How to Increase Website Traffic for Free [33 Techniques]

If you are an Internet Entrepreneur or a marketing professional in charge of your company website, this (How to Increase your Website Traffic for Free and grow sales) must be the question you must be having in your mind.

The traffic of a website is quite similar to the traffic on our roads. The way travelers are the traffic constituents on the street, website users are the constituents of website traffic.

What is Website Traffic

Website Traffic is determined by the number of visitors visiting your website and the number of pages they visit.

Avinash Chandra

Website traffic is a metric that indicates the number of people that visited your website. These visits can be a result of various strategies.

Keeping an eye on this metric is essential. It is so because it tells if your digital marketing tactics and efforts are paying off, or not. If you ask any digital marketing about their primary goal, they’d say it is to increase website traffic. So if you are one of them here is how to increase website traffic and sales.

In technical terms, website traffic or web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to and from your web site.

Avinash Chandra

All major websites (and most probably yours) continuously monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic, to learn, which parts or pages of your website are popular and are regularly accessed using digital analytics tools such as Google Analytics.

And if you are wondering why to worry about website traffic, here is why:

• This is because traffic converts into leads, and leads, into revenue-generating customers.

Please also note that you also need relevant and good quality traffic to your website, for improved conversion.

Ultimate conversion can only happen if you can drive quality traffic to the website and convince them that you’re the best in the industry.

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Search algorithms keep changing, and digital trends keep evolving. Businesses often struggle with increasing their traffic as it can be hard to keep track of all that.

Want to know how to increase website traffic? I have listed 33 timeless & practical ways below to achieve that target. So keep reading.

Quantity & Quality of website traffic

The quality of traffic on the road depends on the quality of the road, the type of vehicles plying on the road, and the compliance of traffic rules by the users.

Similarly, among 200+ factors, the quality of website traffic depends significantly on the page speed, the content quality and the technical configuration of the website among others.

A website that is appropriately designed with a user-friendly sitemap, responsive design, fast server, and quality content receives a considerable amount of traffic compared to its competitors.

Needless to say that the Success of your web property depends on the quality and quantity of traffic.

Digital Analytics or Web Analytics tools helps you measure the behavior of a visitor to your website to help you determine the quality and quantity of traffic.

These tools help you analyze the qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition. You can use this data to drive continual improvement of your website, to enhance the website visitor’s experience to achieve success.

Quantity of Website Traffic – Traffic Metrics

The quantity of website traffic can be defined with metrics such as:

1. Sessions on the website
2. Percentage of new sessions
3. Unique website users

Quality of Website Traffic – Conversion Metrics

The quality of website traffic can be defined with parameters such as

1. Average session duration
2. Bounce Rate
3. Repeat users
4. Sessions from Organic Search and Referral
5. Goal Conversions you are achieving
6. Traffic through Mobile
7. Percentage of Internal Search wrt. to website sessions
8. Percentage of Bounces following an Internal search

To be successful, you need to focus on increasing the quantity as well as the quality of your website traffic. It does not make sense to have:

• 100k users are visiting your site with a 90% bounce rate. What it means is that your website is not meeting the expectations of your visitor. Or
• Only 100 users are visiting your website. (an exception could be if you are a real niche website with very high goal conversion rate with high transaction value).

The Focus of this article is to enable you to learn how to increase the quality and quantity of your website traffic & build business.

However, before we do that, let us understand the sources of the traffic to an average website.

Leading Content Marketing firm BrightEdge reveals that Organic Search is the primary Website Traffic Generator. As per insights from BrightEdge’s Data Cube, organic search trumps other traffic generators, driving 51% of all visitors for both B2B and B2C businesses.

Sources of Website Traffic

With the ever-increasing channels to drive traffic to a website, the life of a Digital Marketing professional is becoming stressful day by day. Many digital marketing professionals and brand owners struggle to decide where to put the maximum marketing resources.

The key part of any successful online marketing strategy is to decide the channel, which is likely to drive the most visitors to a company’s web property. It does not make sense to put money everywhere as marketing resources are almost always much lesser than the opportunities present; on top of it, there is increasing scrutiny on marketing spends and its ROI. (Source)

Organic Search: The King of Website Traffic Generator

Leading Content Marketing firm BrightEdge reveals that Organic Search is the King of Website Traffic Generator.

Organic search trumps other traffic generators, driving 51% of all visitors for both B2B and B2C businesses.

BrightEdge Insights

With the increasing popularity of Social media, this might come as a surprise to many. However, it is quite reasonable as search is the primary mechanism to discover content on the Internet.

