How To Get Traffic To Your Website

How to increase website traffic?

1. Run PPC campaigns
2. Create content with Google search potential
3. Create titles that people will click on (and which Google will “catch”)
4. Optimization Techniques
5. Technical SEO
6. Optimize current and refresh old content
7. Promote yourself in social media
8. Establish cooperation with influencers
9. Write guest posts

How to get traffic to a site whose stats barely bounce off the ground, and how to increase traffic at later stages of its development can be a challenge. Whether you’re running a blog, online store, news site, or any other online business, you’ll find plenty of tips here. However, before we get down to business, we need to pay attention to a simple rule:

If you want to increase traffic, you have to measure traffic
Using the Google Analytics website will not only tell you about the progress you are making but also show what and to what extent you can improve. Thanks to numerous charts, you can easily gain access to tons of valuable data: the number of visits to the website, new and returning users, the average length of sessions on the website, or traffic sources.

Right, traffic sources. We can distinguish many of them, but the four main ones in Google Analytics are:

Direct, direct source. Most often we talk about it when the user simply entered the name of the website in the address field of his browser and pressed enter. But you have to remember that direct is also input from e.g. e-mail readers. So when we send someone a newsletter with a link to a news article on the website, if the person reads this e-mail in his e-mail program and clicks the link there, it will be counted as direct input. Similarly, if someone previously bookmarked a website in the browser and clicked on it after some time.

Bookmarked entries cause some problems with measuring the traffic because “direct” is, contrary to appearances, quite capacious and when we observe the statistics, it is not really known how many people entered the address manually, and how many e.g. previously added it to the bookmarks. This is the so-called dark traffic, traffic of unknown origin. At a higher level of data analysis – when we want to know the behavior of our customers and the source of traffic on the site as accurately as possible – its presence causes more trouble than good. Therefore, it is worth adding so-called UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module) to the links, thanks to which the traffic will be automatically assigned to the “campaign” source.

Organic, organic traffic. It’s the one coming from Google, but not from the ads. SEO activities, i.e. efforts to optimize the website and content for Google, are intended to push our address higher in the search results to a given key phrase. More on key phrases and SEO in the further part of the article.

Referral. Here, entries from links placed on other websites are counted. For example, when one blogger links to another blogger, driving visitors to his site, then we refer to referral traffic. This also includes – or perhaps most of all – traffic from social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Linkedin. You know: you throw links on social, people click on the links, you get traffic on your website.

Where else may the traffic be coming from? And, for example, from display ads, i.e. ubiquitous graphics and promotional banners, placed on various websites, which 1/3 of internet users are happy to block using the AdblockPlus plugin.

It can also come from the affiliate network (the source is often categorized as a referral), thanks to links placed on websites as part of affiliate programs.

Why study traffic?
Analyzing traffic sources is important as it allows you to track the effectiveness of your marketing activities. If the data shows that we can improve social activities – let’s improve social activities, and so on. But they also help to better recognize (potential) customers and possibly better target subsequent content.

If we sell men’s shavers, and our site mainly targets 18-24-year-old girls, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong – although it does seem like men should be your target. But what if the ladies come in to buy gifts for men? It is quite likely. Then it makes sense to take advantage of this move, for example by writing additional articles on the topic “How to choose a shaver for a man”.

More important than who comes to our site is who we have more “use”. So, for example, who of these people actually makes the purchase. If the website intended for men is mainly visited by women, but they come to buy it, there is no problem. If, on the other hand, we have few men visiting, and more women, and in addition, sales are still standing, then something is wrong. When it comes to driving traffic to your website and turning visitors into customers, there are a lot of things that can be done wrong. But there are also many good practices that can work great.

All the points listed below have one thing in common: you need to be proactive in increasing traffic on your website.

Run PPC campaigns

This point is the first for a reason. It will become clear in a moment.

PPC stands for pay per click. This advertising model is the most characteristic of Google and the service formerly known as Adwords, and today simply Ads. PPC along with SEO (methods of website optimization for search engines) are two ways of getting traffic from Google, and one of the most effective in general.

In the PPC model, there is no payment for displaying the ad to the user. Money from the advertiser’s account is collected only when the user enters the website. The cost of a click depends, among others, on the competitiveness of the phrase we want to advertise on.

