Top 40 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Top 40 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Spoiler alert: without content, you won’t get more website traffic. So if you’re going to skip this section, go for it! I’ll see you skip backups in 10 seconds because you realize you can’t do any other strategy without quality content.

Have a business blog

First, your business needs a blog where you can regularly publish useful long-form content on your website. This is non-negotiable.  

• Blogging companies get a 97% increase in website links.  
• Businesses with blogs get 55% more website visitors than businesses without blogs.
• Marketers with blogs are 13 times more likely to generate a positive ROI.

How to Increase Website Traffic – Blog Statistics

The more value you offer on your website, the more reasons people will visit it. Most of the strategies in this article (or any article on the subject) would be difficult to accomplish without a blog.

Follow the evergreen theme

While news and trending topics can give you a traffic boost in the short term, they’re not worth the time and effort. Create content around topics that are always of interest to your audience. These evergreen posts accumulate traffic and links over time, especially if you refresh them regularly (more on that later).

Write irresistible headlines

The title is one of the most important parts of the content. Studies show that an effective blog title can increase traffic by 500%. Even the most comprehensive blog post won’t be read without an engaging headline. Master the art of headline writing so readers can choose your posts on the SERPs.

How to Increase Website Traffic – Irresistible Headline Examples

In these 88 headline examples, there are (many) more from where.

Invite others to blog on your site

Not only do guest authors diversify your topics and perspectives, but they also want to share the article with their network and link to it on their site, which can bring new readers to your site.

Make sure you only post high-quality original content without spam links (so you don’t get penalized by Google and lose traffic). A standard set of guest posting guidelines can help with this and keep your content on-brand.

Create awesome visual effects

Use design tools like Canva to illustrate concepts, visualize data, and recreate diagrams within your brand. When other websites use your images, they link back to yours.

Additionally, Google will show more images in regular search results, giving you more opportunities to rank and increase the appeal of your results (and thus your CTR).

Merge Videos

Text-based content is all good, but video can attract more visitors and keep them engaged. Here are some ways to use video to get more traffic to your website:

• Embed videos into your blog posts so they can appear in video search results
•     Do YouTube SEO to rank higher on YouTube, then add a link to your site in the video description.
•     Add call-to-action buttons directly to your videos to send people to your website.

Has a resource center

Videos and blog posts aren’t the only type of content you should create to educate your audience and build trust. Don’t forget infographics, downloadable guides, templates, webinars, and more.

As you create these lead magnets and use them elsewhere on the web, collect them on the resources page. The library of multimedia content is sure to attract visitors who will come back to your website again and again.

How to increase website traffic with SEO

So there is a problem with all the strategies above. If no one can find them, they won’t drive traffic to your site. Since Google’s homepage captures 71% of search traffic clicks, you need an SEO strategy.

SEO is the practice of optimizing a website for search engines (hence search engine optimization) so it can be more visible in search results for relevant queries. SEO strategy is another animal entirely, but here are the SEO basics.

Target keyword…

Keywords are words and phrases that people enter into search engines, and as you can imagine, some keywords get more searches than others.

Using a keyword research tool, you can see that, for example, the keyword “how to increase website engagement” only gets about 10 searches per month, while how to increase website traffic gets 300 searches.

How to Increase Website Traffic – Keyword Volume

The latter is a better blog post topic if you want traffic.

Try WordStream’s free keyword tool to find traffic-driving keywords for your website.

… long tail keywords

So the higher the search volume, the higher the traffic potential, right? Not so fast. Many ultra-high volume keywords are also very broad and difficult to rank for (eg ‘website’ has a volume of 143,000).

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and will drive the most relevant traffic to your website.

Strategically place keywords

This is the foundation of on-page SEO – where you can optimize your content so that search engines can understand what it’s about and rank it in relevant searches. Be sure to place your target keywords in:  

• title tag (meta title)
• H1 heading
• At least two H2 headers
• naturally in the body
• first 100 words
• Image filename and alt text
• meta description

Optimize Your SERP Appearance

It is not enough to include keywords in meta descriptions and meta titles. You need to optimize these important messages to increase their appeal on the SERPs and encourage more organic clicks.  

