Here are 15 effective ways to drive traffic to your website. A dream of every website owner across the world is to wake up, open Google Analytics and see the graphs go up. Number of users, conversions, everything that translates into real-life benefits and makes having a website worth it. Unfortunately, many webmasters struggle with turning this dream into reality. They need user traffic, and they aren’t getting anywhere near enough.
Have you tried every method out there but your website still isn’t getting website traffic?
Do you struggle with turning your website into an income-generating asset?
Don’t worry – driving traffic to your website may take some time, but if you follow the right steps you’ll speed up the process.
#1. Improve Your On-Page SEO
What can help you supercharge your results is learning the right SEO strategies and the best practices for using target keywords.
You can improve your on-page SEO through keyword research and just the right optimization to your website content.
For example, you can:
- Optimize the keywords in your SEO title
- Put core keywords in the headlines throughout your website articles
- Add keywords to your image file names so search engines know what they’re about
- Make your URLs as SEO-friendly as possible by optimizing the slugs.
- Make sure you include at least your main keyword in your meta description
Related: How SEO Works
To make it easier on yourself to optimize on-page SEO, consider installing plugins like Rankmath SEO, and use Ahrefs or HubSpot’s SEO tools.
#2. Optimize Landing Pages for SEO
Ideally, you’d want to improve website traffic for every page. However, your immediate business goals depend on the landing pages. That’s where you want conversions, and conversions can’t happen without visits. So most of the traffic has to go to landing pages. How to direct it there?
Related: How to Optimize Your Landing Page
When you design your landing pages to catch the users’ attention and draw them to the big shiny button, remember that a customer’s journey begins before they even open a search engine. Try to predict what they’ll type in Google, then find and use the best keywords for the task. The better you grasp user intent, the more traffic you can attract.
Building backlinks and spreading awareness in social media help a great deal, too.
#3. Research New Keywords
Keyword research isn’t about finding one high volume keyword and ranking for that single keyword alone.
It’s about coming up with a keyword strategy with a variety of terms that are relevant to your product and industry.
But if that’s too narrow, don’t be afraid to expand on different keywords in your industry. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable for a website offering hosting services to create a content strategy for a blog that covers topics on hosting along with broader topics on web development, CMS platforms, WordPress errors, and more.
If you do expand on new keyword families, just don’t forget to identify the search intent behind them and try to serve that search intent with your content.
#4. Create Infographics
You often hear that infographics are a major help in SEO, and it’s true. They rank high in Google, they are shareable, they build backlinks like crazy, so is it any surprise they are magnets for user traffic, too?
Any information becomes more fun to consume when you spice it up with visuals. Videos and presentations work better than plain text for the same reason.
So get in touch with your creative side. Start producing high-quality infographics and become popular with your target audience.
#5. Create Content That People Want to Share (and Link To)
If you think about it, the stuff we tend to share or link to on our own is usually well-researched, genuinely helpful, or relevant and something we consider trustworthy. When it comes to great content, you’ll find that the key thing is to think about the value it provides.
If you think the quality of your copy is up there with the greats, the next step is to enrich it with media – using compelling and relevant images.
But why not go all the way? It’s always a good idea to add a video to your website content (a how-to tutorial or a product showcase for example). If you’re worried about production costs, you can always create an infographic. Or hell, even a custom GIF.
These visual elements have the potential to make your content more shareable – and media always makes it easier to repurpose website content for social media.
#6. Interlink Your Site’s Pages Efficiently
Links are one-way tubes that carry traffic between websites. Smart webmasters know how to control the flow of traffic across their sites’ pages to maximize the benefits. They do it by designing an organized internal linking structure that ensures all the important pages get enough visitors. When you draw it on paper, it looks like a tree with the home page as the root.
Link your site’s pages in a way that will help users find the content they need. The rule of simplicity states: make the “click distance” between any two given pages three clicks or less.
#7. Natural Link Building
Natural link building happens when other websites, bloggers and web owners from your niche link to your content on their own.
