One of the common questions I get is “How to increase my website traffic?”
And my answer is this – there isn’t one single method to drive traffic to your website. There are numerous ways to do that and it depends on what you sell, your budget and how you want to do it.
So in this blog, I’m covering all possible ways you can grow your website traffic and create a steady stream of visitors in the long term. You’ll see various paid and organic strategies that not just drive traffic but also results in high conversions.
Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
1. Write Useful, Informative On-Site Blogs
There’s only one #1 strategy to win over your audience. And that’s to be helpful to them.
Having an on-site blog helps you to showcase your authority, your knowledge and your usefulness. You can add blogs regularly to your website based on the products/services you’re offering.
It can be:
● About the product
● Tangential topic to the product
● Use cases
● Customer reviews
● Industry trends
● Customer pain points
Not every single blog has to be about you or your business. You can also talk about general topics in your industry and educate your audience.
You may want to learn more: How to start blog
2. Build Your Email Subscribers
Not a lot of people convert to customers the very first time they visit your website.
So how can you keep track of them and communicate with them? Through emails.
If the lead is interested in what you have to offer, but haven’t yet made a concrete decision, then you can ask them to sign up for your email list.
You can then email them about your offers, more information on your product, case studies and any other details to help them decide.
Here are our favorite tools for email marketing.
3. Promote Your Content in Online Forums
Online forums are one of the most underrated ways to drive traffic. But there’s a key to being successful with this strategy—being helpful.
You can’t just go to any forum, publish a link and get loads of traffic.
No, that’s not how it works. You need to become a part of the online forum community where your audience will be and add value to conversations. So when you post a link to the forum, people will trust you enough to visit the page.
4. Write Guest Posts on High-Authority Websites
Writing guest posts and linking your landing page is one of the evergreen strategies for outreach.
A founder, a marketing head or anyone in the senior position can contribute guest posts to top publications where your customers are. You don’t necessarily need to talk about your product or the exact solution you offer.
You can talk about anything in your industry and link to a blog or a case study on your website relevant to your article. You can also link back to the homepage of your website through the author bio.
When you pass on the link juice from such high authority content, your domain authority also increases and can help your search engine ranking.
Did you know that press releases can be a great SEO tool – check out our guide on PR SEO here.
5. Engage with Your Audience
This is simply and truly one of the best long-term strategies to play out for everyone wondering how to increase website traffic.
Nowadays, customers expect businesses to act human, engage with them, answer their questions and be authentic.
If you can do that through your social media communications, customer service interactions, on-call conversations and email interactions, then you can slowly build a powerful business brand that’s trustworthy in the eyes of the audience.
6. Include Quick-Share Icons on Blogs
You have a decent number of visitors reading your blogs regularly. How can we potentially leverage that to drive traffic?
By enticing them to share about your blogs on social media.
You can make that happen by adding prominent social media sharing icons on the sides or the bottom of the blog. You can also add a few ‘Click to Tweet’ sections highlighting the key points in the blog. This is a simple way to keep adding to the traffic you receive and create a snowball effect in the long term.
7. Regularly Update Your Old Blogs
Writing on-site blogs and entirely forgetting about it later is not the way to go.
If you want to maximize all the content on your website, then you need to regularly update your blogs with relevant, recent information.
It may be any of the following:
● Stats
● New studies
● Keyword updates
● New product information
Or anything else that you think can improve the value of a blog. Notice how we mention original blog date and last updated blog dates across this website.
8. Build Content Around Topic Clusters
Topic clusters is essentially a group of webpages aimed at a single topic. You create multiple blogs revolving around the subject and address all possible questions the audience can have.
And you create one pillar content that covers all the webpages and link to them below it. Creating topic clusters will increase your search engine ranking in that particular topic and retain the customers looking for more information within your website. For example, if I were to write about plants, I would write what are plants, how to use fertilizers, importance of manure, fertile soil, sunlight etc. in as educational content way as possible.
9. Post Regularly on Social Media
I cannot stress this enough!
Being regularly seen on social media as a business is crucial. You don’t need to be active on any and all social media platforms out there.
Pick two or three top social media platforms where your audience is. Then create interesting posts about the industry and your product to post regularly. You shouldn’t just stop yourself from posting content but engaging with your audience, replying to their comments and answering the DMs.
This is the best way to connect with your customers and help the word of mouth marketing too!
You may want to learn more about: Social media best practices.
10. Answer Questions on Quora
Ever since Quora was started in 2009, it has become a go-to place for many to find answers to their questions.
So, you can drive a lot of traffic back to your website by answering queries relevant to your business. You can anchor the right keywords with a link to your website or a particular landing page.