Meta description: Keep it between 155-165 characters indicate the value readers will get from the post, and make it actionable.  

Meta title: Make this 60 characters or less valuable, keywords near the beginning, and indicate some value or benefit.

Internal link

When creating and publishing content, be sure to include at least 1-3 links on this page to other pages on your site. This will help drive traffic to those pages and (a) keep visitors on your site longer, (b) get them to view more pages on your site, and (c) get them Get more value from your website – all of which can improve your rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

Are you missing any SEO opportunities? Find out instantly with the free LOCALiQ website scorer.

Improve page speed

Ever find yourself waiting 30 seconds for a webpage to load? Neither do I. If your website takes forever to load, your bounce rate will be very high. Speed ​​has always been a ranking factor, but now even more so as the page experience has been updated. Make sure your pages are as technically optimized as possible, including image file size, page structure, and the functionality of third-party plugins. The faster your website loads, the better.

Google’s PageSpeed ​​Insights tool will score your site’s performance and provide recommendations for improving your core web vitality and more. use it!

Make your website responsive

Today, there’s more traffic on mobile than desktop, so if you let your visitors pinch and scroll on your site, you’re telling them to go somewhere else. Even if you have a basic website, you still need to make sure it can be easily accessed and viewed on a variety of devices, including small smartphones.

To optimize every aspect of your website, check out our ultimate website audit checklist (with Epic 6-Tab Google Sheet).

Implement Pattern Marking

Implementing Schema markup (or other microdata formats) won’t necessarily increase traffic to your site by itself, but it will make it easier for search engine bots to find and index your pages. Another benefit of using an SEO framework is that it produces better rich site snippets, which in turn increase click-through rates.

How to Get More Website Traffic – View Schema Markup

Even the most evergreen content loses luster over time, and content freshness is a ranking factor. Even if your post is still ranking on the first page of Google, you’ll be surprised by the effect of the content refresh. A new posting date on the SERPs can significantly increase CTR and boost several positions, which can lead to a surge in traffic.

But you can’t just change a few sentences and then update the publication date on the post. Google knows much more than that. Here are some strategies, taken from my post on how to get more traffic from evergreen content:

• Update and/or add new information and statistics.
• Replace outdated visuals and/or create new visuals to illustrate concepts.
• Add new links to updated resources.
• Fix broken links and images.
• Add new keywords from Search Console’s query report (more on this later).
• Adjust your meta title and meta description.
• Get backlinks

One of the most influential Google ranking factors is the quantity and quality of links to your website. The more links you get from trusted sites with high domain authority, the more you increase your domain authority. The higher your DA, the higher your ranking and the higher your traffic — not to mention any traffic you get from the link itself.

How to Increase Traffic to Your Website – Relevance of Backlinks to Traffic

There are several effective link-building strategies, but here are just a few:

   Contact reliable sites and offer to write a guest post where you can link to your site body or your author bio.

    Use SEO tools to find broken links on other sites and offer yours as a replacement.

   Create original, high-quality content, link only.

How to use social media to increase website traffic

Social media marketing has several benefits – one of which is referral traffic to your website. Here are some ways to turn these massive platforms into traffic generators for your website.

Promote your content on social media

It’s not enough to just make great content and hope people find it. Promote your content to your audience on the most popular social media channels. Twitter is ideal for short, quick (and tempting) links, while Google Business Posts can help your site appear in local search results. If you’re a B2C product company, you’ll likely find huge traction on image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram.

Not only will this drive traffic to your website, but the more you focus on your content, the more likely you are to get the backlinks we just talked about.

How to Drive Website Traffic – Content Promotion on Instagram Stories

Add hashtags

When sharing your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other hashtag-friendly sites include relevant hashtags to increase the reach of your posts. However, keep hashtags highly specific to the topic of your post so you can be discovered by the people most likely to read, share, and/or link to your content. Our guide to hashtags on Instagram has everything you need.

Target amplifier

Who would amplify this in Rand Fishkin’s excellent work? Why? After posting, he made a great point about creating content for potential amps, not just potential clients. Such amplifiers include:

Industry publications such as trade journals, news sites, big brand blogs, and social influencers.

   External sources of influence, such as journalists from mainstream media and social influencers outside your field.  

