How To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Website traffic is an important metric to measure and directly influences your site’s success.

However, that does not mean that it is easy to drive more traffic to your website, especially not as a new online business owner.

This is a problem that most businesses face early on, and even some long-running businesses can occasionally struggle to secure the amount of web traffic that they need.

Thankfully, there is a huge range of different ways to boost the amount of traffic that your website receives.

While it would be impossible to list every single version of every single technique, it is important to understand the many ways you can increase website traffic.

Taking the right steps towards greater incoming traffic can be a huge part of pushing your business to greater heights.

Perform Proper Keyword Research

Keyword research sits at the heart of everything you do with marketing.

Keywords are not just meant for ads or SEO – they are the thing that defines how your site appears to other people and how you can promote it across a range of platforms.

If you want to draw traffic to your site, you need to understand the keywords involved in your site and the platforms you are trying to draw people from.

Relevant keywords could be anything from a product name to obscure industry terms – but they need to be relevant.

For example, if you want to capture the maximum traffic potential of an article about cars and drive a lot of traffic to your site, then you would need to consider the keywords involved. If your business focuses on car-related keywords and is in a relevant field or niche, that traffic potential becomes much higher.

Understanding Keywords

A target keyword is a term that you target for all kinds of marketing options, from SEO tools to search ads. Generating traffic means using these keywords in a way that appeals to your target audience.

Keywords have two major metrics: search volume and difficulty. Search volume is the number of people who search that keyword (increasing its traffic potential), while difficulty is how hard it would be to rank for that keyword (since a lot of other businesses may be using it).

You always want keywords to be relevant, but if you want to drive traffic to your site, you will have to choose which ones to focus on.

There are no wrong answers: some businesses focus on the most relevant traffic sources, while others go for the most popular or least difficult keywords.

Choosing Keywords

Whether you are using them for SEO tools or to help with creating quality content, you want to insert the right keywords into your site/product page/blog content.

Good keywords are terms that users in your target audience are likely to search for but are not so overused that your business will barely ever appear.

This means finding a balance between specific and vague keyword terms.

Long-tail keywords can also be tricky. Not all users search in long-tail keywords, but some long-tail keywords are specific enough to be useful depending on the market your business inhabits.

Create Good Content

Content marketing is the backbone of many websites and for a good reason.

Not only does it help you rank higher in search engines, increasing your visibility, but it also helps to drive traffic towards your business more effectively than a lot of other methods.

If you are creating content that people want, and are making that content visible on a wider scale, then you are far more likely to get greater amounts of web traffic.

However, this depends entirely on how you are actually using the content that you create.

Making Lists

Lists are incredibly versatile. If you care about increasing website traffic through making content that pushes people to engage, then lists are some of the most useful.

Not only does a piece of list content (like “top 10 bedroom furniture options”) secure a lot more attention than normal content, but it can also provide you with a great space to include details like product names, calls to action, or connections to your own services.

Why lists?

While list content might not be the most comprehensive blog post type you can come up with, they tend to increase web traffic for a while.

Creating lists that are relevant to your business’ services can often give you an easy way to promote services and products that you sell.

Remember: lists are good for driving traffic to your website but not for making people convert. A list on its own will not offer much – you will need another format or technique to help secure those visitors as customers.

Write Evergreen Content

Relevancy is important for all kinds of content marketing, so evergreen (constantly-relevant) content can be invaluable.

Content can quickly become outdated on the internet, and old articles sometimes need regular refreshing to stay up to date.

Even articles about older subjects can end up being invalidated if a new version of that thing releases.

Evergreen content is content that is always useful, including things like FAQ pages, reference guides, tutorials, or “serious” content that is meant to educate the reader.

These tend to be useful for a long time, providing a stable source of website traffic.

Write Useful Content

Naturally, the best content is useful content. Creating something that is useful to your audience can see an increase in website traffic, as well as more referral traffic from other sites referencing your content.

For example, creating some important resources about a niche topic can help to drive more website traffic back to you.

Users who are searching for resources like that will stumble across your website, potentially taking an interest in the goods and services you offer.

Alongside direct search traffic, you also have people visiting due to other websites linking back to your content.