Organic Search Drives 51% vs only 5% from Social Media of the Online Traffic to a website.

Impact of Organic Search across the Industry Type

Organic Search has a much more profound impact on B2B sites compared to B2C sites. As per the study, organic search traffic accounted for 73 percent of all traffic to business services sites, more than a 20 percent jump from the 51 percent when evaluating organic search across all websites.

The business services sector also received the least amount of traffic from the display, email and referral compared to the other industries, gaining less than 20 percent of its traffic from the three sources combined.

Paid Search: Method to increase website traffic fast

From the above, it is obvious that Organic Search drives traffic to a website, however when we look at the data shared by BrightEdge on Revenue per Traffic the sudden rise of paid search revenue is quite interesting.

However, it is quite apparent as when a consumer is actively considering buying; paid search plays a key role in helping them decide what to buy. At the same time, many businesses use paid search to drive conversion with deals.

The above data from BrightEdge also shows the significant impact of search on the overall revenues of a business.

Organic Search: Key to Driving Online Traffic to your Website

From the above, it is clear that the organic search is key to driving traffic to a website. To succeed a marketer needs to ensure that the site is appropriately optimized and contains the relevant content their target audience is seeking.

How to Increase Website Traffic and Sales?

From the above, it is quite clear is that influencing organic search should be your topmost priority.

You can influence organic search and increase your website traffic by repeatedly creating and promoting consumer-relevant content that ranks for keywords with significant volume and low competition.

However, it is easier said than done. It is not enough to build good quality content; you need to be very systematic about promoting them as well.

Therefore I am sharing all the techniques, which will help you understand how to increase your website traffic by creating and promoting good content.

Best Ways to Increase Traffic to your Website [33 Techniques]

Finally, let’s jump into the promised 33 timeless and practical best ways to increase website traffic:

Section 1: ▶︎ How to Increase Website Traffic for Free (4 Techniques)

1. Create & Implement an unbeatable content plan to get traffic to your website free

Your audience will judge you based on how you present yourself to the world. Create a content plan to generate authentic, unique, relatable & credible content pieces.

Avoid writing with commercial intent. Instead, have an informative approach and an interactive tone. It is noisy out there. So how do you be heard, and heard well? You also need to manage your content by checking its relevance with the world in the present-day context.

Removing irrelevant and old material from your website and adding fresh content or sections is a good practice. You don’t have to renovate the entire content. Just a touch-up on old web pages is enough.

P.S. Updating content on your website is also appreciated by search engines.

2. Spread the word out: best way to increase website traffic for free

Once you have tooled up your webpage with a linkable, likeable, useful and value-adding content, it is time to market the content by spreading the word out. Reach out to those who are looking for the content you have got.

You can leave answers along with the link to your content on pages like Quora, Yahoo Answers. Go ahead and identify people who are linking similar content.

You can use tools such as Voila Norbert to identify email ids based on the prospect’s first name, last name, and website address.

You can also identify people who like the content like yours with tools such as Link Prospector Majestic and Ahrefs.

3. Get listed in online web directories: free ways to increase website traffic

When talking about how to increase website traffic, we often forget about submitting links to online directories. Getting listed in online directories plays a crucial role in increasing web traffic.

Google Maps, Google My Business, Yelp, Foursquare, Glassdoor, YellowPages, Bing Local, Mapquest, YellowBot, Yahoo Local and SuperPages are some of the excellent business directory sites you might want to register your business to.

Online directories aren’t merely a digital version of the fat books with telephone numbers. When someone searches for your business online, these directories help potential customers to identify you. They can learn more about you and contact you whenever.

If you are not registered on a few online business directories, you are surely missing out on great opportunities. You can add a listing, or you can claim a listing. When you claim, you can edit the information provided by you and respond to reviews posted by customers.

4. Start guest blogging to increase traffic to your website for free

It isn’t something that strikes immediately when you think of website traffic. But it works wonders if done correctly. Ironically, it is impossible to discuss the topic “how to increase website traffic” without talking about guest blogging.

Guest blogging goes two ways – contributing to guest blogging websites and asking people to guest blog on a platform that belongs to you.

When you guest post on a relevant blogging platform/site, it increases your brand awareness and blog traffic.

When you invite others to guest post on your website, they’re likely to share it on their platforms as well.

This would direct new users to your site. You can collaborate with the guest blogger/influencer in a barter deal that is a win-win for both parties. In both cases, be aware of spammy tactics as they might result in getting penalized by Google.