Customer Evangelist: Use and recommend your industry followers.  

Potential evangelists: Clients with large networks and followings, or well-read publications

How To Drive More Traffic To Your Website – Amplifier

Publish local LinkedIn articles

The world’s largest professional social network is a valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should publish to LinkedIn regularly. Doing so can increase traffic to your website, drive more visitors to your LinkedIn company page, and improve your reputation in the industry. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel – write a reflective essay on a recent topic or repurpose what you’ve already written about.

Interviews with industry thought leaders

Think interviews are only for the majors? If you ask them, you’ll be surprised how many people are willing to talk to you. Send an email request to interview a thought leader in your industry and post the interview on your blog. Not only will name recognition to increase your credibility and drive traffic to your website, but respondents may also share content, further extending their reach.

Add social sharing buttons

It’s an easy website traffic win. Social share buttons allow readers to share the page they are reading through social networks with just a few clicks.

How to Increase Website Traffic – Social Share Buttons

Another option is the click-to-tweet feature, where you can provide pre-written tweets that readers can post with one click. Check if any of these plugins are available for your website and give it a try.

Research competition

If you’re not using software like BuzzSumo to check what your competitors are doing, you’re at a disadvantage. These services aggregate the social performance of specific sites and content, giving you an at-a-glance look at which topics resonate with your readers and, most importantly, spread across social media. Find out what people are reading (and talking about) and mimic that to drive traffic to your site.

Post at the right time

If you want to dig deeper here, you can also check out your social media analytics to find the times of day and week that are most engaging with your audience, and then share your blog post link. Start with the overall average best time, then dig into the data to improve from there.  

How to Get Website Traffic with Listings

Business directories are a promising source of website traffic, but it’s not enough to just add your website to your listing. It is important to optimize your listings so that they can rank on their respective platforms and be seen by local searchers.

This is where you’ll find the best free listing sites, but the most important thing is your Google Business Profile because an optimized listing can help you rank on Google Maps and Google Search. Facebook is also important because it is the second largest directory. Don’t forget popular sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, and more. To optimize your listing:  

• Fill out each available section.
• Include your business category.
• Keep your information as consistent as possible in the list.
• Get comments and reply to them.
• Add photos.
• Update your information regularly
• How to Increase Website Traffic – Websites in Listing
• An optimized Google Business Profile can place your website at the top of search results.

More ways to increase website traffic

Host a webinar

People love to learn, and webinars are a great way to pass on your wisdom to an eagerly-anticipated audience. Combined with an effective social outreach campaign, webinars are a great way to increase traffic to your website. Send the email a week or so in advance with a “Last Chance to Register” reminder the day before the webinar. Make sure to archive the presentation for later viewing and spread the word about your webinar widely via social media. If you’re wondering how to host a webinar, click the link for some tips.

Build an online community

People want to speak their minds and have opinions on topics that interest them, so building a community on your website is a great way to start conversations and drive traffic. Implement a robust commenting system with third-party solutions like Facebook Comments or Disqus, or create a dedicated forum for visitors to ask questions. However, don’t forget to manage your community to ensure minimum standards of etiquette are met.

Join the forum

On the other hand, join forums and social media groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit, where you can share your knowledge. Include links only where permitted and appropriate, and if you do, don’t just post a link or include a link in every post. And make sure the links point to specific blog posts on related topics. The main goal here is not to drive traffic to your website. This is to add value and build brand awareness. Interested people will search your site on their own, or go to your profile, where they can find your site.

Attend a meeting

No matter what industry you’re in, there are probably at least one or two big conferences and meetings related to your business. It’s a good idea to attend these events – it’s even better to speak at these events. Even a half-way speech engagement is a great way to establish yourself as an industry thought leader and gain significant exposure for your website.

Submit your content to aggregator sites

If you have a blog, it probably has an RSS feed that allows aggregating sites to display the latest content on a particular topic. People use these sites to follow their favorite blogs, news sites, etc., and often opt-in to receive emails with these links. Most aggregators will find your feed on their own, but there are some paid aggregators to consider. Hubspot has a list of content aggregators here to help you get started.

