27 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Has it ever occurred to you while sitting in a traffic congestion on the highway that “if only I could attract traffic like this to my website”. This is something most marketers would be familiar with.

If you are, or you have ever struggled with driving traffic to your website, well, you’re not alone.

According to a Content Marketing Institute research conducted in 2019, 61% of content professionals are not certain as to what is most important to their audiences, 50% do not know the goal of the audience at a particular stage of the customer’s journey, and 49% are not aware of the steps in the customer’s journey.

In-between writing a new blog post, posting on social media platforms, and curating and disseminating emails for a new email campaign, it is difficult to look back in retrospect and identify what’s driving traffic to your site and what is not.

The list below are ways that will significantly help you increase the traffic to your website, generate more leads, and improve your ROI.

How to Get More Traffic to Your Website

1. Content Creation
2. Topic Expertise
3. Paid Advertising
4. Organic Social Media
5. Website Analysis
6. Contests and Giveaways
7. Influencers
8. Email List Building
9. Community Engagement
10. Guest Posting
11. On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
12. Quality Backlinks
13. Video Marketing
14. Content Repurposing
15. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
16. Historical Optimization
17. Voice Search Optimization
18. Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
19. A/B Testing
20. Internal Linking
21. Technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
22. Community Building
23. Content Offers
24. Media Coverage and Public Relations
25. Social Share Buttons
26. Click Through Rate (CTR) Optimization
27. Academy and Knowledge Base Posts

1. Content Creation

An Inbound marketing strategy focuses on attracting your target audience to your company. A very good way to do this is by creating content via blogging.
To develop the right content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you should understand your buyer persona. Once you understand your audience, you can then develop content that will attract them to your website.

How then do you write a good blog post that will attract the right audience? You can do so using these five steps:

• Identify your buyer persona: Be aware of key information about your audience, from their typical job titles, to their pain points to what they do typically for fun (hobbies) and build a persona around this.
• Conduct an SEO research: Discover what your audience is searching for online through search engines so you can curate the right content.
• Write a draft: Start by writing a draft post that answers your target audience’s questions.
  Publish: Publish the content your post on your website or blog.
• Promote: Run promotions of your blog post on social media and email newsletters to attract traffic. The more traffic your post is able to generate, the higher it will rank in web searches.

2. Topic Expertise

 

When you ranking higher on Google, organic traffic to your site will increase automatically. Google typically gives a higher rank to sites that are popular as topic experts on the subject area they’re writing about.

To be identified as an expert, you can create a pillar page, which essentially is a longer blog post or article that broadly covers almost or all aspects of a subject area. Then, you notify by writing “cluster content,” or supporting blog posts, targeting long tail keywords, which show you’ve covered that particular topic exhaustively.

By focusing on long-term traffic, your website will rank higher on search engines
Team manager of HubSpot’s pillar page content, Christina Perricone, says, “The pillar cluster model organizes content on your site around a single topic and search term through internal linking. This organization helps search engines easily crawl and categorize all of the content that you have on a particular topic, thereby making it easier for you to rank for that search term.

When the model is done right, it also helps visitors navigate your site and move through related pages, boosting traffic for all of the pages in your topic cluster.”
To familiarize yourself more with pillar pages for your company?

Learn more here and here.

3. Paid Advertising

You can direct traffic to your website very fast with paid advertising. You can run pay-per-click and retargeting ads with search engines.

Using social media, you can also run display ads or sponsored posts or promotions. Your strategy should typically include a combination of various types of advertising. In fact, as reported in the 2020 CMO Survey, businesses expect that social spending will rise by 62% over five years.

4. Organic Social Media

Organic deployment of social media platforms is not a new strategy, however, it’s still something marketers should put their focus on. Asides posting on social media platforms, you can also employ the use of Instagram Stories (Hello, swipe up feature!), live video, IGTV, or even Facebook Messenger. The major thing with organic social media is to be an early adopter of new features and ride the wave as much as you can.

For example, Facebook is deploying an automated lead generation feature on Messenger, which allows businesses to create an automated chatbot experience within Messenger to connect to content offers on your site. This is a fantastic feature for sending traffic to your website.

It’s also very key to have a diverse social media strategy and use the ideal social media platforms for your target audience, not just Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest generate a lot of traffic depending on what you’re marketing. Pinterest has very good engagement rates — 66% of Pinterest users make a purchase after seeing a brand’s Pins.

