27 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website Building site traffic is a painstaking process but the results are cumulative.
By R.L. Adams Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business. It all starts with traffic. Sure, conversions matter. But, if you can't figure out a way to get those eyeballs onto your page, then conversions will be the last thing you'll be worrying about. Now, we all know that we can pay for traffic. Sure. But, that's not the only way you can get those prospects to show up.
The truth? Organic traffic converts at ten to thirteen times that of paid traffic. Clearly, when someone finds you, your product or your service organically, there's far more motivation to purchase. Why? Because everyone knows that if Google's vouched for you, then whatever it is that you're selling, must be good.
However, whether you focus on organic strategies to increase the traffic to your website or paid strategies, you need to first get a lay of the land. Understanding how you can get that lucrative traffic to show up is only half the battle. Actually doing the work to get them there is a whole other ball game.
Related: 17 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic
Increasing Your Website Traffic
Before you do anything, you need to ensure that you're tracking and analyzing your results. You can't work on increasing your traffic if you don't know where you're starting from. Three things you'll need here to install to track everything:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- AMP Analytics
AMP refers to Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. It's a lightweight framework for mobile devices. Since it's lightweight, it needs its own analytics and doesn't currently work off the generic analytics integration. For Wordpress, you need a special plugin that you can download here.
Once everything is humming, track your sessions and your landing pages. This way you'll know how many actual times people visited your website and what pages they arrived through. Google Search Console will allow you to associate keywords to each of those visits, along with how often they were displayed versus how many times they were clicked through.
1. Paid Ads
Paid ads are an obvious approach to increasing traffic. You can simply turn them on like a faucet. But, if you're diving into Facebook ads or Google ads or YouTube ads and so on, make sure your sales funnel is air tight. Otherwise, you're largely wasting your time and your money by sending paid traffic to your site.
This is where you need to ensure the proper landing pages and funnels that are working to convert your traffic into leads and buyers. Without that, you're largely wasting your time.
Related: The 3-Step Formula for Successful Facebook Video Ads
2. Search engine optimization
One of my absolute obsessions is search engine optimization (SEO). But, SEO is not for the faint of heart. It takes considerable amounts of effort. But, you can easily implement an SEO strategy alongside a paid strategy to grow your traffic over time.
What I've come to notice about organic traffic is that it converts from anywhere between 10 to 13 times more and greater than its paid-traffic counterparts. And it's free. Grab a good SEO course or audiobook and take the time to study and learn it in-depth or hire someone who knows what they're doing when it comes to this skill set.
Related: These 9 SEO Tips Are All You'll Ever Need to Rank in Google
3. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a pretty straightforward way to grow traffic to any website. As long as you're guest blogging on a site that has considerable reach, it should generate some healthy traffic numbers for you. Even better? Ensure that the guest blog is topical or related to the industry that you're in. You might find a hard time convincing popular blogs and bloggers to guest blog on their site, but it's well worth it when just one of them agrees.
Related: 4 Ways Guest Blogging Grows Your Blog Audience Quickly
4. Instagram traffic
Instagram is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Be sure to use relevant hash tags when posting pictures or interacting with others. Take the time to comment on other relevant images from those who have large followings. However, be careful not to be too promotional on every post. Add value through a 3-to-1 ratio. Three value posts to one promotional post.
Related: 20 Tips to Organically Market Your Brand on Instagram (Infographic)
5. Snapchat
Snapchat is another great avenue for social media traffic. Use Snapchat strategically to help promote whatever it is that you're selling. But, also to document your life as the entrepreneur behind the business. Remember, these days people rarely by from brands. They buy from people they like and can relate to.
Related: 5 Reasons Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram Are Wildly Successful
6. Facebook Pages and Groups
Find relevant Facebook Pages and Groups and start commenting and engaging with others. Don't spam. Don't promote. Not at first at least. But, comment and engage. Add value. Then, and only then, when the opportunity is right, direct them to a relevant piece of content on your site that would help add to the conversation. When done right, not only can you get the right eyeballs, but those prospects can quickly turn into customers.
Related: 10 Ways to Maximize Your Facebook Business Page
7. LinkedIn article publishing
I often use LinkedIn as a platform for helping to bring awareness to a topic. LinkedIn has massive reach and it's also what we call an authority site. When done the right way to the right audience, that article can bring in droves of traffic to your site. Use the long-form format and make it keyword specific but also relevant to the audience you're trying to reach.
Related: These 10 LinkedIn Tips Will Make You a Networking Master
8. Medium articles
Medium is another wildly popular authority site that everyone has access to. Use it to post your content and help drive awareness to your business, and ultimately traffic to your site. Add value here. Use it to create tutorials or walkthroughs or other long-form content that will ultimately help your audience.
Related: Medium Is the Solution If You Want to Blog Without Any Overhead
9. Slideshare slides
Slideshare is another great site to leverage to drive traffic to your site. And it's free. Plus, when done right, your slides can go viral. What types of slides? We're talking about PowerPoint-style presentations here. Create shareable content that you know your audience is going to like and ensure that you add relevant links back to your site.
Related: 5 Strategies for Using SlideShare in Your Marketing
10. Email marketing
Email marketing is still one of the best methods you can use, not only for making money online, but also for driving visitors to whatever it is that you're promoting. You can either build your own email list using lead magnets and sales funnels, or you can run solo ads through solo ad providers or email list brokers. Just search for the topic + " email list broker" in Google.
Related: 7 Statistics That Prove Email Marketing Isn't Dead
11. YouTube video marketing
YouTube is a powerful medium. We all know that. But, how many people are confident enough to put themselves out there and create YouTube videos? Not many. But, considering how much reach YouTube has, and the fact that it's the number two search engine in the world behind Google, more people should leverage this platform. Find ways to make instructional videos that add loads of value. And do it often.
