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Ask a marketer or business owner what they'd most like, and they'll probably say they want more customers. What often comes next? More traffic to their website. In fact, 61% of marketers say their biggest challenge is generating traffic and leads.
There are many ways to increase traffic to your website, and in today's post we're going to share a number of them, almost all of which are free.
Curious where you currently stand with your website? Do an SEO analysis to gain insight into how well your website is currently optimised.
Spoiler alert: you can't generate more website traffic without (good) content. So if you're planning to skip this part, go ahead! You can't do any of the other strategies without good, high-quality content.
First and foremost, your website needs a blog where you can regularly publish useful, long-form content on your site.
The more value you offer on your website, the more reasons people will have to visit your site. And without a blog, it'll be difficult to carry out most of the strategies in this post (or any post on this subject).
Although news and trending topics can give you a short-term traffic boost, they're less worth the time and effort. Create content around topics that will always interest your audience. These ‘evergreen’ posts will generate more traffic and links over time, especially if you refresh them regularly (more on that later).
Headlines are one of the most important parts of your content. Studies have shown that effective blog headlines generate 500% more traffic. Without a compelling headline, even the most comprehensive blog post will go unread. Master the art of writing headlines, so readers will choose your post on the SERP.
Not only can other authors diversify your topics and perspectives, they'll also want to share the article with their network and link to it from their site, which can bring new readers to your website. Do make sure you only publish original, high-quality content without spam links (otherwise you'll get a Google penalty and lose traffic). A standard set of guest posting guidelines can help with this and keep your content on brand.
Use design tools such as Canva to illustrate concepts, visualise data and recreate charts in your house style. When other sites use your images, they'll link to your site. What's more, Google increasingly shows images in regular search results, giving you more chances to rank and to increase the appeal (and therefore the click-through rate) of your result.
Text-based content is all well and good, but video can attract even more visitors and keep them engaged. Here are some ways to use video to get more website traffic:
So there's one problem with all the strategies above. They won't drive traffic to your site if nobody can find your content. And with Google's first page capturing 71% of search traffic, you need an SEO strategy.
SEO is optimising a website for search engines such as Google and Yahoo (search engine optimisation), so a website is more visible in the search results for relevant searches. Here are the basic SEO principles.
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines, and as you can imagine, some keywords are searched for more than others. Using keyword research tools, you can see that the Dutch keyword “hoe de website betrokkenheid te verhogen” (how to increase website engagement) gets only about 10 searches a month, while “hoe het websiteverkeer te verhogen” (how to increase website traffic) gets 300 searches.
So the higher the search volume, the higher the traffic potential, right? Not so fast. Many high-volume keywords are generic and hard to rank for (for example, “website” has a volume of 143,000).
Long-tail keywords are specific searches. That makes long-tail keywords easier to rank for, and they'll bring the most relevant traffic to your site.
Determining keywords strategically is the foundation of on-page SEO. Where you optimise your content matters, so search engines can understand what it's about and rank it in relevant searches. Make sure you place your main keyword (focus keyword) in the following locations:
Just having the keyword in your meta description and meta title isn't enough. You need to optimise these two elements to improve their appeal on the SERP and drive more organic clicks.
Meta title: Make it 50 – 60 characters, with the main keyword close to the start.
Meta description: Keep it between 110 – 130 characters, with more information than in the title, and make it action-oriented.
When you create and publish content, make sure you add at least 1-3 links to other pages on your site. This will help send traffic to those pages, but also (a) keep visitors on your site longer, (b) have them view more pages on your site, and (c) enable them to get more value from your site – all of which improves your ranking and drives more traffic to your website.
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Have you ever had to wait thirty seconds for a web page to load? Me neither. If your site takes a long time to load, your bounce rate will be high. Speed has always been a ranking factor. Make sure your pages are technically optimised as far as possible, including image file sizes, page structure and the functionality of third-party plugins. The faster your site loads, the better.
These days, more traffic happens on mobile phones than on desktop computers, so if your visitors have to pinch and scroll their way around your site, you're basically telling them to go somewhere else. Even if you have a simple website, you still need to make sure it's accessible and comfortable to view on a range of devices, including smaller smartphones.
Even the most ‘evergreen’ content loses its shine over time, and content freshness is a ranking factor. Even if your post is still on Google's first page, you'll be surprised what a content refresh can do. A new publication date on the SERP can significantly increase CTR and push you up a few positions, which can lead to an increase in traffic.
But you can't just change a few words and then update your post's publication date. Google is wise to this. Here are some strategies, taken from our post on how to get more traffic from ‘evergreen’ content:
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 a high Domain Authority (DA), the more you increase your own Domain Authority. The higher your DA, the higher your ranking and the higher your traffic.
There are various link building strategies that work. Here are just a few:
Social media marketing has several benefits – one of them is referral traffic to your website. Here are some ways to turn these huge platforms into traffic generators for your site.
It's not enough to produce great content and hope people find it. Promote your content on the most popular social media channels for your audience. Twitter is ideal for short, punchy (and enticing) links, while Google Business posts can help your site show up in local search results. If you're a B2C product business, you may find lots of traffic on image-heavy social sites such as TikTok, Facebook, 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 the backlinks we just talked about.
When you share your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other hashtag-friendly sites, add relevant hashtags to improve the reach of your posts. Keep the hashtags very specific to the topic of the post, though, so you can be discovered by people who are likely to read, share and/or link to your content.
The world's largest professional social network is a valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should be posting content on LinkedIn on a regular basis. This can drive traffic to your site, bring more visitors to your LinkedIn company page and enhance your reputation within your sector. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel – write a reflection on a recent topic or repurpose content you've already written.
Think interviews are only for the big players? You'll be surprised how many people are willing to talk to you if you just ask. Send emails requesting interviews with thought leaders in your sector and publish the interviews on your blog. Not only will the name recognition increase your credibility and drive more traffic to your website, but the interviewee will probably share the content too, increasing its reach even further.
This is an easy way to win website traffic. Social sharing buttons let readers share the page they're reading with their social networks in a few clicks.
If you haven't yet used dedicated tools to check what your competitors are doing, you're at a disadvantage. These tools gather the social performance of specific sites and content to show you at a glance which topics readers find interesting and, more importantly, which ones are doing 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.