A brand-marketing associate at HubSpot, Henry Franco gives 2 recommendations regarding organic social media. “First, don’t spam your audience — it costs a user nothing to scroll past your post, and if you don’t offer them any value, that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Know your audience, and craft content that speaks directly to them,” He also says. “Second, stay active with community management. People love when brands like and reply to them — it’ll humanize your business, and keep people coming back for more content.”

5. Website Analysis

Let’s take a step back a bit on our thought process. Before driving traffic to your website, it is very critical to learn about your audience. In order to do this, there are platforms that assist in helping you analyze your website, an example is Crazy Egg, to see where your visitors are being lost. With this information, you can then create the ideal content to drive the right traffic to your website.

6. Contests and Giveaways

An easy way to drive traffic to your website is by running contests and giveaways. This can give you a quick jack, while also serving to reward your followers. You can host giveaways using either social media, through your email list, or you could even use both.

Using a strategy like this can be simple. Just follow these six steps:

1.  Decide on a platform on which to host your giveaway (can be multiple)
2. Decide on a prize (free tickets, discount, etc … )
3. Choose the criteria (website comments, email sign up, etc … )
4. Write your ad copy
5.  Create attractive graphics
6.  And finally, post and promote

7. Influencers

Contrary to the opinion of a lot of marketers, Influencer marketing is not just a bubble. In fact, it’s a relatively cheap option to drive traffic to your website.

According to Think with Google, partnerships with YouTube influencers are four times more effective at driving brand awareness than those with celebrities. When an influencer posts discount codes, links, reviews, or giveaways, you are taking advantage of their audience to drive traffic to your website.

Like Brian Halligan’s said in his INBOUND 2018 keynote speech; “Customers are more likely to buy from organizations with excellent word of mouth. How do you create great word of mouth? First, delight your customers. Second, work with influencers.”

8. Email List Building

Using your current blog readers and customers is also a good way to drive traffic to your website. When you make a new blog post or content offer, you can promote it to your followers/ blog subscribers for a quick traffic boost. For websites heavy on content, having repeat readership is helps to meet traffic goals, conversions, and also for lead generation.

To get started here, build or grow your current email list. Here are a few strategies you can use:

•  Content offers (see No.23 for more information): Generate gated content for site visitors which requires them to give an email address to receive it. Include strong calls to action (CTAs) for these content offers on your website.
• Easy-access newsletter sign-up: Add sign-up forms to your website, from your homepage to your ‘about us’ page. If a visitor had a decent experience on your site, they might want to sign-up for your newsletter. Make this process as easy and straightforward as possible.
• Social media: Promoting your email newsletter on social media, either through a post or contest, is also a great way to convert your current followers into subscribers.

9. Community Engagement:

The more people can recognize your brand, the more traffic you will be able to drive to your website. A good way to achieve brand recognition is to be very active and engaged in your community.

You can enhance your engagement strategy today by participating in industry related Facebook group discussions, giving answers to questions on public forum websites, and actively interacting with your followers on social media.

One brand that really excels at this on social media is Taco Bell. Taco Bell engages with users on social media to delight their customers regularly.
Just remember to be tactful, helpful and human. No one likes to get spammy links when they’re asking a question online.

10. Guest Posting

In the same light, writing guest posts can increase traffic to your site. Writing as a guest on a related website shows you’re active in your industry or community, while also linking to your website so it’s a win-win.

For you to get a guest posting strategy running effectively, you need to identify a site that would be a great fit for your company, draft a the blog post, and then write a pitch to the administrator of the site. Staff writer on the HubSpot Marketing Blog, Caroline Forsey says, “I’m always particularly intrigued with a guest pitch if it shows me the writer has done their research ahead of time.

For instance, I’d pay much closer attention to a pitch if it tells me how this piece could appeal to my readers. Additionally, I’m impressed when a writer can recognize gaps in our content and how their piece will fill those gaps, rather than competing with existing content.”

11. On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Using On-page SEO is also a good way to make your website rank higher in web search engines and generate more traffic. Some elements of on-page SEO are the page title, header, image alt-text, Meta description, URL, etc. Popping up in search engine results will ensure your site gets more traffic.

12. Quality Backlinks

As you know by now, to drive traffic to your site, it is important to rank high in search engines. And to rank higher in search engines, you need to be a figure of authority or a thought leader in your industry. Another way to do that, asides from the topic/cluster model we touched on above, is by getting quality backlinks. If websites with high authority link to your site, it increases your credibility even more.

