Website Traffic. How To Get More Traffic To My Website. Ask a marketer or business owner what they’d like most in the world, and they’ll probably tell you more customers. What often comes after that? More traffic to their site. In fact, 61% of marketers say their biggest challenge is generating traffic and leads.
There are many ways you can increase traffic to your
website, and in today’s post, I’m going to share a whopping 39 of them, almost
all of which are free.
"JUMP "See The Highlights Of the You tube Videos I Chrome Extension I
Table of contents
- How
to drive traffic to your website with content
- How
to increase website traffic with SEO
- How
to drive website traffic with social media
- How
to get traffic to your website with listings
- More
ways to increase website traffic
- Tools
to help drive website traffic
How to drive traffic to your website with content
Spoiler alert: you can’t get more website traffic without
content. So if you plan on skipping this section, go for it! I’ll see you in 10
seconds when you skip on back up because you realized you can’t do any of the
other strategies without good, quality content.
Have a business blog
First and foremost, your business needs a blog where you can
regularly publish useful, long-form
content on your site. This is non-negotiable.
- Companies
who blog get 97% more
links to their websites.
- Businesses
that blog get 55% more
website visitors than businesses that don’t.
- Marketers with blogs are 13 times more likely to generate positive ROI.
Not sure where to start? Perhaps these 118 blog
post ideas to help you out…
Focus on evergreen topics
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 will always be of interest to your audience. These evergreen
posts will accumulate traffic and links over time, especially if you
refresh it regularly (more on that later).
Write irresistible headlines
Headlines are one of the most important parts of your
content. In fact, studies have shown effective blog headlines to
drive 500% more
traffic. Without a compelling headline, even the most comprehensive blog
post will go unread. Master
the art of headline writing so readers will choose your post on the
SERP.
Invite others to guest blog on your site
Not only can guest authors diversify your topics and
perspectives, but they’ll want to share the article with their network and link
to it on their site, which could bring new readers to yours. Just be sure that
you only post high-quality, original content without spammy links (lest you get
a Google
penalty and lose traffic). A standard set of guest posting guidelines
can help with this and keep your content on brand.
Create awesome visuals
Use design tools like Canva to illustrate concepts,
visualize data, and recreate charts in your branding. When other sites use your
images, they’ll link back to your site. Plus, Google is showing more images in
regular Search results, giving you more opportunities to rank and increase the
appeal (and therefore click-through rate) of your result.
Incorporate video
Text-based content is all well and good, but video can
attract more visitors and keep them engaged. Here are some ways to use video to
get more website traffic:
- Embed
videos into your blog posts so they can appear in video search results
- Do YouTube
SEO to rank higher on YouTube, then add links to your website in
the video description.
- Add
call to action buttons directly in your video that send people to your
site.
Have a resource center
Videos and blog posts aren’t the only types of content you
should be creating to educate your audience and build trust. Don’t forget about
infographics, downloadable guides, templates, webinars, and more. As you create
these lead
magnets and use them elsewhere on the web, collect them on a resources
page. A library of multimedia content is sure to attract visitors who will
return to your site again and again.
How to increase traffic to your website with SEO
So there’s one problem with all of the strategies above.
They’re not going to drive traffic to your site if no one can find them. And
with the first page of Google capturing 71% of search traffic clicks, you need an SEO strategy.
SEO is the practice of optimizing a site for search engines
(hence search engine optimization) so it can be
more visible in search results for relevant queries. An SEO strategy
is a whole other animal, but here are the SEO basics.
Target keywords…
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines, and as you can imagine, some keywords get searched more than others. Using keyword research tools, you can see, for example, that the keyword “how to increase website engagement” only gets about 10 searches per month while how to increase website traffic gets 300 searches.
The latter is a better blog
post topic if you’re looking to get traffic.
Try Word Stream's Free Keyword Tool to find traffic-driving keywords for your site.
…long-tail keywords
So the higher the search
volume, the higher the traffic potential, right? Not so fast. Many
super-high volume keywords are also super-broad and super-hard to rank for (for
example “website” has a volume of 143,000).
Long-tail
keywords, on the other hand, are easier to rank for and will bring in the
most relevant traffic to your site.
Place your keywords strategically
This is the bread and butter of on-page SEO—where
you 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 keyword in the
following locations:
- Title
tag (meta title)
- H1
heading
- At
least two H2 headings
- Naturally
in the body
- The
first 100 words
- Image
file names and alt text
- Meta description
Optimize your SERP appearance
Just including the keyword in your meta description and meta
title isn’t enough. You need to optimize these important pieces of information
to improve their appeal on the SERP and encourage more organic clicks.
