content used visuals like charts, graphs, color design and images.
Types of visual content to incorporate on your websites include:
- Infographics
Infographics are not only aesthetically pleasing, but they also allow us to provide relevant data in a user-friendly way.
According to Demand Gen Report, Infographics can help boost the traffic to your site by up to 12%.
- Videos
Videos are important for SEO and wider digital marketing success. Studies show that web pages with videos have a significantly higher average time on site than those without videos.
Adding videos to your website and through your content will allow you to capture visitor’s attention and keep them engaged longer, drive branding and build trust.
- Images
Pictures capture attention better than a slogan or headline. Pictures tell a thousand words, which makes them perfect when you aim to capture someone’s attention and keep them engaged and on your website.
- Charts and Graphs
According to QuickSprout, articles with data-driven visuals rank fourth in shareable formats. The same research shows that blog posts with graphs and charts receive more trackbacks – 258% more than blog posts with other types of images.
Interactive charts are also a great option to try, as visitors can interact with them and spend more time on your site.
Some of the best interactive charts libraries include:
- Screenshots
In general, articles that used screenshots didn’t receive as many social shares as articles with stock photography did.
However, screenshots are great to use when describing a product, pointing things out, or trying to explain and guide readers. That’ll guarantee the readers find your content
more helpful as opposed to resources without screenshots.
For example, in our guide on adding PurpleAds to your WordPress site, we used screenshots to easily convert to the readers exactly where and in what order they can find the floating banner’s code:
Try following these tips to make sure you use visuals the right way:
- Pay attention to the choice of its location – everything should look coherently and fit the context.
- Support images with descriptions – text without an image doesn’t attract, while an image without text can be unclear.
- Try to refrain from using cliched stock photos. They have their place, but using original images, or buying quality images from a good source is best.
23. Write an intro that hooks the reader
24. Be engaging
People often want to read content that teaches them something. Some of the most popular and engaging pieces of content you can start including in your site to bring more traffic are:
- List Posts
- How-To
- Success Stories
- Industry News
Conclusion
In this post, we have shared tactics to help drive traffic to your website. These strategies are either free or require a small budget for promotion.
Just remember that traffic numbers are important, though they alone do not mean everything. You’ve also got to account for the quality of your traffic. So make sure you’re trying to reach an audience that actually has an interest in your niche.
With that, best of luck implementing some of these strategies! With enough effort put in, you’re sure to see results.