Advertising set on the phrase ” offices for rent Atlanta” will be much more expensive than in the case of “vet Atlanta” – because although we search for vets more often on Google, much more money is in the real estate industry. Agencies can spend much more on acquiring one client than veterinary clinics because for them one transaction will be worth thousands of dollars. Contrary to the vet, where more often hundreds rather than thousands of dollars are received.

When we enter “offices for rent Atlanta” in Google, the first few results will be sponsored (marked as an advertisement). According to the data estimated, the owners of these websites will pay well over $5 for each click (it was tempting, but no, I didn’t click for fun, I won’t be like that). If they were vets and advertised their Atlanta vet clinics, the estimated cost per click (CPC) would be 50 cents on average.

Using the Google keyword database allows you to check, among other things, the estimated amount (CPC) that you would have to spend in the Google Ads system to get traffic similar to the traffic generated from SEO activities.

PPC campaigns are more expensive in the long run than SEO activities, but they have the undeniable advantage that they work right away. You often have to wait for months for the effects of search engine optimization. On the other hand, advertising on Google works here and now – you set it and you have it, and when someone clicks, you pay.

For this reason, PPC as a method of getting traffic to a website is excellent at the beginning of a business (and that’s why I am writing about it as the first one). At this stage, SEO has not brought results yet and you need to be patient. Social media channels – Facebook fan page or Instagram page – are just starting to catch fans. There is no one to send newsletters with links to the website because the database is just under construction.

So what to do? Download paid traffic. Bloggers or slow businesses may skip this method. If you are in no hurry to attract people to the site, it is better to invest in SEO calmly – the effects will appear over time and will be more durable. However, if you own an e-commerce store and want to sell right from the start, PPC is the solution for you.

Importantly, in the case of PPC, this method allows you to precisely set the type of recipient you want to win. Location is one thing, but otherwise, we can define whether we care more about women or men; we also set the preferred age and even education.

We also define the purpose of the advertising campaign. If we have a new e-book that we want to share with the recipients, we can direct them from Google directly to the page where they will download it. Similarly, when we run a temporary promotion for specific products or we want to advertise a special event.

Summarizing the PPC thread: this method will work great if we need to increase and properly target traffic in a given period. Especially useful at the beginning of the business. Over time, SEO activities begin to bring results and many website owners definitely shift the investment burden to natural positioning. However, they usually do not give up PPC entirely. These are two complementary sources of movement and the skillful use of both brings amazing results.

Create content with Google search potential

There is a lot of great quality content on the Internet that will never be found in a search engine. Reason? They don’t answer any specific query. When we open an opinion-making magazine, we will also find columns. Journalistic texts are a genre quite close to literature. Freeform, title not necessarily referring to the content, no thesis formulated at the beginning of the article, a loose combination of facts. This is what a typical column might look like.

A text that we will be happy to read in the newspaper, and which we would not have come across in our life with Google, if it were an entry published, for example, on a blog. It would simply not be indexed in this search engine. Because for what keyword? What would you have to enter to find this material?

Well, unless someone specifically enters ” what keyword ” in the search engine and thus finds the author’s website, positioned for this phrase. But if we assume that the fictional “what keyword” is not a well-known press columnist, but a man trying to break through on the Internet, then such a scenario is completely unlikely. Nobody knows “what keyword”, so nobody looks for him on Google.

“What Keyword” can successfully promote his work, for example, on Facebook (by setting up a fan page titled, of course, “Songs of Truth”). However, if he thinks about how to increase website traffic and to attract Google users to him, he has to think like Google users. It will mean compromising with your inner artist. Articles must be structured around a specific keyphrase. Which, unfortunately, one way or another affects the freedom of writing. The game may be worth the candle, however.

If Google decides that the “What Keyword” article is worth showing at the top of the search results for a given term, his website will record a lot of new visits. We checked how the number of clicks correlates with your position on Google in the What do we know about SEO CTR? (CTR is the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of people who saw the link). How to choose the right key phrase around which to write the text? First of all, it is worth using the Google Keyword Database – it is a real treasure trove of hints.

Google Adwords Database
Thanks to it, you will understand the topic well and, if you want, you will start increasing traffic on the website thanks to the appropriate selection and use of key phrases.