This can bolster your traffic even further and provide some important boosts to your search engine optimization that will only put your site even further up the search results.

Improve Headlines

Headlines are an often-overlooked part of your content and can heavily influence how much traffic you can drive to your site.

A good headline can often get you ranked higher in search engines and noticed more often by your target audiences, while a bad one can do the exact opposite.

Better Headlines

If you want to draw in relevant traffic, then you need to present them with an article or page that they have an interest in.

Headlines are the first thing they see and can often be the point where they either stick with the article or decide to move on.

To get more traffic from a particular market, you want to title posts and headers with something relevant to them.

Use relevant keywords in the headlines, keep the headers clear, and try to make sure that the article’s purpose is clear even before the user visits it.

Focus on Long-Form Content

While short-form content is useful, it can sometimes be a good idea to commit to long-form content.

In general, longer content will appear higher in search engines – although that is not the only benefit.

If you want to drive traffic to your website, then remember that longer content also has more opportunities to insert links, keywords, and marketing pushes.

Having more actual content available makes it significantly easier to target the right audiences with careful wording.

Word Count

While word count is not the only factor that goes into ranking, it can definitely help, both directly and indirectly.

As long as the content itself is useful and unique, there is almost no reason to not add more of it, especially in formats like a blog post or news section.

It can be easy to assume that longer content will drive users away, but that is not really the case.

Even long articles can seem short if the user is engaged and invested in the content – and, for more informative posts, staying brief often means that you miss out on including important details.

Build a Content Schedule

No matter what kind of content you are creating – from blog post content to entire technical manuals – it is important to keep consistency in mind.

Most search engines prefer to rank reliable long-term sources of information above an individual blog post.

Whether you are using an automated publishing schedule or just doing it manually, make sure to stagger your posts.

This does not just benefit search engines but also helps keep users engaged, especially if they are signed up to email updates each time you post.

Staggering content releases never hurts, and the right timing might allow you to keep your website traffic high by drawing in a new bulk of users each time the previous content starts to lose its initial traffic volume.

Repurpose Your Old Content

While you should never copy content 1:1, there is nothing wrong with repurposing old articles or ideas.

This can draw twice as much traffic to your website by putting the same information into different formats or even across different platforms.

For example, a blog post could become a great script for a video, and you could always re-write an old tutorial into a new blog post with updated demonstration images.

Not only does this draw more website traffic your way, but it means that you can produce an extra set of content without actually having to do extra research.

Just be sure that you do not copy too much – search engines are very harsh with sites that use duplicate content.

Refresh Old Articles

There is always a chance that older articles or blog post content might eventually become irrelevant.

However, getting rid of it would be a waste – especially if you can refresh it and update it.

For example, a blog post about a product that has been replaced by a newer version can still be useful.

You could re-word it and add a new section about how the new version improves on that product or alter the content to include details on alternatives to the defunct old product.

While it is important to create content regularly, there is nothing wrong with re-using older content that no longer has any value.

Whether you play off nostalgia or just use it as informative content, there are a lot of ways to convert older pieces into something new and useful.

Update Old Posts

It is very common for a blog post to suddenly become out of date, especially if it focuses on a particular product, service, or larger-scale subject that is changing over time.

If your information remains irrelevant, it could impact your organic search traffic and your SEO. Going back and updating content is important, even in blog posts.

There is no reason to keep a blog post outdated for historical reasons, and more major forms of content (such as tutorials and informative articles) should absolutely be kept up to date.

The age of a piece of content does not matter. A page from a decade ago could still top search engines as long as it has been improved and iterated upon, so do not be afraid to turn older content into something new if you need a fresh post.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an old – but still very effective – way of approaching your audience directly.

While it is entirely possible to get your emails hidden by looking too much like spam, there are a lot of legitimate ways to use email marketing to your business’s advantage.

A lot of people are easy to reach via their inboxes, and you can collect users’ emails in various different ways.

Whether you are using this to nudge visitors into looking at new products or just want to remarket to past customers, it is a good idea to keep email options in mind.

Send Bulk Emails

Email marketing can be incredibly inexpensive, making it a good way to promote blog posts, products, or even your entire site and brand to a range of past visitors.