Section 2: ▶︎ How to Increase Organic Traffic on Website (9 techniques)

5. The Skyscraper Technique of Brian Dean to increase organic traffic to website

If like me, you are also getting sleepless nights trying to find answers to the following questions:

1. How to increase traffic to my website
2. How to increase website ranking and traffic
3. How to increase traffic on website through SEO
4. How to increase website traffic through SEO

Then here is the technique for you.

Brian Dean of Backlinko shared this technique – The Skyscraper Technique that helps you identify topics for great content and helps you better the job to build a massive audience.

The logic of this technique is derived from human nature to talk about the best. The tallest building in town is referred to and always talked about as an inspiration or a reference.

Similarly, if you have the best content on a topic, you will have everyone referring to it all the time, giving you backlinks leading to increased traffic to your website.

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The key steps of the Skyscraper technique are:

Step 1: Find link-worthy content on your business relevant topic

Step 2: Build Content with an improved perspective, updated research and information

Step 3: Reach out to the right people to generate the links needed to rank

Step 1: Find link-worthy content on your business relevant topic

A linkable asset is the foundation of any successful link-focused content marketing campaign. To identify the linkable asset, identify a competition which is already having massive traffic and find out their top-rated content. To do so, use:

• Ahrefs Top Pages Tool and find the content of your competitor that has a track record of attracting quality links. This tool will help (part of Site Explorer) you identify the domains from where backlinks are generating for your competitor (you may also get a backlink from those domains) and adding value to them by enhancing their domain authority. You can also use Ahrefs Content Explorer tool to find out the most shared content for any topic having the most significant amount of shares on social media channels;
• BuzzSumo to find the material which has been heavily shared on social networks. Buzzsumo can help you:
  • Uncover hot new industry topics & exciting news
  • Identify key influencers in your industry
  • Show the most successful content from a social perspective
  • Trends and patterns in terms of which articles did well and at what times
  • Build a content marketing strategy
  • Maximise the reach of their forthcoming articles
• Google Search to identify top articles that already rank for competitive keywords. Now use any link analysis tool to find the link, that has at least 25 referring domains. Below are some of the best Link analysis tools:
  • Link Analysis Tools
    • http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
      • An excellent tool for SEO link building campaign. It monitors inbound links and helps bloggers outreach. It lists all pages linking to your site and their corresponding link anchor text, provides info on the quality of external links (good, bad, dofollow, nofollow, etc.).
    • http://www.majesticseo.com/
      • An excellent tool capable of showing graphs comparing the link discovery overtime for up to 5 chosen domains with several sub-domains created on the analysed domain. It shows several indexed URLs, several backlinks and domains linking back to your site and breakdown of link types (images, nofollows, redirects, iframes, deleted).
    • http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
      • Open Site Explorer is a brilliant, well designed, quick and smart link research tool. It is capable of showing a total number of links to your website, its page and domain authority score, list of pages and domains linking to your site and their page/domain authority.
    • http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
      • Identifies inbound links which can hurt your website rankings instead of helping you to rank better.
• Q&A websites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers can help you figure out what people are searching for. You can answer their question right there on such platforms along with a link to your website. We have seen traffic jumping big time with such efforts for our clients. Quora is an excellent platform to not only share your knowledge but also to identify great blog post ideas. You can identify such ideas, build your content of the relevant topic and answer the question on Quora., but after you’ve published helpful content, you can respond to Quora questions with a link to your post.
• Dig into questions your consumers are asking on your and your competitor’s platform. Build content for such problems.
• Identify Social Groups and forums on social platforms such as Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit that are related to your industry. Identify users pain point and understand what members are asking. You can use platforms such as Boardreader to enter your keywords and find relevant topics or posts.
• Follow key influencers on social media to identify emerging topics. You can also have a look at what hashtags are being used in your community. You can use Hashtagify to research relevant, related and popular hashtags to understand what people are talking about in real-time.

Step 2: Build Content with an improved perspective, updated research and information

Why should somebody come to your website, the only reason could be that you offer something better compared to others. Therefore you need to build Content with an improved perspective, updated research and information. Some of the useful techniques are:

• Long-Form Content: Google loves long-form content. Therefore a simple trick is to build a longer article.
• Promising (But true)  Title: Commit better info through your Title and earn the attention of your consumer.
• Up to date information: Spend time to build an up to date perspective on a subject.
• Visual delight: Attract a user with a visually attractive image.
• Complete info: It is better to build a single piece of info which ensures your user get to the point.