Create titles that people will click on (and which Google will “catch”)

Hardly anyone will click on the text titled “Summary of the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. But if you take something interesting from the content of the book – some interesting quote or a bold thesis, and put it in the first sentence of the title, and then write “Summary of the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, you have a much better chance to interest the user.

A user who scrolls this Facebook page and waits with a bored face for something to finally make him dance. Let the title of your text be like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, who persuaded reluctant John Travolta to go out on the dance floor, and it was great because, in the end, we got one of the best dance scenes in the history of cinema.

Uma thurman John Travolta
What if it wasn’t for the seductive power of the title, phew, the character played by Uma? This is one aspect: the attractiveness of the title, something that arouses interest and motivates you to click.

The second aspect is the SEO compatibility of the title. It is worth reading about the right, from the point of view of the search engine, the structure of the texts for the website in our article Blog positioning. How to do it? The tips therein apply not only to your blog but to any page where content is posted. The presented rules are universal.

And when it comes to adjusting the title to the search engine, it should contain the key phrase. It is – at least in theory – what the user is looking for on the Internet.:

a) attractive from the point of view of the recipient, stimulating interest,
b) consistent with SEO principles – that is, in practice, press the key phrase into the title. Preferably at the very beginning of the title, but if you fail at the beginning, it won’t be bad either.

Optimization Techniques and Analysis

SEO, as I mentioned earlier, is all activities focused on website optimization (and content) for the search engine. The goal is to make your website more visible on Google. Better visibility means more visits. If the page, for the given key phrases, is only visible on the second or even further page of the search results, traffic from Google is unlikely to be expected. In turn, the TOP3, the more people will not only see the link but also click on it.

Regular monitoring of the website’s performance on Google plays an important role here. Take, for example, the well-known and liked website glennmadden.com and let it go through the Visibility Analysis in Google. We can see how visible the phrases are in TOP3, TOP10, and TOP50 and whether it has recently seen increases or decreased invisibility.

Lower in the Visibility analysis, we will also see the key phrases on which the page is visible. It is especially useful to hack the so-called quick wins (go to the Positions tab). These are phrases for which you can relatively easily increase your visibility and jump from positions 11-20 to positions 1-10, thus creating a much greater potential for generating traffic to the website.

What else will the Visibility Analysis show us? Ups and downs – which phrases have gone up recently and which have fallen in Google. Competition – with which websites do we compete for positions in search results? Cannibalization – which pages of our website have been optimized for the same key phrase.

Only one subpage should be optimized for a given phrase and if it is not, it is worth fixing it. Otherwise, Google will receive conflicting signals from your website, which will negatively affect positioning. You can read more in the text Cannibalization of keywords – how to detect it and how to deal with it?

Additionally, the Competitor Analysis tool is useful to track the competition. In it you can check:

Common keywords – words that both your domain and the competition’s domain are visible for,
Competition keywords – words that your competitors are visible to and your domain is not,
My keywords – words that your domain name is visible to and your competitors’ domains aren’t.
Here is an excerpt from the comparison of the common keywords of glennmadden.com and its closest competitor johnglenn.com. When a competitor positions himself higher on certain key phrases, he gets traffic to his website that could belong to you.

How does the competition make them higher than you? There are many factors that affect this, but one of the most important is the way the content is structured on the page: what title was used, how many H2 and H3 headers, what is the length of the article, and so on. You can check all these attributes in SERP Analysis. It will provide you with an anatomical cross-section of materials published by your competitors. Thanks to this, you can better adjust your content to position itself higher and attract more traffic. The topic is more widely developed here: SERP analysis, i.e. a tool for those who write for SEO. How will it help you?

For what keywords is your website visible in TOP10? Check Ubersuggest.com for free!

Technical SEO

Visibility analysis and related tools focus on key phrases and show what can be improved in this area. But if you are thinking about how to increase search engine traffic on your website, you also need to take care of other SEO elements. Technical considerations are important, such as:

• Improving the speed of the website, for example by compressing pictures,
• Adapting the website to mobile devices,
• Ensuring an appropriate category structure,
• 404 error reduction,
• Implementation of secure http protocol, and others.