- Meta
description: Keep this between 155-165 characters, indicate the
value the reader will get out of the post, and make it actionable.
- Meta
title: Make this 60 characters or less value, with the keyword
close to the beginning, and indicate some sort of value or benefit.
Link internally
When creating and publishing content, be sure to add
at least 1-3 links to other pages on your site to that page. This will
help drive traffic to those pages, but also, it (a) keeps visitors on your site
longer, (b) gets them to view more pages on your site, and (c) allows them to
get more value out of your site—all of which improve your ranking and drive more traffic to your website.
Are
you missing any SEO opportunities? Find out instantly with the free Local
website grader.
Improve your page speed
Ever found yourself waiting thirty seconds for a webpage to
load? Me neither. If your site takes forever to load, your bounce rate will be
sky-high. Speed has always been a ranking factor, but even more so now with
the page
experience update. 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.
Google’s Page Speed Insights tool will give you a score on
your site’s performance and provide suggestions for improving
your Core Web Vitals and more. Use it!
Make your site responsive
Today, more traffic occurs on mobile than desktop, so if
you’re making your visitors pinch and scroll their way around your site, you’re
basically telling them to go elsewhere. Even if you have a basic
website, you still need to ensure that it is accessible and comfortably
viewable across a range of devices, including smaller smartphones.
To optimize every aspect of your website, check out
our Ultimate
Website Audit Checklist (with an Epic 6-Tab Google Sheet).
Implement Schema markup
Implementing Schema markup (or another microdata format)
won’t necessarily increase traffic to your website on its own, but it will make
it easier for search engine bots to find and index your pages. Another benefit
of using schema for SEO is that it can result in better rich site snippets,
which can improve click-through rates.
Check out our easy guide to Schema markup here.
Regularly refresh your content
Even the most evergreen content loses its luster over time,
and content
freshness is a ranking factor. Even if your post is still ranking on
the first
page of Google, you’d be surprised at what a content refresh can do. A new
publish date on the SERP can significantly increase CTR and bump you up a few
positions, which can lead to a surge in traffic.
But you can’t just change a few words and then update the
publish date on your post. Google knows better 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 stats.
- Replace
outdated visuals and/or create new ones to illustrate concepts.
- Add
new links to more recent resources.
- Fix
broken links and images.
- Add
new keywords from the query report in Search Console (more on that later).
- Tweak
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 have from credible sites with high Domain Authority, the
more you increase
your own Domain Authority. The higher your DA, the higher your rank and the
higher your traffic—not to mention any traffic you get to your site from the
link itself.
There are several
link building strategies that work, but here are just a few:
- Reach
out to credible sites and offer to write a guest post where you can link
to your site in the body or your author bio.
- Use
an SEO tool to find broken links on other websites and offer yours as a
replacement.
- Create
original, high-quality
content that just begs to be linked to.
Brought to you by
Ready to grow your business?
Unlock the results you’re looking for with technology-backed
solutions designed for small businesses and agencies.
Get
your free demo
How to increase traffic to your website using social
media
Social
media marketing comes with 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 site.
Promote your content on social
It’s not enough to produce great
content and hope that people find it. Promote your content on
the most
popular social media channels for your audience. Twitter is
ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Google Business posts can
help your site show up in local search results. If you’re a B2C product
company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like
Pinterest and Instagram.
Not only will this drive traffic to your site, but the more
eyes you get on your content, the more likely you are to get
those backlinks we just talked about.
#Social Marketing
When sharing your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram,
and other hashtag-friendly sites, include relevant hashtags to improve the
reach of your posts. Keep the hashtags highly specific to the topic of the
post, however, so you can get discovered by people most likely to read, share,
and/or link to your content. Our guide
to Instagram hashtags has everything you need for this.
📗 Free Guide >>
The 25 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website
Target amplifiers
In Rand Fish kin's excellent Who
Will Amplify This? And Why? post, he makes the excellent point of
creating content for potential amplifiers, and not just potential customers.
Such amplifiers include:
- Industry
publications like trade journals, news sites, big-brand blogs,
and social influencers.
- External
sources of influence like journalists in mainstream media and
social influencers outside of your field.
- Customer
evangelists: the people with industry followings who use and
recommend you.