While you will need a way to gather emails from visitors, you have a lot of options once the list of emails is ready.

Even sending a simple bulk promotional email can be a good option, showing a product or service to quite a wide range of people for basically no cost.

While some are obviously going to ignore the email entirely, it still provides a source of more website traffic with minimal effort.

It is important to make sure that you are promoting the right things, though. Create your emails in the same way that you create content – produce something that would make the users want to engage with your site, and make sure it fits your intended target audiences.

Automate Emails

If you do not want to manually send bulk emails to gather more traffic, then you can always automate some emails for users that sign up to your mailing list or updates system.

These can work well as a way to drive traffic back to your site. Spreading out a range of emails that offer things like a free tool or promote a particular deal can help secure a user’s interest or remind them that your website exists if they forgot.

Good automated emails are ones that get right to the point and deliver something worthwhile to the user in question.

Do not fill their inbox with spam – automate regular emails that contain something useful, and try to re-capture any past visitors who signed up to your list but forgot about your site.

Offer Something for Email Details

One of the best ways to secure more emails – and get customers invested in your site – is to offer something in exchange for their email address and name.

This could be anything from a free sample of some software to a discount on a particular product.

Most online communities will take free deals that are relevant to them without question. This can help you get a massive amount of email data to use for future marketing campaigns and can incentivize more users to give up their email information as a whole.

Promotional Options

When it comes time to actually promote your content, there are a lot of ways that you can approach the issue.

Content and site promotion can be daunting at first, especially if you are not sure where to begin, but finding the right tools can make it surprisingly easy.

The important thing is to vary up the methods that you use. Not all users come from the same sources, and capturing more traffic often means spreading yourself across a range of different niches to capture specific audiences.

Even within your own target audiences, there might be dozens of subdivisions of different users.

Some may respond well to Google ads, while others would require influencer marketing to capture them, so you can’t rely on just one method to push your business to its maximum traffic potential.

Content Aggregators

A content aggregation website is any site that collects content rather than producing its own. While some of these are not going to be particularly useful, it can still be worth exploring a lot of content aggregation sites and posting yourself on them as often as possible.

For example, a platform like Reddit is equal parts social media and content aggregation. A lot of subreddits exist specifically for people to share relevant sites and projects, so it is entirely possible to submit some of your own content to a community that might be interested in it.

This does not just apply to Reddit, either. Any website that aggregates content into a single place (usually across multiple niches or subcommunities) can be a great way to target an audience that would have an interest in what you are offering rather than throwing blog articles out at an uncertain audience.

Guest Posts

Writing guest posts can be a great way to get your site more attention. Guest posts are posts written for another site that links back to your own, often with the intent of getting more traffic and SEO benefits.

Since this provides an easy way to get traffic back to your site, you may end up struggling to find suitable websites for this.

This is because they need to be relevant websites while also being sites that will actually accept a guest post.

There can also be specific guest post guidelines to follow. These are usually meant to be quality standards or, for clarity reasons, making sure that you are not submitting content that could damage the site’s reputation or confuse its users.

Sites that accept guest posts are not too hard to find as long as you use the right seraph terms – any site with a “write for us” section may count.

Some sites will also accept guest posts for a fee, hosting an article that you have written in exchange for a small amount of money.

Sponsored Posts

Alongside guest blogging is sponsored blogging. Unlike a guest post, this is when you pay a blogger or site owner some money to write a post that references and links to your content or website, essentially sponsoring them to advertise something that you want them to promote.

This often has to be done in a very specific way since you need to keep relevancy in mind. Sponsoring a random blog to talk about an unrelated product can often have very little SEO impact while also reducing the amount of traffic you are likely to get.

However, if a post fits naturally and relates to the interests of the audience, you are more likely to see success.

Advertising model kits on a blog dedicated to model kit hobbyists would work incredibly well, but it would be less effective on a blog about home improvement.

Sponsored posts also are not accepted everywhere. Some site owners refuse them outright, and others will demand higher prices than you are willing to pay for them.

You should always see if a site accepts these posts before approaching them and not be too forceful with the emails that you send.

Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach is about contacting bloggers that have at least some kind of relation to your brand or site, either to pay them for promotions or to arrange some other form of promotion.