In addition, take care of appropriate linking: internal (creating links between subpages of the site, for example between one article and another) and external – this is the so-called link building (acquiring links leading from other pages to ours). All these activities affect how much Google likes your website, so they indirectly answer the question of how to increase website traffic.

Optimize current and refresh old content

This is a strategy that is widely used, among others, in the media: old content is refreshed in order to gain new life on Google. Because a significant part of those published years ago was not adapted to SEO then. Or it was, but since then the search engine algorithms have changed and today the optimization should be carried out a bit differently. Or the publishers decided that this old text should be positioned under a different key phrase than before. This is how the content pecking begins, and with it:

• Adding a key phrase in the title and in the first paragraph of the article,
• Greater saturation of the text with the key phrase (additional points if it does not harm the aesthetics and the “flow” of the whole),
• Supplement it with the headings H2 and H3 – preferably if they also contain the key phrase,
• Adding a picture to the text,
• Adding a bulleted list (for example, one like the one you are reading),
• Creating links leading from this article to other subpages,
• Update the publication date of the text.

These are the rules that should be followed on an ongoing basis when uploading new content to the website – but also refreshing or optimizing the more age-old ones. How can updating content increase website traffic? Very simple:

• Pushing them higher on google. Text that has not been visible in the search engine so far can suddenly jump to the top positions of the first search page (SERP), and with a relatively small amount of work.
• By reducing the bounce rate. If someone clicks on an old, slightly spoiled article from Google, they may quickly decide that it is not what they were looking for – and go elsewhere. In turn, better optimized (updated) content naturally encourages users to stay on the page.
• By creating new social potential. The refreshed content can be re-promoted in social media, for example on Facebook. Provided, of course, that the content has not become outdated – because then no refreshing will do a miracle

Promote yourself in social media

A fan page on Facebook, an account on Instagram, or Linkedin can be additional, good sources of traffic. Or – for some sites, not additional – the main traffic sources. Much depends on your business model or Internet strategy. Some focus almost exclusively on SEO, others almost exclusively on social. And those who skillfully use both have the best results.

The secrets of running a fan page or a company account are a separate, deep topic. You need to know how to write attractive posts, what images to add, how to engage your fans, reach out with your content more widely, and so on. All this can be read on the Internet, there are courses, books, and videos. However, when we talk about how to increase website traffic, the topic of social media deserves attention for at least one good reason:

Advertising activities in social media allow for fairly precise targeting, similar to the aforementioned Google Ads. We direct traffic either to the entire website or to a specific place – we promote the content that needs a larger audience. You can focus on a specific target group, for example, due to age or place of residence, and not waste your advertising budget on promoting yourself to people who – as customers – are unlikely to interest you anyway.

But even if you do not intend to invest in advertising on Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin, it is still worth promoting your website and your content there. Those who click “watch page” will be up to date with what is happening with you. Sometimes they click on a link. These are additional visits, no matter how large a fanbase you have “grown”.

So if you want to drive more traffic, consider the following:

Complete your profile on social media – if it lacks basic information, some people will get discouraged and the profile may be cut off.

Post more posts. Let those who follow your fan page have more contact with your content, with your brand.

Upload links to your website. If you publish something on the blog – load it immediately on social media. Search for an excuse to sometimes link to a subpage, for example, a category or product.

Get interested in the topic of hashtags. This applies mainly to Instagram and Twitter, but also on Linkedin, it is not without significance. Thanks to hashtags, more people can find your post in which you placed a link to the page.

Play with the ads, watch the statistics. If you spend $100 on an advertisement and 100 people click on the link, then the cost of getting one visitor is $1. Maybe it’s not much, maybe it’s a lot. But if they are “valuable” visitors – those who buy something, subscribe to the newsletter, or simply become regular visitors – then you can assume that it is worth it.

Thematic groups on Facebook also have a lot of potentials. Such as Ubersugest, which we cordially invite you to join. Such groups may have thousands or even tens of thousands of members – people more or less interested in a given topic. They are usually moderated on an ongoing basis, have their own regulations, and posts must be approved by the administrator before they are published. However, many of them are open to self-promotion, to placing links to the page, whether in posts or comments – provided that you actually contribute something to the life of the group, and not just spam links.

When you enter “marketing” in the Facebook search engine and select “groups” below, you will see a lot of closed groups for exchanging thoughts, contacts, and links.