- Potential evangelists: customers with big networks and followings, or well-read publications
Post Native LinkedIn Articles
The world’s largest professional social network is a
valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should be
posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to
your site, drive more visitors to your LinkedIn
Company Page, and increase your reputation within your industry. And you
don’t have to reinvent the wheel—write a reflection piece on a recent topic or
repurpose content you’ve already written.
Interview industry thought leaders
Think interviews are only for the big leaguers? You’d be
amazed how many people will be willing to talk to you if you just ask them.
Send out emails requesting an interview with thought leaders in your industry
and publish the interviews on your blog. Not only will the name recognition
boost your credibility and increase traffic to your website, but the
interviewee will also probably share the content too, further expanding its
reach.
Add social share buttons
This is an easy website traffic win. Social share buttons
allow readers to share the page they’re reading with their social networks in
just a few clicks.
Another option is the click-to-Tweet feature, where you
offer a prewritten Tweet that readers can publish in one click. Check to see if
either of these plugins are available for your site and give's a go.
If you haven’t used software like Bozsum to check out
what your competitors are up to, you’re at a disadvantage. These services
aggregate the social performance of specific sites and content to provide you
with an at-a-glance view of what topics are resonating with readers and, most
importantly, making the rounds on social media. Find out what people are
reading (and talking about), and emulate that kind of content to bring traffic
to your website.
Post at the right time
If you’re looking to get into the weeds here, you can also
take a look at your social media analytics to find the times of the day and
week that get the most engagement from your audience and then share your blog
post links then. Start with the overall average best times and dig into the
data to refine from there.
- When’s
the Best Time to Post on TikTok?
- When’s
the Best Time to Post on Instagram?
How to get traffic to your website with listings
Business directories are a promising source of website
traffic, but just adding your website to your listing isn’t enough. It’s
important to optimize your listings so they can rank on their respective
platforms and get seen by local searchers.
You can find the best free business listing sites here, but the most
important is your Google Business Profile, since an optimized listing can help
you to rank
on Google Maps and Google Search. Facebook is also important since
it’s the second-largest directory. And don’t forget popular sites like Yelp,
Angie’s List, and more. To optimize your listings:
- Fill
out every section available.
- Include
your business category.
- Keep
your information as consistent as possible across listings.
- Get
reviews and respond to them.
- Add
photos.
- Keep your information updated regularly
An optimized
Google Business Profile can land your website at the tippets top of
search results.
Easily check the status of your listings with this free business listings grader from LocaliQ ✅
More ways to increase website traffic
Host webinars
People love to learn, and webinars are an excellent way to
impart your wisdom to your eagerly waiting audience. Combined with an effective
social promotion campaign, webinars are a great way to increase traffic to your
website. Send out an email a week or so ahead of time, as well as a “last
chance to register” reminder the day before the webinar. Make sure to archive
the presentation for later viewing, and promote your webinars widely through
social media. If you’re wondering how to do a webinar, click the link for some
tips.
Start an online community
People want to speak their minds and weigh in on subjects
they feel passionately about, so building a community on your site is a great
way to start a conversation and increase traffic. Implement a robust commenting
system through third-party solutions such as Facebook comments or Disqus, or
create a dedicated forum where visitors can ask questions. Don’t forget to
manage your community to ensure that minimum standards of decorum are met,
however.
Participate in forums
On the flip side, join forums and social media groups on
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit where
you can share your knowledge. Only include links if it’s allowed and
appropriate, and if you do, don’t post links only or include links in every
post. And make sure the link is to a specific blog post on a relevant topic.
The primary goal here is not to drive traffic to your site. It’s to add value
and build brand awareness. People who are interested will search for your site
on their own, or go to your profile where they can find your site.
Attend conferences
Whatever industry you’re in, chances are there are at least
one or two major conventions and conferences that are relevant to your
business. Attending these events is a good idea – speaking at them is even
better. Even a halfway decent speaking engagement is an excellent way to
establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and gain significant
exposure for your site.
Submit your content to aggregator sites
If you have a blog, it likely has an RSS feed which allows
aggregator sites to display the latest content in a particular topic. People
use these sites to follow their favorite blogs, news sites, and more, 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 using. HubSpot
has a list of content aggregators here to help you get started.
Start an email newsletter
A newsletter does
not have to be complicated. Here at Workstreams, we have a weekly newsletter
called the Performance Tip where we feature a blog post from the week. It’s
perfect for people who use their inbox as a reading list, and it’s also great
for posts on topics that your audience might not know to search for. For
example, this post on emotional copywriting gets about 1,000 visits from
organic search per month. But it as a big hit with our email list,
generating more than 4,000 sessions in just a few days.