Step 3: Reach out to the right people to generate the links needed to rank

Identify people who are interested in your article or content and reach out to them through eMails. You can identify site owners who are linking similar content, and they might like to connect with your content as well. To identify such site owners use ahrefs.com or Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer to identify all of the links pointing to your competitor’s content.

Once you have identified reach out to them and share your link requesting them to have a look and share with their followers, at this juncture, what you must understand is that you must continue to build more and more such articles and you will continue to see the rise of your website.

6. Choosing the right Content & Competition with KOB Analysis for Planning SEO Campaigns

You must be wondering that if you are a newbie in the market, how can you compete with the might of a prolific competitor, who must be anyways on the content creation spree. How can a David beat a Goliath in the game, which it has already mastered? If you go after the most traffic-intensive content of your competitor, do you have a chance of success? This is where KOB Analysis for Planning SEO Campaigns features.

KOB stands for Keyword Opposition to Benefit Analysis. It’s the process Originally popularised by Todd Malicoat. This unique technique is essentially a mechanism of conducting a cost-benefit analysis on a specific keyword (or set of keywords). This technique can help you identify how stiff is the competition for a SERP and whether you will generate any business with the effort. This ratio provides you with the “sweet spot” for conducting an SEO campaign based on the allocated resources. To put it, it helps you identify keywords with maximum ROI.

KOB Analysis is a ratio between Keyword Opposition to Benefit it generates. This ratio helps you identify the “sweet spot” for conducting an SEO campaign based on the allocated resources (human, budgetary, etc.). This tool helps us by bench-marking against our competitor to understand the revenue potential of the content. You should develop content with the maximum revenue potential first and after that, others. The original formula given by Todd Malicoat in his Blog is:

KOB Score = Opposition / Benefit

Opposition can be calculated by assigning a 1-10 score for several factors:

• Age
• Anchor text
• On-page optimisation (several sub-factors)
• Global link popularity
• Local Set links
• Unique linking domains
• Exact match bonus
• Social signals

The benefit is essentially the commercial benefit possible with the effort you will make to rank for a specific keyword or content idea. You can calculate benefit by multiplying search volume of a specific keyword with the cost per click data from AdWords. Benefit gives you better insights into which terms have the highest volume and commercial intent.

I am sure you must be wondering how practical it is to calculate the above, here is our secret formula based on the above insight. I am sharing the same below:

KOB Score = Traffic Cost from SEMRush / Difficulty score from SEMRush

What is Traffic Cost from SEMRush & How to Calculate it effectively

SEMRush is a competitor research tool and can help you uncover insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building.

You can determine Traffic Cost from SEMRush, which is the hypothetical value of the cost of traffic generated for a webpage through Google Ads CPC ads.

It is calculated based on the position the page is getting on organic search results, its potential CTR (ClickThrough rate) and the amount of money someone pays using Google Adwords for the traffic webpage generates.

How to Calculate Traffic Cost

• Identify the main Keyword relevant to your offering
  • As Google does not depend on keywords anymore, it is imperative that once you identify a subject for your next blog post/content, make sure that you know the main keyword driving traffic to a relevant webpage or your key competitor.
    • To do so, enter a broad keyword phrase into SEMRush > Keyword Analytics > Phrase Match. Choose the most relevant keyword from the results with a broad search query every month.

• Identify key website or key competitor ranking for that keyword. Note down the URL.
• Feed the URL into SEMRush > Domain Analytics to see the organic search traffic website is getting and the keywords which are driving it. This is where you will also see the traffic cost for the URL for both organic & paid keywords and all other keywords which are driving traffic to it.

• Download the Organic Traffic Report from SEMRush > Domain Analytics > Organic Resrecah > Positions tab to understand the Monthly Traffic site is generating from your key target country for individual keywords. You will also get CPC data, Total search visibility, the position of the listing etc.

• From the data now calculate the traffic for individual keywords (Multiply total traffic to the traffic contribution) and Calculate Keyword Traffic Cost (Multiply CPC to Traffic, every keyword is generating).

Now you have the keyword traffic cost for your competitor, who is already featuring in search results.

What is the Keyword Difficulty Score & how to calculate it

Now use SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Index from the table you have just downloaded. You need not calculate this. Keyword Difficult Index quantitatively illustrates how difficult it will be to rank for a specific keyword.

The higher the score (in the scale of 1% to 100%, 100% means very very difficult) the more difficult it will be to rank for the keyword. Keyword difficulty Index indicates the competition on a given keyword set.

Once you have identified top-rated traffic pages of your competitor, follow the above approach for all the key pages and build the KOB Score.

Calculating the KOB Score

Now divide Traffic cost by the difficulty Index (in percentage) to calculate KOB Score.