You can reach out to bloggers who have already featured your site, written content on a related topic, linked to your blog before, or even tweeted about articles and posts that you have created. However, you need to find them if you want to contact them.

Using a combination of brand mention checking tools and email-finding tools can allow you to quickly gather up a list of bloggers worth talking to, letting you quickly see potential avenues of promotion.

Then, all you need to do is perform outreach. Contacting each blogger and seeing if you can arrange a possible promotional piece is easy enough and gives you a quick way to secure some quality backlinks to increase your website traffic quite significantly.

Accept Guest Blogging Posts

If you have a blog of your own, there is nothing wrong with accepting guest blogging requests too. A guest blog post on your own site can increase traffic in a different way since the blogger is likely to link to their article on their own site anyway.

This not only gives you more attention – since their social media followers and regular readers may visit – but also spreads your website further as a result.

If you target the right blog, you can start driving traffic to your website very quickly and without much actual effort on your own part.

If you can’t draw in the right kinds of bloggers, consider paying or compensating them for their work somehow.

Whether it is money, free products, or some other form of payment, incentivizing high-quality guest posts can often lead to great backlinks and additional traffic without you having to do much work.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a huge part of modern marketing and something that many site owners forget to keep track of.

With good SEO, you can push your site to new heights and see overwhelming success before you even realize where your new traffic is coming from. With bad SEO, you will not appear in search results often enough for your other efforts to make much of a difference.

SEO is all about putting your brand in front of the right people at the right time, and that includes using various SEO tools to focus on a specific target keyword with each page you create.

Check Your Site’s SEO Health

The organic traffic that visits your website will often come from search engines, usually by stumbling across your site listed in their search results.

As you might expect, this can make up a big portion of your traffic, so you want your site to be optimized for search engines.

Poor SEO can make it harder to rank high for search results that are relevant to your business, meaning that the people who would want to see your business aren’t seeing it.

Even if they know you exist, they might not be able to find you if they do not know your business name exactly.

There are various SEO tools out there for checking the overall health of a site’s SEO. Remember, SEO influences the quantity of traffic to your site – better SEO usually means higher traffic, so if you want to increase website traffic, target SEO first.

Build Backlinks

Backlinks from high-authority and high-relevancy sites boost your SEO significantly, making it easier to rank higher in search engine results. This makes them an important part of SEO as a whole.

If you want high-quality backlinks, then you have to build them yourself. This usually means looking for sites that are A) relevant to your business and B) high-authority, then finding a way to get links from them pointing back to your own site.

There are so many link building techniques out there that it would be impossible to list them all inside another list. However, some of the most notable are:

Broken Link Building

Broken links – links that no longer point to a valid site – can be a good source of backlinks as well as general traffic.

If you offer to “fix” broken links by getting a site owner to replace a broken link with one with similar content on your site, then you get the SEO benefits and whatever traffic the original site would have gotten from people clicking that link.

Content Links

As mentioned before, with guest content marketing, having links from high-quality content that relates to your business is very important. Whether you want to rank higher for specific terms or just generate traffic from particular niches, more content always helps.

You can boost your SEO and referral traffic by getting more links from high-quality and well-respected sites.

Not only do these tend to help you rank higher on search platforms, but users may end up following the link and exploring your site if it interests them.

This is a good way to expose more people to your site while also boosting your rankings, giving you two new sources of website traffic for very little effort.

Rich Site Snippets

Snippets are an invaluable part of having an online website and something to heavily consider when you are trying to get yourself noticed more often.

Snippets are the things that search engines like Google display alongside search results when your site appears. This could be things like question boxes, location, and contact details, or a range of other information (both automated and user-defined).

Using these snippets effectively can be tough at first, but it is a good way to display more information to potential search traffic sources. Having more ways to coax people into viewing your site can make a big difference in competitive fields.

Targeting Communities Online

If you are not sure how to drive traffic to your website in the quantities that you want, then it is important to target communities that have some relevancy to your brand. Properly targeting those communities can be tough at first, but it is a useful way of boosting website traffic in the long term.

While it is easy to track down these communities if you are already in the same niche as them, this is not always the case. Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to identify a community that might be worth targeting next.