A Senior content strategist at HubSpot, Irina Nica says, “There are two main ways in which high-quality backlinks can help drive more traffic to a website: boosting ranking and driving referral traffic. On the one hand, backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for every major search engine out there. By constantly earning high-quality backlinks from relevant websites, you’ll improve your rankings in SERP and, as a result, see a lift in your organic traffic.”

She also adds, “On the other hand, backlinks can also drive a substantial amount of referral traffic. That’s something to be expected if you get a mention in popular news website. You can also see referral traffic coming through if you’re mentioned (and linked to) in an article that’s already ranking well for high search volume keywords and is getting a constant flow of traffic”.

13. Video Marketing

There’s no better time to include video marketing in your content strategy. According to a report done by Cisco, video will account for 82% of web traffic by 2022. So, it is imperative to begin to add video marketing into your strategy as soon as you can, because this is the sort of content attracting people and its what they are clicking on.

You may create video for Instagram or Facebook Stories, IGTV, live videos, news feed videos, Facebook Watch, YouTube, and so on.

14. Content Repurposing

It’s quite common among marketers to struggle to come up with ideas for content that drives traffic to your site. It happens to the best of us. A very good way to overcome this obstacle is to repurpose old content.

You could take a blog post that’s perfoming well and repurpose that into say a video. Another example; if you have a podcast that performed really well, create a blog post on that topic. Making use of content that has already performed well will continue to generate traffic for your site.

15. Search Engine Optimization Tools

To generate traffic for your website, it’s very key to be conversant with SEO. Studying SEO tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and SEMrush should help you in developing a strong strategy to direct traffic to your website.

These tools will help you understand, analyze and interpret what’s working on your site and what’s amiss. Plus, they could also serve as inspiration sources for content ideas with great potential for high traffic.

16. Historical Optimization

Historical optimization is the process whereby you update old blog content with the purpose of generating more traffic and leads. For a lot of publishers, a high number of your monthly blog views and leads emanate from older posts.

A principal marketing manager on HubSpot’s Web Strategy team, Pamela Vaughan, who is a huge advocate of historical optimization, has written exhaustively about this.

According to her, “Historical optimization is a tactic best-suited for a blog that’s been around for several years, because you need to be generating a significant amount of organic search traffic, have built up a critical mass of blog subscribers and social media followers, and you need a sizable repository of old posts at your disposal.”

She also states that, “Historical optimization should be a piece of your overall blogging strategy — not the whole strategy.”

17. Voice Search Optimization

For you to generate traffic to your website, it’s very key to pop up where people are actually searching.
Voice search is increasing in importance of areas in which to rank.

According to a research conducted by PwC, 65% of 25- to 49-year-olds speaks to their voice-enabled devices at least once in a day. This is the reason why optimizing your content for voice search is important.

Here are a few tips to get started:

• Research long tail keywords: Each time people make use of voice search they speak in full sentences. To optimize your strategy for voice search, start researching longer tail keywords.
• Write answer-focused content: Don’t just write random content, rather write content that answers your audience’s questions.
• Optimize for snippets: Search engines and smart speakers such as Alexa and Google Home look for brief, concise answers. Adding quick summaries in your posts make it easier for search engines and smart speakers to access the answers they need.

18. Local SEO

If your business has a physical location or your company is a brick and mortar store, local SEO is an essential factor to consider.

Kelsey Smith of Hubspot, writes about this, she says, “To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.”

Take for example; if someone types in “best ice-cream near me” on Google, the results will be generated by the user’s location. Tools like Google My Business and Moz Local give businesses the necessary assistance in managing their directory listings and citations so they pop up in local searches.

To rank for local search:

• Make sure your name, phone number and address, is the same on your Google My Business and social media pages.
• Make use of a directory management tool to monitor directories like Yelp, Foursquare, Best of the Web, etc.
•  Do your research and make use of location-based search terms on sites such as Google Trends, which analyzes popular search terms across different regions.

19. A/B Testing

Every marketer worth their salt knows that there is no such thing as too much testing when it comes to driving traffic to your website.

A/B testing is a split test, which helps you to know what version of a campaign performs best. These tests could give you relevant information about your audience so you can curate customized content and offers that drive traffic to your site. There are numerous tools across the web you can use to get you started with your testing.

