As marketers, we love to increase the brand’s website traffic. More traffic means more attention. And the best way to get that attention is to increase website traffic. All things being equal, more qualified traffic equals more leads, customers, and revenue.
You need to make sure you are attracting your target audience and not just getting more traffic.
In this post, I’ll discuss some different ways to grow website traffic and unleash new organic growth. Some of these methods will help you understand your audience better, while others focus on digital marketing vehicles such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), content marketing, and paid media.
I’ll tell you how to improve your website’s traffic by using offline methods as well such as Guerrilla marketing and forming alliances.
Let’s get started!
How to get traffic to your website
1. Audience insights
If you want to be successful at reaching your audience, you need to understand them first. Only then can you speak to them in a way that appeals to their interests, desires, and objectives. You can also create content that resonates with them and gets them to take action.
So how do you get deep insights into your audience? There are a number of tools and tactics that are helpful, including:
- Market research – Analyze search and social data, dive into competitor analytics, conduct interviews, work with focus groups, or work with market research consultants.
- Survey current customers – Ask your customers to tell you both how you help them and ways you could improve.
- Context-specific surveys and polls – Use contextually relevant surveys/polls on different pages of your website to get real-time information about what your customers need help with.
- Chat with your support team – Your customer support team is on the front lines of helping customers. They can give you valuable information about the problems your audience is dealing with.
- Talk with sales – Ask your sales team what solutions and features your audience is asking for. Uncover any initial objections prospective customers tend to raise, as well as your sales team’s messaging for overcoming those objections.
- Use Google Analytics – Look at the pages that already get website traffic and replicate their success. Are they ecommerce pages or blog posts? Do visitors come from Google or social networks?
2. Map the customer journey
To increase traffic to your site, understand your customer’s journey through the decision funnel. This includes everything from when they first become aware of an opportunity or problem to when they decide to purchase from you.
Customer journey mapping involves creating content that guides potential customers through the process of becoming paying customers and beyond.
For example, if you sell running shoes, a customer who is new to running may not know what kind of shoes they want. You can create guides, videos, and articles to help them understand the different types of running shoes.
Let them know what to look for in a good running shoe and give them resources to help them compare options and find the best pair for their feet, running style, needs, or goals.
3. Target the right keywords to increase website traffic
Google’s own Economic Impact Report indicates that SEO drives 5.3 times more ROI than paid traffic.
Keyword research
Searches done by customers at the beginning of the decision process are usually more general, while searches done by customers closer to the end of the decision process are usually more specific.
An individual who is in the awareness stage of the purchasing funnel may search for running shoes because they are not yet knowledgeable about different brands or products.
A person who is in the consideration phase will be more specific in their search. So, they might search for the best trail running shoes for men.
Someone who is considering buying the Nike Air Zoom Tempo or the Hoka Challenger ATR 6 might Google Nike Air Zoom Tempo vs Hoka Challenger ATR 6, or Nike Air Zoom Tempo reviews.
Finally, someone on the verge of buying a Nike Air Zoom Tempo may search for free shipping.
Use a tool like Ahrefs Keyword Explorer or Google Trends to identify keywords your customers will be searching for during each phase of their journey. Focus on long-tail keyword variations for maximum value.
As you look at the keywords, consider:
- Search volume
- Search intent
- Keyword difficulty
- Your website’s organic search performance on related keywords
- Number of linking root domains you may need to reach page one
- Domain Authority or Domain Rating of the websites ranking on page one
Our guide on keyword research goes into more detail about targeting keywords based on user intent.
Build topic clusters and pillar pages
After you identify your top keywords, it is important to group them into topic clusters. This strategy is effective in making your content more visible in the SEO world.
Buckets of relevance are created by content clusters. A pillar page is created which links to various subtopics. Topic clusters are an incredible way to increase website traffic.
4. Answer valuable questions to increase traffic to website pages
One of the best ways to increase website traffic is to answer the questions potential customers ask. By thoroughly answering the right questions, you can increase the amount of time visitors stay on your site and decrease the bounce rate.
Your website also has a chance of appearing in the featured snippet of organic search results, which can generate a lot of traffic. For example, the beauty website Byrdie often appears in the featured snippet. They get so much traffic because their content is well-crafted and answers users’ questions.
Byrdie has managed to become a successful beauty brand without relying on ads, something that most billion dollar beauty brands cannot say.