 Identifying Sweet Sport and Making sense of KOB Score with ROI Index

Once you have calculated the KOB scores for multiple keywords, now is the time to identify the sweet spot with ROI Index. The ROI Index helps you identify the keyword or content you will go after.

ROI INDEX = KOB SCORE / TRAFFIC COST

Higher the ROI Index, the better will be the output of the efforts you will be making.

However do not just choose the content with the highest ROI Index, you need to balance the traffic as well (as you would like to go for a keyword/page with just 2-4 sessions).

Choose the content where you see the maximum return compared to the Traffic Cost for sizable traffic.

Here is my excel sheet for your reference.

KOB ANALYSIS DATA FROM ESMRush

7 Build domain authority by getting quality backlinks

What does a backlink mean, you ask? A backlink is simply a mention of your website with a link from another website.

Creating domain authority-building quality backlinks is a crucial component of search engine optimization.

Significance of getting a backlink? It indicates Google that your site or webpage is a credible source of information.

Apart from SEO, highest quality traffic can also be derived through backlinks. Users on those authority building sites might click on your link and hopefully, make a purchase.

When a big industry player or an influencer of the complementary industry backlinks to your business, it increases your visibility in front of their (more extensive) audience. It will also bring along high traffic to your website.

When more and more brands, businesses or influencers point towards you in a positive light, it increases your credibility. This results in higher ranking and ultimately, more traffic.

8 Write headlines that gets to get clicked

Writing irresistible headlines helps a LOT in increasing web traffic to your website. Optimize titles for SEO and social media posts accordingly. You have invested a significant amount of time and resources in writing a mindblowing content piece.

That is awesome. But it doesn’t matter how amazing blogs you write if no one clicks by reading the title. It needs to be catchy and compelling, not necessarily click-baity. Though sometimes that works too if used creatively.

Take the opinion of people and ask them what works better. Ask them if they would want to click on the title you’ve picked. So, before finally hitting ‘publish’, think twice about the title.

9 Link internally

The key to winning over a user is to grab their attention and never let it go. Once a user has landed on your website, you have to keep them hooked and asking for more.

Apart from writing insatiable content, inter-linking also helps. You don’t want to overdo it, sure. But do not miss out on opportunities to link internally.

So, even if the user has left the webpage, he is still on your website, surfing around and looking for what more can he get out of you.

Healthy and witty internal linking also help in decreasing bounce rates and increasing session time. As this improves overall user experience, it also puts you in good books of Google.

10 Submit your website to search engines

This tactic is a helpful tactic for search engine optimization. By submitting your website to search engines, you are asking their bots to crawl, index and rank your website according to your content.

This unpaid way of how to get website traffic is still useful and always will be. Top sites to submit your site to are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Before doing so, make sure your content is the way you want and up to date.

Also, through your content, let Google know what is essential on your website. Don’t assume that the search engines will eventually find your site, make ’em! Make sure they know that you exist.

11 Don’t underestimate On-page SEO

There are numerous on-page SEO tricks and tactics you can apply to make your web pages perform better. When you adopt these tactics, your web pages rank better as well resulting in more visitors.

When we talk about on-page SEO, we mean producing relevant and original content, writing optimized meta descriptions and meta titles.

The meta description appears below your link on search engine result pages. It helps users understand what to expect once they land on your page. Add good quality images to your website complimenting your content.

Do not forget to add alt text, description of text and captions (through content management systems like WordPress). Also, make sure you use keywords diligently across your content pieces.

12 Make sure your website has a responsive design

Making your website responsive equals making it compatible for any and every platform can be accessed from. From computers to laptops to smartphones to tablets, your website should be easily compatible for all.

The basic need for any website to rank better in search engines is to provide a good user experience. If your website asks people do adjust to reading by zooming in and out, you are practically begging them to look for information somewhere else.

It is simply not good user experience. Creating a responsive web design isn’t just helpful in “how to increase web traffic”. It is also useful in keeping the traffic diverted to your website hooked.

13 Make sure your website has less loading time

People have shallow patience levels, especially on the web. They simply aren’t going to wait for 30-40 seconds for a website to load. It is a paradox of choice that the internet provides that they don’t have just one option.

And they don’t have all day to wait for your webpage to load. Attention span is also decreasing by the day.

Even if you have written a terrific search engine optimized content piece, if it takes too much time to load, you have lost your audience. Use good quality compressed images to decrease loading time.

Create your web pages in such a way that they’re optimized for all devices and load faster.