Related: 12 Strategies for Promoting Your YouTube Videos
12. Conduct webinars
I have seen firsthand just how powerful the webinar medium is. Webinars will not only drive relevant traffic and increase visits to your site, but you can also use them to make money fast. It doesn't matter what you sell, as long as you use the perfect webinar formula, you can quite literally make millions.
Related: 12 Steps for Creating the Perfect Webinar
13. Tripwires
Tripwire is a term originally introduced by Perry Belcher, co-founder of Digital Marketer and Native Commerce. It's a low front-end offer that's usually in the range of $7 to $37. They can even go as low as one dollar. The point? They help to bring people into your world and then ascend them up your value ladder. They are low friction front-end offers that introduce people to your business and it's usually a much easier sell than going straight to a higher ticket offer.
Related: 3 Core Sales Funnels to Fuel Your Quest for Online Income
14. Free-plus-shipping offers
Free-plus-shipper offers are a great way to increase traffic to any site or offer. They help you to identify buyers and they carry the power of the word free. Free is a big motivation, verified by numerous studies. Books work great in this medium, something that's been ardently fleshed out by the world's best marketers like Russell Brunson and Dean Graziosi. But, other physical items work great as free-plus-shipping offers as well.
Related: What Does 'Free Shipping' Really Mean for Retailers?
15. Marketing conference sponsorships
To get more traffic and eyeballs to your website and business, consider sponsoring one of the top marketing conferences out there. This is a quick and easy way to reach potential customers. Plus, you might even be able to meet market leaders who could further assist you with your cause by partnering up with them in some capacity.
Related: Top 10 Marketing Conferences For Entrepreneurs
16. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is taking the world by storm. Influencers across a variety of social media platforms and even blogs can help you get your message to the masses. And fast. While you might have to pay some money to access this medium, you can drive massive amounts of relevant traffic, and ultimately sales, to whatever it is that you're peddling.
Related: The Road Ahead for Influencer Marketing: 2018 and Beyond
17. Create lead magnets
From ebooks to checklists and cheat sheets, and even software trials and beyond, think about a lead magnet you can offer to your audience. It's a great way to add value while also increasing awareness for whatever it is that you're selling. Lead magnets should be consumable in roughly 15 to 30 minutes. Not more than that.
Related: How to Create a Lead Magnet That Actually Gets Leads
18. Broken link-building strategy
One way to quickly increase your traffic is to go on a site like Wikipedia and search for broken links. Then, replace those broken links with quality content by first researching the old content using the Wayback Machine. Then, replace it with similar, high-quality content and contact the editor of the page to offer up yours as a replacement. It's not guaranteed, but when it works, it's powerful.
Related: 5 Strategies for Better 'Link Building' and Improving Your SEO
19. Use Quora to answer questions
Quora has a massive following and you can reach a wide audience here to increase traffic to your site easily and quickly, without paying a dime. Go on Quora and search for relevant questions to your business or industry or niche. Answer them thoroughly and drop a relevant link or call-to-action at the end.
Related: Why Is Quora Important for Business Websites?
20. Get active on Reddit
Reddit is another highly popular platform that reaches a wide swath of the online world. Leverage Reddit by getting active, engaging, commenting and posting. Don't spam. Especially in the beginning. Use tact and composure. But, slowly build a solid track record of healthy posts before promoting anything.
Related: Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian: Building a Business Mostly Isn't Fun
21. Refresh expired website content
If you have outdated content on your blog, refresh it. Bring it up to date. Expired content is useless. If it expired, then you should figure out a way to make it more relevant by bringing it current. It doesn't take much effort, but it can help send powerful relevancy signals to Google. In turn, it'll increase your traffic over time.
Related: Here's How to Wring Value From Outdated Blog Posts
22. Create infographics
Infographics are a great way you can help increase awareness to just about any business. Create an infographic based on studies that are relevant to your topic or industry. Then, share those with the world. Hire a great designer and build something that's quality and not something that's quickly thrown together.
Related: 6 Infographic Best Practices You've Been Missing out on
23. Do industry-specific studies and share them
You could conduct studies or surveys and share them. Ensure they're industry-specific. If you have to, hire a professional marketing firm to do this. Go out there and tally the market and figure out some of the statistics that could have an impact on decision making in your market. Then share those with the world.
Related: 8 Strategies for Expanding a Niche Product Into New Markets
24. Increase the speed of your website
Website speed is a big factor that's related to relevancy. Your site is far more relevant if it loads quickly. To that end, find a good content-delivery network (CDN) you can incorporate such as Amazon's CloudFront or other services. CDNs help to spread your content across servers all over the world and serve them to the nearest visitor. Also, reduce and optimize images and use a service like Oleg Schegolev's SEMRush to help identify performance issues with your site's speed.
Related: Why a Good User Experience Is the Most Overlooked SEO Strategy
25. Optimize for mobile devices
Today, we're dealing with a mobile-first index on Google. But, the obvious truth is that less and less people are using desktop devices to access the internet. If your site isn't optimized for mobile devices, you're going to be losing out on a large amount of traffic.
Related: 8 DIY SEO Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Marketing
26. Implement re-targeting pixels
Re-targeting pixels are great ways for increasing traffic to your site. Plus, that traffic will be warm traffic. Not cold. Warm traffic is far more likely to convert. Implement a Facebook or Google pixel on your site so that you can re-target the people who visit by following them around with ads.
Related: 5 Lessons Learned From Running 2,652 Facebook Ad Campaigns
27. Blog your heart out
Of course, last but not least, is to blog your heart out. If you don't have a blog on your website, start one immediately. And blog your heart out. Add immense value and watch as the traffic comes flooding into your site. But, you have to be consistent. You can't start and stop every few weeks or months. That won't help.