But make sure to not spam the platform with lots of such links with subpar answers to the questions—because that’s not going to work.
As always, add value through your answers and then lead them gently to your website.
Here’s how I answer questions on quora.
11. Create Targeted Online Ads
Paid search ads and social media ads can help you to quickly generate a lot of traffic in a short time.
Of course, this idea also needs a strong strategy and research to find the right keywords to target and craft the ad message to increase the click rate. Make sure to:
● Analyze the platform where you’ll be placing ads,
● How the ads are chosen and displayed and
● What you need to do to maximize your click through rate.
12. Reach Out to Niche Influencers
Instead of building your customer base from zero, you can leverage those who have already gained a mass following from the people you target.
These influencers from your niche can potentially bring you loads of revenue if they’re promoted in the right way. You can identify a few of these influencers who genuinely promote products and services and have good authority over their audience.
13. Send Free Samples to Influencers
While some influencers do paid marketing for your products, there are a few others who’ll only promote a product if they really like it.
For such influencers, you can send out free samples if it’s a physical product or trials for online products. Once they like your product, their genuine promotions will get you lots of leads and sales.
14. Write Blogs That Stands out on Rich Snippets
Those highlighted sections that you see at the top of Google (like in the image above) are the rich snippets.
These help the searchers to quickly get an answer to their question without reading so much content.
You can get your blogs and landing pages featured on the rich snippets by creating simple summaries, adding bullets, and videos in your content.
15. Collaborate with Industry’s Thought Leaders
The thought leaders in every space have a huge audience base that trusts them.
So if you can leverage that audience and divert the traffic to your website, you can quickly increase the conversions.
Choose a few reachable thought leaders in your industry and strike a relationship with them. You can either invite them for your personal podcasts, webinars, live sessions, or guest posts. Once you associate with them and they start mentioning your company often, you’ll get a good amount of traffic.
16. Perform Content Transformation or Repurpose content
Content transformation is very easy to do – you convert a piece of the blog into a video, a few social media posts, content for online communities, a podcast and an infographic.
I prefer calling it like 80:20 rule which very few companies follow, and we are yet to improve to be honest. Spend 80% of your time promoting 20% of your new content creation.
While you don’t need to do all of these all the time, you can pick a few for each of the blogs. You’ll get various types of content to promote based on the platforms and you don’t need to look for new ideas outside!
Content transformation is a very effective technique to leverage a single piece of content and fashion it for multiple platforms and forms.
17. Work on the On-Page SEO
Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the crucial ways to get more traffic. Make sure to conduct regular audits of your on-page SEO and analyze its performance.
Check for the alt texts in:
● Images,
● Keywords in the meta description,
● Page loading time,
● Image sizes,
● Keywords in headings
and many other on-page SEO elements.
When your SEO performance is the best, you can rank high in the search engine results and get more leads to your website. We do provide SEO across all our plans. Check out more details here.
18. Create an Online Community
Building a great online community around a brand is one of the best ways to have continuous traffic to your website. There are no bounds to the type of community you build.
You can build a community over Twitter chats in public, a closed group on Facebook or a following on Quora. A community is essentially when you have a group of like-minded people sharing information and being helpful to each other with your brand at the center.
ProductHunt, Facebook are some of the community platforms for instance.
19. Perform Website Audit
Creating a website that performs well is good. But you need to constantly look after the website and keep it in its best shape. This is when regular website audits come in.
You can hire a digital marketing specialist or us to conduct a website audits and look at its performance, conversions, visitor’s reactions, and a lot more to optimize the website.
Learn more about website redesign checklist.
20. Relaunch Existing Content
Updating an existing blog and relaunching a blog is different. When you update, you add more pointers and relevant information based on the current condition.
In relaunching, you’ll use the existing blog, guide or ebook as the base but make numerous changes to make it better than the previous one. And when you relaunch your content, you can promote it all over social media and with your email subscribers and drive fresh traffic.
21. Participate as Guests in Podcasts
The number of people who are listening to podcasts is gradually increasing. Right now, more than 50% of Americans listen to podcasts, out of which 37% attend monthly.
If you can become a guest in a few of your industry podcasts, you have the opportunity to be present in front of an audience that you may not otherwise have access to. You can talk about your business, show your industry authority and skills to create a hot lead gen funnel. Here is StepToInbound’s podcast for example.
22. Add Free Downloads on Your Website
People love free stuff!
And creating some free online materials doesn’t cost you too much.
This works well, especially for B2B businesses to create free downloadable docs, ebooks, templates or worksheets that the customers can use. Recently, some B2C companies are also providing downloadable free materials to educate and inform their customers. Download free buyer persona.