Section 3: ▶︎ How to Increase Website Traffic through Google (3 Techniques)

Remember that the content you’re writing needs to satiate two sets of audiences – humans (your target audience) and search engine bots.

Another source your website receives a significant amount of traffic is from the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The higher the ranking, the higher the chances of getting a click.

Here are some technique that will help you increase website traffic on Google search.

14 Optimize website content for search engines

Remember that the content you’re writing needs to satiate two sets of audiences – humans (your target audience) and search engine bots.

Another source your website receives a significant amount of traffic is from the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The higher the ranking, the higher the chances of getting a click.

Undoubtedly, SEO is a slow yet success-oriented building block for increasing website traffic. To get a good rank in search engines, optimize your website content.

Pay attention and the right amount of time to do keyword research. You want to integrate high volume low competition keywords. Place the primary and secondary keywords strategically all around your content.

You should maintain optimum keyword density. Try using the terminology popular in the industry. Also, optimize meta-titles and meta descriptions.

Use keywords in your meta tags, headers, URL of new pages and title tags. It is a slow and continuous process, keep at it.

15 Take Google Analytics seriously

To understand the effect of your marketing efforts best, analyze your traffic before and after the strategies you have implemented. Google Analytics is a gold mine of a resource that would give you insights on the quality and quantity of website traffic.

Analyzing the data provided by analytics is a continuous process that quantifies the efficiency of your digital efforts. Keep checking your website analytics regularly.

Pay close attention to what tactics work, what steps drive traffic, and what posts have worked for your business.

Also, keep an eye on the demographics, age group, and the time. It is a free tool by Google that helps you track links for your marketing campaigns and understand the source.

This will, for sure, help you comprehend which content works, which campaign needs improvement and which ones you shouldn’t waste your resources on.

While there are substantial organic ways to direct traffic to your website, there are some paid ways as well.

Here’s how to increase website traffic using paid ways:

16 Google Ads or Search Engine Advertising

How Google Ads works? Long short, you need to bid for particular keywords. If your ad is selected, it will display on the top of the SERP for the keyword.

You’d have to pay Google for every click by any user. Your ad getting selected depends on your ad quality and relevance. Paid ads get displayed at the top, after the organic results, and sometimes, in the sidebar.

You don’t pay Google for displaying your ad. You pay it for each click. It is also known as Pay Per Click or Cost Per Click campaign.

As compared to other forms of advertising, Cost Per Click is very cheap. You get to set the budget, duration, demographics, age group and other specifications. Being so targeted, the success rate of CPC campaigns is very high.

Section 4: ▶︎ How to Increase Website Traffic using Social Media (5 Techniques)

Social Media Platforms can help you bring tons of traffic. Here is how to increase traffic to your website through social media:

17 Make the most of social media channels

It isn’t about broadcasting anymore, and it is about indulging in conversations. Social media platforms, if used diligently, are fantastic sources to drive traffic from. There are more than 1 billion active users on Facebook and Instagram. With a number this big, you WANT to tap into that potential.

You can use social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to promote blogs and promotional landing pages. Are you writing fantastic content? If yes, that’s great! But can your target audience find it?

This is the real question. They won’t know and appreciate the treasure of knowledge that you are until they get to read your content assets.

You also share your content creatives like posts and infographics and link them to related landing pages on your website. Don’t be too safe around the content you publish. Play around and experiment. Test what works for your audience and what keeps them coming for more.

18 Include relevant hashtags in the post copy

People have also become picky when it comes to online content. The algorithm of social platforms understands user behaviour and choices through reading hashtags.

The platforms ultimately display more of what the users have ‘Liked’. Smart usage of relevant and trending hashtags can help you a big deal. It will, for sure help you reach your ideal customer group and expand your reach.

When you add hashtags, you increase your reach way beyond your networks and get seen and discovered by users who are not necessarily following you on social as of now.

A lot of marketers might agree that Twitter is a hard nut to crack. But with the help of the right and relevant hashtags, you can be SEEN. It would also increase organic traffic, your visibility, follower count and ultimately website traffic.

19 Engage with your audience on social

You can’t just publish content on your social profiles and forget about them. Keep looking at the notifications and track comments. Listen to your followers; see what they are commenting and indulge in conversation.

Social media is a robust platform that allows businesses to answer queries within minutes. If someone posts an inquiry, reach out to them. If someone shows interest in your product, educate them about your product.

If anyone asks about pricing, send them a quote instantly. For businesses, interacting with their target group has never been easier. If someone isn’t satisfied with your services, get in touch with them and make it right.

