10 Things You Can Do to Strongly Grow Your Website Traffic 

Rohan Mathew

Updated on:

The online world can be a tricky road to navigate, but you’ve taken a leap and started your own website. You’ll probably get lucky and catch a few organic views, maybe a couple of subscribers, but you might hit a dead end and find your website reach has flopped.

To be successful your website needs traffic, if you’re not tech-savvy and not very skilled in SEO it might seem like you’ve reached the end of the road in your online venture, but fear not. Here are 10 things that you can do to massively grow your website traffic: 

  1.   Know your audience. 

This should be the top priority when hoping to increase website traffic. How can you possibly draw more people in if you don’t know who you’re aiming your content towards?

Take a bit of time to review your website, consider what you’re hoping to achieve by sharing your content and who you want to pay attention to what you’ve got to say. When you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to do a bit of research so you understand what they expect. 

What kind of content does your target audience look for? Do they prefer video content, blog posts or webinars? With the online world being as wide and varied as it is, understanding your audience is essential. 

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  1. Promote on social media

Influencers aren’t the only ones that benefit from social media promotion. Getting your content out there on social media can increase your website traffic by up to 31%.

The key to pushing traffic from social media to your website is ensuring that your socials are active and up to date. There’s no point in setting up the social media and only updating it every now and then.

You need to be active and engaging on your platforms, linking your website and showing sneak-peaks of your content.

Don’t just focus on Instagram, make sure you’re sharing content on LinkedIn. In fact, a study by Econsultancy showed that 64% of all social media referrals come from LinkedIn so it would be a shame to miss out on such a great opportunity to drive traffic towards your website.

When you’re posting on social media your content needs to be engaging, so it’s worth taking the information you learned about your target audience and stepping up your research. Take a look into the most popular hashtags, the most engaging types of content and bring that over to your socials. 

You want to captivate your audience and give them FOMO if they don’t check out your site.

And you can even use live chats to increase your social media ROI.

  1.   SEO and keywords.

SEO can seem a little overwhelming but unfortunately there is no avoiding it in the online world. If you want your website popping up in the top search results, you’re going to need to work on it. Search Engine Optimization isn’t as complicated as it seems and making a few changes to your website content can work wonders.

Start by making a few notes on what you think your audience might search for then jump across to your search engine and search for your industry. What are the most popular phrases that pop up?

They’re likely to be your keywords but you should double check it using a keywords explorer, such as Ahrefs or Google Adwords to find out the more accurate results. They do cost a little, but when it comes to boosting your website traffic, it is worth it.

Check the results for the other ways that people search for the same thing and try to include it in your content.

SEO isn’t only about getting keywords into your content; you’ll need to make sure your website gives users a great experience and loads quickly. You also want to make sure your URLs and meta descriptions are on point.

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The better your SEO, the more website traffic you’ll gain.

  1. Powerful headlines and catchy content

What makes someone want to read your content? The headline is the first thing they see when deciding if they’re going to click the link and it needs to be engaging.

SEO plays a role in your headlines, but more importantly your headline needs to draw your audience in. You can have a headline made entirely of keywords but if it doesn’t sound interesting, nobody will click on it.

There are loads of studies that encourage a specific formula for writing engaging headlines and if you’re looking to boost website traffic, it would be wise to get up to speed on them.

First things first; your headline needs to link to the content. Audiences don’t appreciate click bait and you’re likely to lose traffic rather than gain it. Your headline should explain the content simply while making your audience want to read on.

If you’ve done your research and know who your target audience is and what they typically search for, you can build your content and headlines around that.

Keep your headlines short. Do you know how many characters are typically displayed on your search engine? On Google it is 70, so titles with more than 70 characters won’t be fully displayed on a search making all of the effort you put into creating it pretty redundant.

Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing and how they draw traffic with their content. It might give you a few extra ideas.

  1. Check out the competition

Every single business, website and blog has competitors and an important part of boosting traffic is knowing who they are and how they work.

Understanding your competitors can give you great insight into how you can improve or what you’re maybe doing better than them.

The content and marketing techniques of your competitors can give you some really good ideas on where you should be going and what you should be avoiding. If you take a look through their website and find that they’re missing something you can get yourself one step ahead by including it on yours.

Be cautious when it comes to scoping out the competition, it’s great to know what they’re up to but you don’t want to copy everything they do. 

Copying competitors can lead to all sorts of issues and could result in your reputation being damaged, as well as potential lawsuits, so it’s really important to know the difference between using your competitors for inspiration and outright plagiarism. 

  1. Advertise

Paid advertising can really drive traffic to your website because it gets your content more widely shared and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. 

