7 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Are you looking for ways to increase traffic to your website?

As an inbound marketer, this is one of the biggest reasons I get approached by many businesses, and usually their main focus is something along the lines of: ‘I need to get to the top of Google so more people can find me’.

Unfortunately, this isn’t really where you should be concentrating your efforts, as I recently discussed in my blog entitled ‘How to Improve Your Construction Business’s SEO’.

After all, traffic is only one part of the puzzle, and you also have to make sure visitors will want to stick around once they get there – although, that’s a whole other blog post.

So, let’s stick to the subject at hand; I’m going to give you some of my best tips for increasing traffic to your website – without focusing on Google rankings.

But first, let’s look at why you might need help with your website traffic…

Reasons for low website traffic

If you’re currently not getting much traffic to your website, it could be for one of the following reasons:

1. Google isn’t indexing your website correctly
2. Your website’s new and not yet been properly indexed
3. You’ve been blacklisted by search engines

I’d recommend using Webmaster tools and following my instructions in this blog post to ensure your website is being indexed properly and that there are no serious problems from stopping traffic reaching your website.

If everything seems to be okay, here are my top 7 tips to help increase traffic:

Below are some of the best ways you can help increase traffic to your website.

1. Create unique, helpful and valuable content

This is the number one thing you can do to help get more people visiting your website. Think of the questions your ideal customers are currently asking, and try to answer them by coming up with helpful content that tells them all they need to know, such as blog posts.

2. Nurture leads with email marketing

Reach out to people who’ve previously been customers or who have shown an interest in your products or services – offer them content that might help them on their buyer’s journey. This is called email nurturing.

Another way to do email marketing is to reach out to other relevant bloggers who may be struggling to monetise their website. By ‘relevant’, I mean ones that your potential customers are most likely to read, and who write about topics that are closely connected to your own products or services.

Some successful bloggers can have between 50,000 – 100,000 subscribers, and you could pay a sum of money for them to send an email with some of your content out to their own subs.

3. Get your website set up for SEO

And by SEO, I don’t mean stuffing your web pages with keywords – instead, carefully make sure the language people use when searching for your products or services is included in your content. Identify keywords, but be mindful to include them naturally in content that is relevant to your audience.

4. Promote your content on social media

Social media is another great way of promoting your content and getting more traffic flooding it – as long as you know how to do it right. Actually take the time to engage with your audience, and reply to the occasional comment or answer questions they might have.

You could also try social media paid ads (on websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn) – however, I wouldn’t recommend this unless you know your content works first and that your CTAs will help you convert that traffic into leads.

5. Set up Google ads and retargeting

Google ads are another good way to increase traffic to your blog, although again, you should only do this for blogs that you know are popular and already converting well.

Another option is Google retargeting; it’s similar to ads, the main different being that they only target people who’ve previously visited your site – this is a very smart way to advertise, as it means the competition for clicks is practically non-existent.

As an example, you can choose to only show an ad on YouTube to the people who’ve already visiting your pricing page. And because the competition is so low, you’ll be more likely to see the results you want and get the most out of your ad budget.

6. Start guest blogging

Remember those bloggers we mentioned before, with the subscription base of around 50,000 – 100,000 (or even more)? If you did, you might have already predicted what I’m about to say next. There are two ways to do guest blogging:

• Invite relevant guest bloggers to write content that you’ll publish on your website
• Request to write a guest blog that will go out to all of their subscribers

Either way, your blog will be promoted to a potentially huge, and previously untapped audience. Doing the same with other websites will help you get much more well-known in a shorter space of time.

7. Sell via affiliate networks

Finally, affiliate networks are worth a try if you sell products on your website. You can get affiliates to sell some of your products for you, and pay them a commission based on what they sell. If these affiliates are particularly well-known and sell similar, relevant products, you could get a lot more interest in your own website.

Think quality, not quantity

The main thing I’d say about increasing traffic to your website is this: think about what you can do to attract the people who are most likely to buy – rather than just trying to get as many people onto your site as possible, and hoping for the best.

Instead of just thinking in volumes of traffic, focus on quality. After all, 100 visitors who are ready to buy is without a doubt better than 1,000 who simply aren’t interested in your product or service.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for ways to increase traffic to your website, don’t just focus on getting to the top of Google. Think quality rather than quantity, and concentrate on attracting people who are the most likely to buy your product or service.

If your website isn’t getting enough traffic, I’d recommend using Webmaster Tools to check Google is indexing your site properly, and ensure you haven’t been blacklisted. Another reason you could be seeing low levels of traffic is because your website is relatively new – it can take a while.

If all of the above seem fine (and you really should tackle any problems first), here are my top 7 ways to increase traffic to your website:

1. Create unique, helpful and valuable content
2. Nurture leads with email marketing
3. Get your website set up for SEO
4. Promote your content on social media
5. Set up Google ads and retargeting
6. Start guest blogging
7. Sell via affiliate networks

Have you tried any of the above methods? What worked and what didn’t? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments section.