20. Internal Linking

When a user or visitor comes to your blog, your aim is to ensure that they continue reading on other pages WITHIN your website. This is why internal link i.e. links to other pages on your site are very essential. When visitors continue to other pages of your website this increases their likelihood to convert and become a enthusiasts of your brand.

For example, you can make use of an internal linking structure using the pillar/cluster model described earlier in this article. Pillar and cluster pages link back and forth; this boosts the credibility of your site on search engines, and at the same time increases the likelihood of a conversion.

21. Technical SEO

This is the more technical aspect of SEO that is concerned with the backend of your website, to see how the pages are set up and technically organized. The factors are elements such as page speed, indexing, crawling, and more. HubSpot’s director of acquisition, Matthew Howells-Barby, has writes about technical SEO.

He states, “Don’t underestimate the power technical SEO changes. [Technical SEO] resulted in us growing our organic traffic by more than 50% in just one month.”
Some of the tips he suggests to get started with technical SEO include:
• Fix broken links and redirects
• Create an XML sitemap for your subdomains
• Set up language meta tags
• Add custom H1 and introductions to topic pages

22. Community Building

Cultivating a community of brand enthusiasts is a good way to continually drive traffic to your website. You can build a Facebook group, LinkedIn Group, Twitter chat, or Quora Space specially for your followers and other enthusiasts in your industry where you give value, while linking it back to your site.
Career coaching business, CultiVitae is a very good example of community building. They have grown a Facebook group where Emily, the founder, answers questions and provides networking opportunities.

With more than 3,000 members in the group, CultiVitae gives value to its followers, while also promoting its product.

Such communities ensure that you are kept top of your customer’s minds. Also, it is a very good way to engage with your followers and audience and know more about them as they evolve over time.

23. Content Offers / Lead Magnets

Content offers, also known as lead magnets, is a smart way to use content in driving traffic to your site and generate leads. The content offering may differ based on what stage in the buyer’s journey your customer may be in, they could include webinars, demos, guides, trials, reports, checklists, and more.

24. Media Coverage and Public Relations

Earned media coverage is a great way to drive brand awareness, increase visibility for your company and generate traffic to your website. If there’s a cohesive relationship between your marketing and public relations team, then you’ll generate traffic to your site while creating excellent word of mouth.
A senior corporate communications manager at HubSpot, Ellie Flanagan says, “Although most outlets these days try to stay away from including backlinks in their stories (it’s usually against their editorial guidelines), that doesn’t mean that a good story won’t drive folks back to your site.
Media coverage provides great third-party validation for your company. Stories about new products or services, your company culture, or even industry thought leadership could all be great drivers for a reader who maybe hadn’t heard of your company before and wants to learn more.”

25. Social Share Buttons

Social share buttons are links, which make it easy and straightforward for your readers to share your content on their social media pages. When your readers become also become promoters of your content, this naturally increases traffic to you site.

When you must have created your social share buttons, how then do you get people to share your content? Here are some tips that can help you get started:

• Prompt your readers to share on social media pages
• Create valuable content
• Include quotable content
• Add multimedia formats i.e. images, videos, infographics, and so on.

26. CTR Optimization

As soon as your content is posted and you begin to rank on search engines, try to ensure that people are clicking through to actually read your posts.

Your click through rate (CTR) helps you measure who clicked on your post and actually read it as against the number of people who just viewed the link to your post (e.g., the advertisement, landing page or email) in total.

A very good tool for measuring your organic CTR is Google Search Console. To get more people to click through and drive traffic to your site, it is essential to write compelling and apt titles and Meta descriptions.

A tip on writing quality Meta tags that are click-worthy is to make sure your titles are short and snappy, and your description is suspense filled enough to leave visitors wanting more. This also ties into on-page SEO, described earlier.

27. Academy and Knowledge Base Posts

Finally, another form of content that can be used in driving traffic to your website is educational or knowledge based content. If you create educational posts, courses or certifications that are helpful and offer value to your audience, you’ll most likely see an increase in traffic.

HubSpot as well as many other online marketing tools/platforms uses have academies that generate content that is valuable to their audience. They provide content formats such as videos, certification courses, and knowledge base articles to answer questions.

Conclusion

All being said, If you’re a marketer or business struggling to get traffic to your website, you’re not alone. Putting the tips above into action can help you increase your traffic as quickly as possible. As soon as your traffic starts to improve, it’s time to optimize for conversions.