There are a number of tools that can help you identify the specific questions your audience is asking online, including:
- Answer the Public lets you type in a keyword and then it will give you a long list of related questions.
- BuzzSumo allows you to search millions of forum posts like those found on Quora and Reddit to find real questions people are asking.
- Question Hub is a new tool by Google that reveals all the unanswered questions people search for on the web.
After you identify which questions would be most beneficial for your website, work diligently to answer them.
5. Regularly refresh your content
Even if a post is still ranking highly on Google, it can be improved with a content refresh. This includes changing the publish date on the search engine results page, which can lead to an increase in traffic.
Although you may be tempted to simply change a few words and then update the publish date on your post, this is not advisable. Here are some strategies :
- 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.
6. Get backlinks
The number and quality of links to your website is a very important factor in how well your website ranks on Google. The more links you have from credible websites 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.
7. Promote your content on social
To ensure that your content is seen, you must promote it on the most popular social media channels for your target audience. Twitter is a good place for short, snappy links, while Google Business posts can help your site come up in local search results. If you make B2C products, you may have success with image-heavy social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
The more traffic your site gets, the more likely you are to get backlinks.
8. Add hashtags
If you want more people to see your content when you share it on social media sites that use hashtags, include relevant hashtags with your posts. Be sure to use hashtags that are specific to the topic of your post so you can be found by people who are interested in that topic.
9. Target amplifiers
In Rand Fishkin’s excellent Who Will Amplify This? 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:Â the people with industry followings who use and recommend you.
- Potential evangelists:Â customers with big networks and followings, or well-read publications
10. Post native LinkedIn articles
You should regularly post content to LinkedIn because it can help increase traffic to your site, drive visitors to your LinkedIn Company Page, and improve your reputation within your industry. You don’t need to come up with new material every time; you can post a commentary on a recent topic or reuse something you’ve already written.
11. Interview industry thought leaders
Interviews are not just for famous people. You would be surprised how many people would be willing to talk to you if you just asked them. Find people who are experts in your industry and send them emails asking for an interview. Post the interviews on your blog. This will help increase traffic to your website, and the person you interviewed will probably share the content too, increasing its reach even more.
12. Add social share buttons
This is how you can get more website traffic easily. Social share buttons allow readers to share the page they’re reading with their social networks in just a few clicks.
If you want to make it easier for your readers to share your content on Twitter, you can use a click-to-Tweet feature. This prewrites a Tweet for the reader so all they have to do is click a button. You can check to see if your site has a plugin for this.
13. Research the competition
You can’t afford to miss out on what your competitors are doing. Social media can give you insights into what is working for them. Find out what people are reading and talking about, and create similar content to bring traffic to your website.
14. Focus on evergreen topics
It is not worth your time and effort to create content around news and trending topics because the traffic boost you get from them is only temporary. Content about topics that will always be of interest to your audience will generate traffic and links over time, especially if you regularly update it.
15. Write irresistible headlines
The headlines of your content are very important. In fact, studies have shown that having effective headlines can increase traffic by 500%. If your headlines are not interesting, people will not read your content, no matter how good it is. Make sure you know how to write good headlines so that people will see your content on the search engine results page.
16. Steal traffic from competitors
Use a SEO analysis tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for. Look for keywords where they rank in the top 10, but have relatively thin content. For example, look for short blog posts.
When you identify the pages that aren’t performing well, take steps to make them into better resources. This could involve answering more questions related to the topic, providing more thorough coverage, or improving the design. The Google algorithm favors content that is in-depth and useful, so taking these measures should increase your chances of ranking ahead of your competitors in search results.
A second strategy for improving your website’s ranking is to use SEO tools to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile. If there are any pages with many high-quality links that return a 404 error, recreate those pages with even more valuable content. Then, contact the sites that linked to your competitor to let them know about your new content. While not every site will respond, you should be able to generate several new high-quality links.
Summary: how to increase website traffic
If you follow the above tips to get more traffic to your website, you will get more leads, customers, and revenue for your brand.
Just because a list of ingredients is provided does not mean that they will work well together. It is up to the person using the ingredients to figure out how to use them in a way that will be successful with their audience. Therefore, it is important to understand your customers, figure out how they search for information, and solve their problems. Additionally, it is important to have a presence in many different places.
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