Start email newsletter

Newsletters don’t have to be complicated. At WordStream, we have a weekly newsletter called Performance Tip, where we publish this week’s blog posts. It’s great for people who use their inbox as a reading list, and it’s great for posts on topics your audience might not know to search for. For example, this post about emotional copywriting gets about 1,000 monthly visits from organic searches. But it was a hit on our email list, generating over 4,000 conversations in just a few days.

Google Analytics shows an increase in pageviews sent via email

Just be careful not to bombard your readers with too many emails or too many links in one email. Follow these email marketing tips and test to find out the best content and frequency.

Contact Email Newsletter

Each topic under the sun has a newsletter, many of which receive publicity and contributions. Do some research, find people in your niche who are looking for great content, and offer it. If you get referrals, not only will you get traffic spikes, but you’ll likely find more regular readers (or sign up for your newsletter!) who return to your site regularly.

Create free tools

What’s better than free and useful content? Free and useful tool. Idea generators, assessments, quizzes, calculators, and more. Optimize your landing pages with long-form content and your tool can rank naturally. Make it something your visitors can use over and over and you’ll see tons of traffic come in.

Advertise

OK, so this one isn’t free, but if you play your cards well, your investment can easily pay for itself.

SEO is all good (very, very good), but it takes months of consistent posting to accumulate traffic, builds links, and win Google’s favor. At the same time, you may want to consider paid advertising campaigns. Search, display, and social advertising are all great ways to drive highly targeted visitors to your website at scale. Each paid media channel has its pros and cons, so think carefully about your goals before you use a credit card.

Get Facebook website traffic ad tips here.

A good place to start is Google Ads – check out our tutorial on how to run Google Ads. If you want more traffic to your website to also lead to more sales, you need to include high commercial intent keywords as part of your paid search strategy. Yes, competition for these search terms can be fierce (and expensive), but the rewards may be worth it. PPC is said to return $2 for every $1 spent, and Google even claims it’s more like $8.

Track SEO metrics in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an invaluable source of data for almost every imaginable aspect of your website, from your most popular pages to visitor demographics. Keep an eye on your SEO metrics and use this information to inform your promotions and content strategy. Find out the topics that are most popular among your website visitors, the demographics of your visitors, the channels they come from, and more, then leverage and expand what works.

View your query in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is very useful for finding the queries that lead people to find your site in search results and click on it. This can help you make sure your pages rank for the content you’re targeting, find new keywords to add to existing pages, and new keywords that are fully targeted. You can also view organic CTR and troubleshoot indexing issues in GSC.

Analyze SERPs with SEO Tools

All-in-one SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs allow you to do keyword research, and backlink analysis, analyze SERPs, identify content gaps and ranking opportunities, audit your website, and more. You can even use them to analyze pages on competitor websites.

Review your site with Site Rater

These tools will also audit your website for opportunities to improve rankings and traffic, but they are more user-friendly than all-in-one SEO tools. These reports are easy to read and provide insight and actionable guidance on how to improve your score. Some people also look at other aspects of your website, such as accessibility and content readability. Check out our list of the best website raters, which (of course) includes ours.

• Best Free Website Rater – sample local website rater report
• Try a free website rater for opportunities to increase traffic.
• How to Increase Traffic to Your Website: A Review
• It’s a wrap! Here’s how to increase your website traffic:
• have a business blog
• Follow the evergreen theme
• Write irresistible headlines
• Invite others to blog on your site
• Create awesome visual effects
• Merge Videos
• Has a resource center
• target keyword…
• … long tail keywords
• strategically place keywords
• Optimize Your SERP Appearance
• Internal link
• Improve page speed
• Make your website responsive
• Implement Pattern Marking
• Get backlinks
• Regular refresh of old content
• Promote your content on social media
• Add hashtags
• target amplifier
• Publish local LinkedIn articles
• Interviews with industry thought leaders
• Add social sharing buttons
• research competition
• Post at the right time
• Host a webinar
• Optimize your listings
• Build an online community
• join the forum
• attend a meeting
• Submit your content to aggregator sites
• Start email newsletter
• Contact Email Newsletter
• Create free tools
• advertise
• Track SEO metrics with Google Analytics
• Identify queries using Google Search Console
• Analyze SERPs with SEO Tools
• Review your site with Site Rater