Not only can paid advertising push traffic to your website, you can gain measurable results on how effective this technique is and give you insight into how your target audience behaves when searching online. 

So if you’re looking to increase website traffic, paid advertising may be one to consider. 

There are two main types of paid advertising, which are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Cost-Per-Impression (CPI). 

PPC is more suitable for search engines and is a lot easier to track, giving you clearer insights and measurable results of who is clicking on your advert. You can get PPC using Google Adwords or Facebook Advertising and although very effective, this method can become expensive if you don’t monitor the number of clicks you’re receiving. The cost can also vary depending on the competitiveness of the market and the kind of keywords being used. 

CPI advertising can be much cheaper as you pay a set cost for displaying your advert 1000 times. The downside of PPI is that it’s much more difficult to measure the results as you won’t be able to find out how many clicks your advert received, only how many times it has been displayed. 

  1. Guest Blogging

All aspects of business involve networking, and your website is no different. If you’re looking to encourage more traffic to your site then guest blogging is a great way to do it. 

Guest blogging can be a bit of a challenge to break into but if you put in the effort, the rewards are worth the work. You need to start by building relationships with expert and popular bloggers in your field. 

Reach out to popular bloggers in your field, get some responses and build from there. You can then start to work in your guest post. The post you write should be related to the blogger you’re posting for, not yourself. 

To encourage traffic back to your website you can include backlinks to your blog or website at relevant points in the post and once the posts are live, the traffic will come flooding to your site. 

It’s true that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

  1. Analyze your Analytics 

Analytic data is so helpful when trying to get more traffic to your site, you really shouldn’t skip it. 

Using Analytics might sound scary and little overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. You can use the data to identify trends, patterns and help you to make better, more informed decisions about your website. 

It gives you the ability to collect data, measure the data, analyze it, and then optimize your site. It’s not about how much data you collect, but what you do with it. 

You can use it to find which of your landing pages has the most views, and what sites have sent you the most referrals. You can then use that information to focus your efforts, building your content on the sites that send you the most visitors, rather than wasting energy in areas that give you no results. 

Understanding the data means you can build your site, updating and improving your most popular landing pages and put more energy into improving the pages that maybe aren’t so popular. 

Analytics also gives you an insight into what your audience are looking for and what you can do to keep them coming back. You don’t want only one time visitors on your site, you want them returning every time you upload new content. 

  1. Email Marketing

Marketing campaigns aren’t just limited to businesses, they can be used to encourage traffic straight from their inbox to your website and it’s really effective. 

As long as your emails are well thought out, engaging and not irritating, then your website should start getting more views in a short amount of time. 

Make sure you’re not spamming people with tonnes of marketing emails, most email inboxes will now automatically pick up on that, sending your email straight to the junk folder to never be opened.

You can use your analytics data to determine what your audience is looking for and tailor your campaigns to those. 

There are loads of easy to use email marketing sites that are perfect if you haven’t had experience with this kind of marketing before such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact. 

It’s important to remember that you can’t just start firing off emails randomly, you need to build an email list first. You can do this by asking visitors to your site to subscribe, offering product updates, posting adverts that link them to your subscriber page…the options are limitless, but you do need permission. 

Once you’ve managed to build your email list, you can get started by sending out content updates, newsletters or pitching product sales all the while including linkbacks to your website and relevant pages. 

The great thing about using email marketing sites is that you can make it automated in most cases, preparing emails and content in advance and scheduling them to be sent on a specific date at a specific time. You don’t think that all the major companies have a single person manually sending out emails do you?

If your emails are well thought out, polite and professional then the traffic should be flooding to your website in no time. 

  1. Optimize your site

You’re doing everything you can to encourage people to visit your website, but if your site isn’t up to scratch then they wont come back. 

It’s paramount that your website is fast, responsive and organized if you want to increase your traffic. 

Our world is so used to being online that nobody has the patience to wait around for a web page to load. If your site is slow to load, you’re not getting many visitors because they’ll take their clicks somewhere else where the pages load faster. 

Check your image sizes are at their lowest, your HTML’s are custom, make sure your site cache isn’t affecting your load speeds. 

If you use WordPress, you can install plug-ins to boost load speeds and check page speed data. 

If you’ve got a little knowledge with code and javascript, check your site and make sure there’s no extra comments, commas or useless code because it will drastically slow your loading speed.

If you’re not javascript and coding savvy, Google recommends using the Minify Resources that can help to do that for you. 

You can also use a Content Distribution Network, where your content is stored in servers all over the world, increasing loading speed and giving more reliable access. 

Ultimately to encourage traffic to your website, your website needs to be worth visiting. If it’s slow and not very great to navigate you’re likely to end up losing visitors rather than gaining them.