How to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you want to increase your online sales, you must know how to drive traffic to your website. There are many ways to increase traffic to your website, and in today’s post, we’re going to look at 7 of them.

Where to Start with Driving Traffic to Your Website

Let’s say you just finished published your website. It’s brand new, fresh out-of-the-box. The obvious thing to do now is to generate traffic to your website, but, you don’t know where to start.

Well, before you spend any time testing strategies to grow your traffic, you need to make sure your website is set up in a way that resonates with your audience. Here are a few articles curated for you to ensure your traffic achieves maximum conversions:

• Focus on Functionality NOT Aesthetics
• Ecommerce Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
• 3 Steps to Create a Successful Website from Scratch
• Ecommerce Pre-launch Checklist

If you feel prepared to start driving traffic to your start and confident you’ll achieve conversions, let’s dive into the strategies to make it happen.

1. Create Share-worthy Content

New websites rarely start acquiring thousands of viewers a day without any content. If you have a blog, focus on creating share-worthy content with a slight focus on going viral.

First, scan your industry. What are other websites blogging about? What are the trending topics in your niche? What are the pain points your customers want solved?

Then, start producing 500-word advice posts followed by in-depth 5000-word step-by-step guideposts that genuinely help people. People will notice, especially if you dedicate time and attention on quality content.

Quick Tip: Fill up your blog with valuable list posts and information articles such as Top 5 Ways to Do XYZ, or 17 Best Strategies for ABC.

2. Capitalize on SEO

400;”>Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental strategy to drive free traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

A simple way to understand SEO is this: SEO is a measurable, repeatable process that sends signals to search engines telling them your pages are worth showing. The information you need to send these signals to search engines are:

• Keywords. These are words and phrases people are using on search engines. Your posts and your pages should include them strategically without disrupting the quality of your content.
  Click here to learn about Keyword Research to Boost Sales and Traffic.
• Metadata. This is the “behind-the-scenes” information that tells search engines about the content on your posts and pages. This includes titles, meta descriptions, image ALT, and more.
• Site speed. 400;”>Changes in Google’s algorithms are geared toward quality, fast-loading web pages.
  

SEO is a must-do if you want to drive more traffic to your website. While this post introduces you to the idea, you can find more information on creating SEO content here.

3. Build An Email List

Are you using a lead magnet on your website? This is a strategic move to capture a visitor’s email and encourage them to return to your website down the road.

Add a sign up to your posts, use a pop-up after visitors stay 10-seconds or more, provide a newsletter with value-focused content. Then, consider using an email marketing platform like Klaviyo to send automated emails to bring your list back to your website.

4. Guest Posting

This is a broad topic with quite a few tactics to experiment with. The first is to find related bloggers in your niche and reaching out to see if they’ll accept a guest post from you. There may be some trial and error in getting your pitch together and you should expect rejections or no replies at all. However, once you start building your connections and a network of guest posts, you can get significant links back to your website.

Alternatively, you can also try posting on websites like Medium or Quora. Both platforms have a large user base actively posting and engaging. With Quora, you can answer relevant questions in your post and include a link back to your website or specific pages. The more helpful you are, the more engagement you’ll have, and the more traffic you can drive to your website.

5. Social Media

You should be familiar with all the popular social channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. These are active sources of traffic for your website.

However, the strategies you use here must go beyond sharing the content from your website to your social channel. It’s not enough to click share and expect traffic to come flooding to your website.

Instead, you have to be equally active in your efforts as the people engaging on these platforms. This means, you must participate in conversations. Reach out and connect with other pages, people, and influencers. Add comments and comment back.

400;”>Social media was designed for people to be social. And, being social requires interactions from both sides.

6. Paid Advertisements
   

If you want to get traffic the fast way, pay for it.

You can use Facebook and Instagram ads to target specific audiences relevant to your website. Once you establish your budget and the creative content for the ads, you can run campaigns to drive traffic to your website.

Some businesses use paid ads not only to gain more traffic, but also to earn more profit. Depending on the ads being used, if it resonates with an audience you can expect to see reasonable results. Whereas other businesses spend hundreds to thousands on paid ads and get little to no return.

If you’d like to get some advice or help with your Facebook or Instagram marketing, get in touch.  

7. Use Analytics

In all your efforts to drive traffic to your website, install an analytics program like Google Analytics. Use analytics to observe visitor behavior, traffic sources, and other key information to improve your efforts.

If you use Google’s keyword report, you can increase your website’s traffic by using the right keywords in your content. Focus on the top 10 keywords and continue to track performance in the coming months.

Finally, check to see which channels drive the most visitors to your website. Are you gaining the most traffic from organic search results? Social media platforms? Website backlinks? Find the areas where you are succeeding and develop new actions to further enhance the results.

Want to learn more about paid traffic and organic search? Give this a read!