Reddit and other forums

Spaces like Reddit are perfect for this, offering established communities that are usually focused on a particular niche or subject. This can also be a reason to go looking for forums and other community-run sites – places where you would want more traffic directed to your site.

Of course, the way that you promote your site needs to be good. A lot of online communities will shun obvious attempts to advertise something without actually engaging with their content and discussions.

Posting original content and acting like a user is the best option. Even if you only contribute to a few discussions, building up some trust before you start to promote your services can go a long way toward earning more website traffic.

Facebook groups

Facebook groups are another great place to consider since these are often just like forums, only more closed-off. Since the groups are built around particular subjects or goals, they can be a gold mine of potential traffic and something that you should not overlook.

Make sure that you understand and respect any rules that they have established about promotion. You do not want to be kicked from the group, so take your time and approach the group in a way that benefits your site.

Quora questions

Quora allows almost anybody to answer questions, and that often makes it a great place to promote services. For example, if a person is asking where to find services for something you offer, you can promote yourselves to them directly.

Of course, this means finding the right questions to answer, so use the platform’s search features liberally. You can narrow down a huge range of question options quite quickly, letting you find plenty of interesting places to promote yourself.

Be sure that you are actually answering their questions alongside your promotion, though. Having a successful and respected Quora profile makes it easier to keep promoting yourself that way, driving more traffic to your website over time.

Product Hunt

Communities like Product Hunt are focused on curating particular apps, websites, and other products across a range of niches.

While it can be a tough site to use, there are a few ways to promote yourself and get quite a lot of positive feedback – bringing traffic along with it.

Product Hunt has its own guide on how to do this well, so make sure that you are prepared and understand how the process works. Like most sites, the Product Hunt community would not take kindly to spam.

YouTube comments

If all else fails, there are always YouTube comments. From commenting on videos about things related to your business to posting your own videos and responding to the comments that you get in return, it can be a way to promote yourself in some very precise niches.

While this can be extremely unreliable at best, you do not actually lose anything for leaving YouTube comments.

This makes it a great option for trying to squeeze a few more traffic sources out of a platform that you may only use occasionally.

Data and Optimization

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when trying to generate traffic is not gathering and using data. Constant data-gathering can be incredibly useful for businesses in any niche, offering even more ways to improve your traffic generation efforts.

However, getting hold of useful data and using it correctly is not always easy, especially if you are not sure where to begin. It can be tough to drive traffic to a site if you are not sure how you should be doing it.

Optimize Traffic Sources

If you are connected to an analytics platform (which you ideally should be), you can use it to see where your traffic is coming from.

This is surprisingly useful for driving traffic to your website since it shows you three important metrics that you will need to consider.

Like any other part of marketing and promotion, success is not always an improvement across the board. Sometimes one metric will increase while another decreases.

Highest Volume

The highest volume sources are the ones that provide the most traffic overall. If you just want to drive traffic to your website without any real care for relevancy, then this would be the biggest thing to focus on.

While this is not a bad thing, high traffic potential does not always mean higher chances of converting. Even so, getting more website traffic can still increase the number of conversions you get semi-proportionally.

Highest Conversions

Conversions are a major factor to focus on. Conversions can cover whatever you need them to, from sales to site newsletter sign-ups, but the general idea is to measure the traffic sources with the most successful conversions.

These tend to be the ones that have the best chance of turning a visitor into an interested user or customer.

For example, it might be a source of traffic from a blog post mentioning a product, linking directly to that product’s page.

However, more conversions are not always the only thing you need to focus on. While it can be an important metric to measure, make sure that it is not the only thing you focus on.

Most Engagement

Engagement can be measured by a range of things, but it mostly refers to users interacting with the site (like exploring various product pages). This can be very important as well since it shows you which kinds of traffic are getting invested in the site.

High engagement does not always mean high conversions, but it also does not necessarily mean that chasing engagement is worthless. Having users interact with your site more can make it more memorable and might convince them to convert later on, even if they leave your site.

Take Traffic From Competitors

If you are in a highly competitive field, you can always simply steal competitors’ methods of gaining website traffic to direct more traffic to your website.