23. Add Original Images to Stock Image Sites
This is just like creating infographics but with a bit of twist. You create images and videos that have high chances of getting shared. You can then upload the images to free stock image sites like Unsplash and Pixabay and images to YouTube.
Once you see lots of people using it, you can reach out to them asking to link back to your website as the image source. Here is my profile with images you can get for free.
24. Create and Share Videos on YouTube
YouTube is becoming one of the go-to discovery platforms. If you want to leverage that traffic, you can create attractive, timeless, informative videos about your products and industry and share them on YouTube.
You can get a steady stream of traffic with the right keyword optimization. You can also share these videos with relevant on-site blogs and sometimes even guest blogs.
Here’s our YouTube channel. Please subscribe.
25. Create High-Quality Infographics
Infographics are one of the highly shared content pieces and can improve the understanding by 50%.
When you don’t want to read a 3000-long blog, you can instead scroll through a value-packed infographic to quickly learn what it’s about.
You can create infographics of your long blogs or a combination of studies from multiple resources. When you create attractive infographics, you can expect various websites to use them for their content and then link back to the original infographic page as the source.
This could increase the traffic to your website and improve SEO performance.
26. Include Your Business in Online Directories
There are so many online directories you can list about your business. You can use Google My Business, Yelp, Foursquare and other relevant business directories.
Make sure to optimize the content, add images and gather reviews from your customers. These directories will become a free source of the traffic to your website. If your business is local to an area, make sure to target the local audience with location-specific keywords and online listing.
Learn more about step by step process to complete google my business profile.
27. Strategize to Increase Your Referrals
There’s nothing like a customer telling their friend to use your product or service.
You can bypass all of the initial stages in the conversion funnel when you get a referral from happy customers. So encourage your customers to talk about your company by offering incentives in coupons, vouchers, cashback and discounts.
28. Leverage FAQs to Write Blogs
If you’re wondering how to increase the organic website traffic, then targeting the commonly asked questions in your blogs and landing pages is the key.
Your customers have a lot of questions about your company and your product.
So if you want your blogs to be beneficial to customers, make sure to answer their questions in them! It’s as simple as that.
You can either focus on one big question for a single blog or cluster multiple related questions in one blog. This would further help you position as an authority and improve your chances of ranking in search engines.
29. Target Long-Tail Keywords
If you’re a new business starting, then targeting the long-tail keywords is the best way to get a high ranking. You can use any keyword planner online to find the relevant long-tail keywords in your industry and create blogs and landing pages around it.
If you’re writing blogs, make sure to have a minimum word count of 1000 and include secondary, related keywords to the main long-tail keyword to improve the chances of ranking.
30. Identify Content Gaps
You may think that you’ve talked about everything possible related to your product. This is when a content gap analysis helps identify the loopholes and a few areas where your website lacks content.
When you bridge the content gap and create more informative content to educate your audience, you can leverage the keywords that don’t have high competition.
Here’s how you can perform a content gap analysis.
31. Run Retargeted Ad Campaigns
We’ve talked about the importance of online ads. But just sending one ad to your audience isn’t sufficient.
You need to retarget the same set of audience who have shown interest in your product with multiple ads. With retargeted ad campaigns, you can reduce the cost per click, increase your click rates and increase your traffic.
Learn more about google retargeting ads.
32. Optimize for Mobile-Friendliness
Google has begun mobile-first indexing from 2019, which means the mobile version of your website is used for ranking. So even if your website looks great on the desktop version but doesn’t look good on smartphones, then you’re going to lose your ranking.
So, during website design and optimization, make sure the mobile version of your website is user-friendly and easy to work with. This could make a lot of difference in your ranking, which could affect your website traffic. Core Web vitals are of utmost importance with a recent development with google search consoles.
33. Reshare Old Blogs and Videos on Social Media
Your social media posts don’t always have to be about new ideas, new blogs and new creations. You can reshare your old blogs, images and videos on your social media pages at regular intervals.
Since your social following will always increase, your old blogs wouldn’t feel that old for your new followers. You can reshare the old blogs that you’ve recently updated or a blog that’s relevant to a current trend or an incident. You can do the same for timeless videos.
34. Analyze Your Competition for Blog Ideas
Running out of ideas for blogs? Sneak a peek at your competitor blogs.
There’s only so much a business can talk about and when you think you’ve exhausted all your ideas, analyze your competitor’s blogs. Look at the traffic each of their blogs gets and find out what works the most for them.
Compare this data with what you already have on your website and create new blogs on topics that you haven’t covered yet.
35. Syndicate Your Content on Medium
Medium is a free platform on which you can reshare your blogs, infographics and images.