Get active, be proactive, interact as much as you can and always be available for your customers.

20 Social Media Advertising

Just like Google, social channels, like Facebook, Instagram, etc. also allow advertisements. You can create ads for specific goals like building brand awareness, increasing traffic or conversions.

You can get creative and make ads with attractive images, engaging videos or a slideshow of pictures. You can choose the psychographic data and target your audience.

Instagram is becoming a marketing channel for retailers. It gives great exposure due to targeting features through its ‘link in bio’ feature.

On Facebook, you can also promote your products in buy and sell groups. Interested people would click on your click and reach your landing page. There is no secret ingredient for a successful marketing campaign.

You have to try different permutations and combinations of paid and organic ways of how to increase website traffic.

21 Increase website traffic with social networking

Influencer marketing is on its boom on social platforms, especially on Instagram. Instagram is a highly visual platform. At first, if you are a small and growing brand and want to be seen, you can reach out to influencers with large audiences to promote your business or product.

These are mostly paid collaborations, but influencers with smaller following might as well do it in exchange for your products (barter collaborations). Keep in mind that you cannot just reach out to any person who has a following of millions. You can also collaborate with complimenting brands.

For example, for promotion of children’s books, publishing houses or book authors can reach out to mommy bloggers and influencers. If you have a makeup line, reach out to fashion and lifestyle bloggers. You need to find an influencer that fits in your niche. It helps if the influencer has an image for producing great content.

Section 4: ▶︎ Content Led Tactics to Increase Website Traffic (7 Techniques)

22 Content / Brand Laddering

Professor Kevin Lane Keller created Concept of Brand Laddering.

Brand Laddering is a concept that illustrates how Brand perception builds in the mind of a consumer over time.

The brand connects gradually as the consumer understand more about a brand and its offering over some time.

A Brand Ladder has three sections, Attributes, Functional Benefits and Emotional Benefits.

In a consumers mind, a brand initially showcases attributes as the benefit, followed by functional benefits, finally leading up to emotional benefits.

Similarly, if you are a newbie in the marketplace, you need to connect with consumer bit by bit.

Enrich consumers life by helping them through the purchase funnel. Start with assisting them in understanding what a product can do, how they can use it, and how to choose the best product, do not rush into selling them.

Identify topics of concern based on keyword research. A consumer who come across your brand name during their research process most likely entrust with their business.

23 Build linkable / Likable Content

Not all content is equal. Content with different approaches and a similar number of words may rank differently. To make sure that your content stays on top, follow the following tips:

• Keep URL’s shorter than 50 characters on an average.
• Use interactive / visual content. Such content engages a user much more than plain text.
• Vie for an engaging title
• Communicate in simple language so that everyone can understand.
• Use floating share buttons
• Go for Long-form content
• Share on social media platforms at a regular frequency

24 Make the most of videos

Videos are simply engaging. Social platforms now give importance and preferences to longer videos that perform well. You might think long videos might lose the attention of your visitors. It isn’t true if your videos are engaging enough.

Make explainer videos, product demo videos, You can also invest in Youtube Marketing, if you have that kind of resources. Videos will attract more audience as well as keeping existing visitors engaged.

People are suckers for visuals; hence, videos perform better and boost your website traffic. If you create videos even once a week consistently, you’ll be able to bring traffic to your site.

25 See what the competition is up to

We’re not saying copy. No. Never. But it is okay to keep an eye on what they’re doing. Stay aware of what offers they are putting up, what marketing strategies they use, and how they attract users to their site. There are software that make competition analysis easy for you.

They analyze the performance of their website and content and give you insights accordingly. The software doesn’t just give you numbers, and also help with topics that work with competition on social media as well.

The software also helps with metrics like total visits, average visit duration, pages visited per visit, bounce rate and traffic source and medium.

26 Host or provide exclusive content on your website

Hosting exclusive content, like webinars, trial workshops and PDF download, on your website can bring quality organic traffic to your landing pages.

Webinars are a great way to impart knowledge, wisdom and expertise to the audience that has signed up and waiting for you. It is a great way to connect with them and instantly increase website traffic.

You can shoot out announcement emails and reminder emails a week ahead of time to create a buzz. You can also create an event on social media and promote it on all your channels.

You can also create informative free courses, slideshow presentations and other relevant, helpful content to attract users to visit your website. Having a regular schedule for posting such videos or webinars can give these users a reason to come back.

Provide something of value, so they understand your credibility, expertise and dedication towards the work and the industry you work in.

27 Keep updating your website

Content creation and content marketing are continuous processes. The day you stop creating or updating existing content is the day you sign on your business’s death warrant.