There are various SEO and marketing tools that you can use to break down a competitor’s backlinks and general marketing techniques, letting you see where their traffic is coming from.

Reverse-engineering a competitor’s methods can be very useful, allowing you to quickly direct more traffic to your website by using the same exact techniques that they were already using.

Not only does this put you on similar ground to that of your competitor, but it is relatively easy to do.

Other Ways to Push Traffic To Your Website

There are hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your website and thousands of variations of those tactics. This makes it impossible to list every way that you could drive traffic to your site or even capture existing organic traffic.

However, some methods to increase website traffic and direct existing traffic to your site stand out from the rest.

Here are some of the best ways to secure more traffic to your site.

Improve Your Site

Search engine bots check a site based on its current state, from landing pages to meta description information.

Optimizing and updating your site can help it rank higher the next time it gets crawled, helping to increase organic traffic to your website by having it appear in more search results.

Even simple things like better internal linking can make a difference, so on-site SEO work is never a waste of time.

Check Analytics

Using a free tool like Google Analytics or Google Search Console can open you up to an entirely new world of data. Many new site owners do not even realize that Google Analytics is invaluable for tracking organic traffic behavior.

This can help with things like seeing where you drive traffic the most, how new arrivals move around the site with internal links, and which techniques have managed to increase website traffic the most.

Use Social Media Sites

Always post on social media platforms. Even if all you post is links to your blog content, social media platforms can increase traffic passively.

The more accurate you are on social media and the more you use your social media tools to draw attention to your brand, the easier it becomes to increase traffic to your site.

Not only can social media drive traffic to your website, but social media sites are also good for SEO reasons. Links from your social media accounts can boost site SEO, meaning that social media can help to drive traffic through search engines as well.

Vary Your Tools

Using a range of SEO tools, content management tools, and other software options can be useful for trying to increase traffic to your site effectively.

Never put all of your focus on one thing. Whether you are improving meta description details, increasing page speed, monitoring blog traffic, or making the site responsive for mobile devices, you always want to be improving something in the background.

Spread Your Focus

You can’t increase website traffic very far if you only commit to improving a single part of your promotional efforts and traffic-gathering techniques. Even if you are relying on mostly free tools, spread your influence around and combine multiple different techniques.

Choose Budget Options

There is nothing wrong with relying on free tools to experiment. While options like Google Search Console are obvious, there are countless cheap tools and free techniques out there that can help you drive traffic to the right places.

For example, using a page speed checker or alternate social media management platform might seem like a minor change, but you could gather important data or make useful discoveries about new ways to increase traffic flow.

Don’t Ignore Obvious Improvements

It is always better to do something with cheap tools than not do it at all. As long as you are not making mistakes or damaging your own efforts to promote yourself, there is very little reason to not explore new options.

Do not overlook clear avenues of improvement or sources of additional traffic, even if you are worried about your budget. You can always use free or cheaper tools to get a feel for that market before you commit to anything larger-scale.

Work Within Search Engines’ Guidelines

Always keep the guidelines of search platforms in mind. It is easy to get overeager and make a mistake, but you want to be sure that everything you are doing is okay.

Tools like Google Search Console are useful, but they can’t warn you if you do something black-hat or are vulnerable to being penalized. Make sure you are familiar with the limitations of what you can do on that platform.

Focus On The Right Things

It is important to think about what matters most to your business. For example, is the number of monthly active users on your site more important than the click-through rate or less?

Knowing whether or not to put something like click-through rate at a higher priority can be really valuable since different online sites and businesses will prioritize different things.

Make Regular Blog Post Updates

Social media and blog updates are the easiest way to sustain interest in your business, even if they are mostly used for internal linking to products.

This is especially true of social media, where each new social media post has a chance to appear on another user’s feed. The nature of social media makes it quite easy to “snowball” your follower count and receive more attention over time.

Push For More Website Traffic

If you want more traffic on a web page, push for it. Do not slow down, and do not let yourself get complacent with the number of visitors you already get because there is always room for more.

Most businesses never really “settle down” and are always pushing for greater success. If you really need to get more users on your site, then you should follow this example and keep the ball rolling for as long as you can, especially if you find a new niche to target.