Just be careful not to bombard your readers with too many
emails, or even too many links in one email. Follow these email
marketing tips and do your testing to find out what content and
frequency is best.
📗 Free download
>> 30
(Copy & Plateable) Email Templates for Small Businesses
Reach out to email newsletters
There are newsletters out there for every topic under the
sun, and many of them accept pitches and contributions. Do some research to
find the ones in your niche that are looking for great content, and supply it.
If you get featured, you’ll not only get a spike in traffic, but you might find
more regular readers who return to your site regularly (or sign up for your
newsletter!).
Create a free tool
What’s better than free and useful content? Free and useful
tools. Idea generators, assessments, quizzes, calculators, and more. Optimize
the landing page with long-form content and your tool could rank organically.
Make it something your visitors can use over and over again and you’ll see
droves of traffic coming in.
Advertise
Okay so this one isn’t free, but if you play your cards
right, your investment can easily pay for itself.
SEO is all well and good (very, very good), but it takes a
few months of consistent publishing to accumulate traffic, build links, and
earn Google’s favor. In the meantime, you may want to consider a paid
advertising campaign. Search, display, and social ads are all excellent ways of
attracting highly targeted visitors to your site at scale. Each paid media
channel has its pros and cons, so think carefully about your objectives before
you reach for your 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’re hoping that more traffic to
your site will also result in more sales, you’ll need to target high commercial
intent keywords as part of your paid search strategies. Yes,
competition for these search terms can be fierce (and expensive), but the
payoffs can be worth it. In fact, PPC is said to return $2 for every $1 spent,
and Google even claims it’s actually more like $8.
Tools to help drive traffic to your website
Aside from the all-in-one SEO tools in this list, all of
these are…you guessed it…free!
Track SEO metrics in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an invaluable source of data on just
about every conceivable aspect of your site, from your most popular pages to
visitor demographics. Keep a close eye on your SEO metrics,
and use this information to inform your promotional and content strategies.
Find out what topics are most popular among your site visitors, the demographic
profile of your visitors, the channels they’re coming from, and more—and then
harness and scale up what’s working.
View your queries in Google Search Console
Google Search Console is super useful in finding the queries
that are leading people to find your site in search results and click on it.
This can help you make sure your pages are ranking for what you’re targeting,
find new keywords to add to an existing page, and new keywords to target
altogether. You can also view organic click-through rate in GSC and
troubleshoot indexing issues.
You can learn how
to use GSC to improve your SEO here.
Analyze the SERP with SEO tools
All-in-one SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs allow you to do keyword
research, get backlink analyses, analyze the SERP, identify content gaps and
ranking opportunities, audit your site, and more. You can even use them to
analyze pages on your competitors’ sites.
Audit your site with website graders
These tools will also audit
your website to find opportunities to improve your ranking and
traffic, but they’re a little more user-friendly than all-in-one SEO tools. The
reports are easy to read and offer insights and actionable guidance on how to
improve your score. Some also look at other aspects of your site like
accessibility and content readability. Check out our list of the best
website graders, which (of course) includes ours.
Try the free Website Grader to find opportunities to
improve your traffic.
How to drive traffic to your website: recap
That’s a wrap! Here’s how to increase website traffic:
- Have
a business blog
- Focus
on evergreen topics
- Write
irresistible headlines
- Invite
others to guest blog on your site
- Create
awesome visuals
- Incorporate
video
- Have
a resource center
- Target
keywords…
- …long-tail
keywords
- Place
your keywords strategically
- Optimize
your SERP appearance
- Link
internally
- Improve
your page speed
- Make
your site responsive
- Implement
Schema markup
- Get
backlinks
- Regularly
refresh old content
- Promote
your content on social
- Add
hashtags
- Target
amplifiers
- Post
native LinkedIn articles
- Interview
industry thought leaders
- Add
social share buttons
- Research
the competition
- Post
at the right time
- Host
webinars
- Optimize
your listings
- Start
an online community
- Participate
in forums
- Attend
conferences
- Submit
your content to aggregator sites
- Start
an email newsletter
- Reach
out to email newsletters
- Create
a free tool
- Advertise
- Track
SEO metrics with Google Analytics
- Identify
queries with Google Search Console
- Analyze
the SERP with SEO tools
- Audit
your site with website graders
1 Comments
#Trading #Daily Updates
ReplyDelete