Now, if earning quality backlinks from authoritative websites was easy we wouldn’t have coined the term “link building.” That being said, with enough effort you will eventually get your website up there, and the most straightforward way to do it is by creating valuable content people will want to link to.
#8. Use Structured Data on Your Site
Have you ever seen Google search results with more information than usual? Review stars, telephone numbers, addresses and other minor details that make websites look more professional and credible? It’s all thanks to structured data. And you can implement it on your own site, too.
Learn how structured data works and use it to mark up your website’s pages. Google will see the schema code and decorate your search results with those pretty, click-attracting features.
#9. Write Knowledge Base Articles
When it comes to content marketing, there’s something to be said about length.
Article length is important for several reasons.
First of all, Google likes length. A QuickSprout survey found that longer content ranks higher in Google’s search results.
“The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words.”
Second, you don’t want a bunch of smaller, similar articles focused around similar keywords cannibalizing each other in the SERPs.
Third, if you focus on creating the best, most informative and exhaustive article on a given topic, that’s also going to be lengthier, you’ll have the chance to tackle some smaller related keywords naturally, which means your article will pop up in several search results.
And last but not least, readers love genuinely helpful pillar articles and an easy-to-navigate knowledge base.
It’s great for site structure, it’s great for readers, and it’s great to link to as a relevant resource in guest posting, or if you happen to be doing some low-key marketing helping out people in forums like Quora or Reddit.
#10. Refresh and Improve Your Old Content
Some pages on your site might not be getting as much traffic as they could. One of the possible reasons could be their content. If that’s the problem, it’s time to breathe new life in your weaker pages!
Find these problematic pages. They have these traits:
- They have lost rankings and traffic with time;
- They have never ranked high.
- Then improve their content and unleash their true potential.
Search engines like fresh and new content and upgrading is a great way to boost a page that’s not quite ranking.
Here are some great ways to upgrade outdated content:
- Add media – images, infographics, videos
- Remove obsolete information
- Back up your content with more external sources
- Interlink with newer content to boost your site’s structure
#11. Add New Content Weekly
Regular activity on your blog allows you to accelerate your growth – the more content you have, the bigger your chances for ranking on multiple search results. Plus, as you start establishing your presence, you can teach your audience to expect new content at a certain time.
If you can’t manage to write new articles weekly, hire a content writer.
Take some time to plan out a real content strategy and use some type of content calendar. Your content production shouldn’t be an afterthought.
#12. Produce Video Content
Statistics show that marketers who use video grew revenue 49% faster than those who don’t and 92% percent of customers say that visuals are the most influential factor in their purchasing decisions.
#13. Optimize Your Images for Image Search
Did you know that images are subject to 30% of all online searches? That sounds like a rich opportunity to get more visitors to your website. How do you make this awesome fact work for you?
Obviously, you start by using images on your website – or else you can’t get any of that sweet image traffic. What kind of visuals should you use? Anything you can think of, really.
Photos, Diagrams, Screenshots, Comics, Gifs, Infographics
But to gain traffic from them, you need to optimize them for image search. That means using keywords in their titles and ALT tags. If you make them shareable across the social media, you’ll get even more traffic from there.
Important note: be careful with your images’ file size. “Heavy” pictures put a strain on website loading speed.
#14. Add Social Share Buttons
It’s not that search engines take into account the amount of attention your website is getting on social media. But that can amplify the actual ranking factors, and adding social sharing buttons doesn’t cost you anything.
Not adding them to your website posts is missing out on a huge opportunity to increase organic traffic.
#15. Create FREE Online Courses
If you want to establish your site as an authority in your industry, creating a free online course might be just the way to do it.
Plus, you’ll get to include lead generation forms for everyone that wants to sign up!
Depending on your skill set, knowledge, and the nature of your business – find a topic you think will be relevant to your customers. Of course, this should be a topic on which you can provide useful and in-depth knowledge.
However, if you want to create a quality online course you do have to think about production costs, so plan ahead and think about whether investing in it at the moment makes sense for your marketing strategy.