In today’s fast-paced world, you need to stay updated. You need to be on your toes to remain relevant. The tone you used five years ago doesn’t necessarily work in the present day. The lingo keeps changing, and new terminologies keep coming up.

You need to keep updating your content and write new content accordingly. You don’t have to renovate your whole content structure. You just have to remove outdated content and remove what does not sound relevant anymore. Avoid using time-bound lingo.

You can also experiment with types of content and see what works for you. Keep updating your website content regularly, as and when the need arises. It is a good practise for SEO as well.

This process of content laddering allows you to connect with the consumer at every stage. To identify various steps of purchase, you can do Google Keyword research, conduct online and offline surveys.

28 Focus on targeting long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are 3 to 4 (maybe 5) word key phrases. These keywords are incredibly focused and specific to what you are selling. When a customer knows exactly what he is looking for, he uses highly specific key phrases.

Short tail keywords have high search volumes; ranking for those keywords might be difficult. Long-tail keywords, being extremely focused, give you a chance to rank higher on the search results pages.

Higher rank leads to more clicks. As compared to generic short tail keywords, long-tail keywords are more likely to convert to actual sales. This is because the customer is already aware of the product and you sell what he needs.

If you want to master the art of increasing website organic traffic, know how to target long-tail keywords.

Section 5: ▶︎ Promotional Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website (4 Techniques)

29 Make the most of landing pages

By landing pages, what we mean are pages where you display product offers, discount codes, free trials, free PDFs, etc. Optimizing your landing pages to the most will boost your ad campaigns and in turn, maximize the ROI.

The crucial tip we would like to give you is – Always match the phrasing of your landing page with that of the link or ad copy that directed them here.

This assures the users that they have arrived at the right place and will get what they were promised. Might seem obvious, but you may be surprised to know that the best of the best advertisers also fail to do that.

Mention a clear Call-to-Action in a place where it is visible. A strong CTA makes a huge difference. It would either bounce the user away or lead to a conversion.

30 Polish your email marketing campaign

As email is something personal, it is good to practise to ask for permission from the recipient to receive educational or promotional emails.

Through the email list, you have created, you can shoot out newsletters. Even an averagely effective plan can book=st website traffic by a big deal.

Just keep in mind that just because they have permitted you, don’t bombard them with unnecessary emails. Manage your email lists. People appreciate informative content.

You can also provide “7-day free trial” content as a part of your promotional strategy. A friendly reminder of products, services and discounts can help in boosting traffic.

Once you have a great email plan carved out, be careful in creating subject lines. The subject line of your email address determines whether the subscriber opens your email or not.

Also, avoid using spam words. There are online tools that help you figure out great subject lines for your emails.

31 Display Advertising

It is another form of paid online advertising. Through display advertising, you get to display your ads on websites, apps or social media channels.

Ad formats can be images, text, videos, flash or audio. Just like any other form of advertising, you get to target your audience and chose your audience.

These are like the banners you post in newspapers or hoardings (but more focused and targeted), these banner ads will be displayed on thousands of websites in front of an audience that is relevant to you.

You can choose interests or target topics that are relevant to your site.

By doing this, you allow Google to work for you to decide which websites are relevant. No budget is too small in the book of online advertising. It is better to start with more modest budgets to test the efficiency of your ads.

32 Retargeting

It is a fierce marketing tool that helps if you are looking for ways of how to increase website traffic.

When asked to paid search strategists and experts, they agreed that when it comes to displaying advertising network, retargeting or remarketing is the place, to begin with.

Through cookies of your past visitors, you follow them around and follow up with ads because they showed interest in your product. This can be done as a part of social media ad campaigns as well.

When you target people who are familiar with you or have visited your website before, chances of them coming back for more is higher.

It is also known as behavioural retargeting through which past visitors are remarketed according to their past internet actions.

Section 6: ▶︎ Other tips for increased website traffic:

33 Create affiliates to promote and sell your products

Creating affiliate programs aids immensely in boosting traffic, and if you’re lucky, in conversions, too! The affiliate marketing system works on a commission basis.

The company pays an affiliate to promote its product. They get a percentage of revenue generated for every sale made through their affiliate link.

The affiliates you select and appoint must preferably have a good following or the right image. They promote your products through social channels with a link that has a tracking code. Every time a user purchases through the link, the business pays the affiliate the fee.

I am quite sure that if you follow the above approach, you will surely see a jump in your website traffic. We have applied this for several of our clients and are quite sure you will get the benefit out of it.

Frequently Asked Questions