The best part about Medium is that you can build a following separately on Medium with just the syndicated content. While this may not work as a standalone strategy, a few leads from Medium regularly to your website can add to your leads.
36. Spark Conversations on Twitter
Twitter is that social media platform where news originates and real conversations take place. You can bring attention to your brand and its ethics by creating a healthy discussion around it.
You can start exciting questions to your followers, take part in conversations that are already happening to show where you stand on issues close to your industry. This way, you’ll get people to check out about your business and, in turn, create traffic back.
37. Share Useful Information on Reddit
Reddit is known for that platform where people get answers and talk about stuff they wouldn’t otherwise converse on other platforms.
You can a few Reddit communities and regularly share helpful information and make your presence known. You can add a link to your website wherever relevant while adding value to the community.
38. Conduct Contests and Giveaways
A little incentive goes a long way to get the word out about your business. You can give your followers small tasks to perform as a part of contests and provide them with a sample of your products or services.
If you make it worth their while, you’ll get lots of people competing for your contests and giveaways, which would maximize the word about your business and get more leads visiting your website.
39. Optimize for Voice Searches
Due to the increase in voice-enabled devices like Alexa and Google Home, we see increased voice searches.
More than 25% of people are using voice searches through their mobile phones and around 71% of the global population prefer voice searches for queries than typing.
With such a huge market available for voice searches, it’s essential to optimize your website for it. While you’re conducting website audits, gradually start optimizing your existing webpages for voice search and make sure to include the voice search keywords for SEO. This could help you drive more traffic from voice searches too.
40. Internally Link Your Blogs
The authority of your website isn’t just determined by the content and the design. Your internal and external linking also matters. Your guest posting, linking from high-authority websites and sharing on social media will contribute to the external linking.
For internal linking, you can link within the blogs and other landing pages to create a good linking structure. This will help you make your visitors stay longer on your website and divert them to other blogs and webpages.
41. Interview Popular Industry Figures
Publishing the interviews with some popular names in your industry will improve your credibility and bring new traffic from their followers.
Unlike what many think, many people are open to give a free interview. You can ask some interesting questions, publish the answers, maybe a few images with their quotes and get it shared all over social media. You’ll increase the reach of your business and make more people aware of your website.
42. Publish Aggregated Content from Influencers
Getting organic traffic is one of the challenging tasks for any marketer. Publishing aggregated content obtained from different influencers in your industry can create free word publicity and lots of traffic.
You can choose a topic and ask specific questions from the top industry leaders and aggregate all of their answers together in the form of a blog. Once you’ve published the blog, you can reach out to them, send them a link to the blog and thank them.
The chances are that most of these people will share the link to your blog through their social media pages and emails, which will get you a ton of traffic.
43. Optimize Landing Pages with Feedback
Customer feedback is really important for any business. When you want to know exactly what your customers expect from you, you can directly ask them – it’s as simple as that!
Send surveys to your audience, have quick feedback pop-up forms on your website and conduct feedback sessions with your social media following to get an idea of how you can improve your landing pages to better cater to your customers.
This will improve the number of leads and conversions on your website and create a positive feedback loop that customers appreciate.
44. Host Webinars and Conferences
People love to come together and talk about their expertise and gain knowledge. An excellent way to bring together the industry leaders and borrow their audience is by hosting webinars and conferences.
Decide an interesting topic that people would like to know more about and bring together two or more people on a Zoom call or any other live session like Twitter or LinkedIn. You’ll get listeners of the people you’re bringing in to talk and improve the reach of your business.
45. Optimize for Click-Worthiness
When you’re creating ads and meta descriptions for blogs, you need to make sure they’re click-worthy.
This is one of the most neglected aspects to drive traffic to the website. Your headlines and meta description displayed on the search engines should be compelling enough for the audience to open your website. Similarly, you need to optimize your ad headline and description for your online ads.
46. Share Your Mistakes and Learnings
Right now, the audience is gravitating a lot towards businesses that are vulnerable and honest. So, if you can regularly share your business learnings, mistakes and trials, it can help others learn from it and build an authentic image in front of your target customers.
So the next time someone is talking about the kind of product you’re offering, your followers will immediately think of you. And this could drive regular traffic to your website indirectly from your followers.
Final Thoughts
While there isn’t one single way to increase your website traffic, a combination of some of the above ideas will create an incremental increase in your visitor count.
For all those wondering how to increase your website traffic, this list will help you decide the best outreach strategy.
You don’t necessarily need to implement all of it. You must be doing a few of them already. And you can add to it by picking a few more to create a long-term marketing and content strategy.