Establish cooperation with influencers

I know, I know, risky advice. For once influencers can be unpredictable and – rumor has it – difficult to cooperate, and two, they highly value their services. According to many – far too high. However, it cannot be denied that their advertising activities can bring results. We are talking about people who are followed by thousands or even tens and hundreds of thousands of people. They may have something to say, but they don’t have to. Either way, their popularity does the trick. Therefore, various brands focus on cooperation with internet stars, offering them products or specific internet addresses to promote. Because when the influencer says: ” Click! ”People will click.

The simple conclusion is that by establishing cooperation with an influencer, you can increase website traffic.

Some comments:

Bigger is not necessarily better. When choosing an influencer to cooperate with, it is not always worth following the number of his fans. Often a better choice will be a more niche influencer: fewer fans, but more content profiled for a specific (your) audience.

Cooperation with an influencer does not always have to be settled in cash. Many will agree to barter if you have something interesting to offer. Or even to do something for free, if the contact between you is positive and built up over a long period of time (for example, you contributed on his site as a fan).

Make sure that the links leading to your website are do-follow – because they will give it “SEO power”. Nofollow links direct users to the site just as well (apparently there is no difference between the two types of links), but from the search engine’s point of view, they are almost indifferent. This is why links placed on Facebook, Instagram, or virtually any other social media will not have a great deal. influence on positioning your page on Google – because they are no-follow links automatically.

A link posted by an influencer on Instagram will bring you only as many visitors as they click directly on the link, while a link on the blogger’s private page, set as do-follow, will additionally be a signal to Google that your website is more trustworthy. Ideally, the influencer will link to your website both on Instagram / Facebook and on a private blog.

Write guest posts

That is content that will be published by the owners of other websites. This is a common practice among bloggers, but also businesses operating in the same industry. For example, the Medium.com blog has quite a lot of content from people who don’t work on a daily basis, but also deal with SEO or related topics, such as content marketing.

For Medium.com, such a guest appearance from an outsider is additional material for the company’s blog. For this person – a way to self-promote and invite new visitors to your website. Win-win.

Increasing traffic by writing guest posts is similar to working with influencers. The link to your website then appears on the page with which you arranged for the guest publication – and once that some readers will probably click, and two, if it is a do-follow link, strengthens your website’s SEO.

Ideally, the page where you post your guest article has a similar profile to yours. It covers the same or similar topics. Linking to the cars page, coming from the dresses page, is better than no link. But for Google, a much better signal is when, instead of some weird crossword puzzles, car pages link to car pages (and similarly for dress pages).

Send a newsletter to your visitors
A lot of people do it from their own website email. It’s about collecting e-mail addresses from website visitors in order to then send them messages straight to their inbox. And in the news, of course, links to the site: to a new offer, to a product category, to a fresh article.

If you have not run a newsletter so far, creating one is unlikely to help increase traffic on the site in the near future. First, you need to build a subscriber base, and it can take months for it to become meaningful. But it is worth starting to do it now – because after a while it will turn out that you have several thousand people on your list, to whom you can directly send a link and download them to the website. Cool? Cool.

By the way, we will gladly add you to our database. We send messages under the sign #Glenn News every 2 weeks, and you will find links to the latest blog materials and information about new promotions – no spam. Sign up!

How to increase website traffic? Well, that’s right
Just like that. The above methods, despite the fact that there is a lot of text, probably do not cover the topic in one hundred percent.

how to increase traffic on the website infographic
Finally, I want to add an important thing. Increasing traffic is extremely important, but often the returning user turns out to be the more valuable user, not the new one.

Ultimately, in most cases, quality matters more than the quantity of traffic. By quality, I mean the traffic of the users you care about the most. Perhaps out of 1000 random people who visit your website, only one will convert (i.e. buy something, subscribe to the newsletter, etc.). Another time, you’ll get 100 of the right people and convert 10 of them.

So what traffic is better on the site – 100 people or 1000? Exactly. It depends.

Therefore, although it is worth increasing the traffic in principle, there is no need to fixate on the basic statistics. At some point, it becomes more important to turn your visitors into customers. And here comes further marketing nuances, all this secret knowledge. Stop by Glenn’s Website Design Articles every now and then for more.