To drive traffic to your website, you have to understand a few things. Website traffic, search engines (and more specifically search engine optimization, or SEO), digital marketing, content marketing, and how to create content people want to see – to name a few.
But, rather than becoming a tech guru, all you really need to know to drive traffic to your website is a few tips and tricks, and we’ve got them all for you right here!
1. Understand searching
Search engines get millions of enquiries a day – it’s your job to know what they are. No, not all of them, just the ones relevant to your website so you can target the relevant traffic.
So, before you create content, think about what people are using search engines for. That’s the best way to get more traffic to your website.
To compete with other sites on the SEO front, you’ll need to know what people are searching by focusing on a few things:
Keyword research
Focus on a target keyword or two. Then type your target keyword into a keyword explorer app (usually free tools) when doing your keyword research.
Now, focus on keywords that are related to your target keyword and have lots of people searching for them, with few competitors on other search engines.
By doing this, you can drive traffic to your website by focusing on what your target audience is researching the most, but not getting answers to.
Content explorer
To nail your content marketing, you really need to create content that’s original, but in demand.
So, head to a content explorer app (these are usually free tools, too) and find out what people want to know, but don’t have access to. Having spoken to the director of UK Web Geekz at an SEO conference recently he was telling us all about Surfer SEO which is a keyword clustering software that combines that data with a content creator for writers.
By searching for a broad topic, you’ll see some relevant websites, but with little organic traffic because they aren’t optimized enough to benefit from SEO.
This is your chance to pounce.
In content marketing, you have to create content that’s relevant to your website visitors. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website and generate more traffic, but only if you keep providing.
That’s how you’ll get consistent traffic and continue to grow.
2. Guest posts
If you can create a guest post on other blogs or relevant websites, then you can generate traffic through web traffic that arrives elsewhere (the other blogs) which then direct them to you.
When you link back to your site on guest posts, you can send them to a blog post of your own – i.e. you’ll be driving traffic your way through referral traffic.
Referral traffic is basically about getting more organic traffic to your website by letting them find their own way to you. It’s definitely effective, and referral traffic is usually happier traffic because they’ve not been ‘forced’ to your site by google ads, paid traffic, or social media pages. Instead, they arrived via a search engine results page thanks to the guest blog you wrote.
Guest posts are a great way to drive traffic to your website – just find a blog open to a guest post, and see if you can be the one to create that guest post.
3. Find your relevant online communities
Relevant traffic hides in relevant online communities, so head there. Then you can bring more traffic to your website by advertising your latest blog post, or increasing website traffic by the way you answer questions in the community, or develop your presence on the social media platforms.
This is smart social media marketing and will increase web traffic by inviting more website traffic to your website in organic ways. This is how you get quality traffic to your website.
Online communities aren’t just found in your social media followers or with email marketing. How much traffic you can drive to your website isn’t all to do with a social media post.
Look for communities where questions are asked (Quora, Reddit, etc) and answer questions to be helpful to your potential customers. You can increase website traffic this way. And then, when the moment is right, you can send them to your blog content for more help.
A quick answer will get their attention, but a comprehensive blog post (because you will need to publish long form content to help in depth) will be useful to them too. You helped them, and now they’ll help you by increasing your click through rate and arriving at your thought-through landing pages.
4. Branch out
Search engines can only bring you so much – you’ll need to drive traffic to your website yourself by getting creative. And we’re not just talking about your latest blog post.
Promote blog posts away from your blog. Internal links are great (internal links are where you link one blog post to another blog post and so on, creating an internal linking structure), but sometimes you’ll need to bring organic traffic to your website by thinking outside of the box:
- Podcasts – everybody listens to podcasts and your target audience is literally waiting for you with mobile devices in-hand.
- Brand collaborations – big brands might not be interested in guest posting, but they may be interested in having their name on relevant sites – your relevant site! This two-way relationship gives them more exposure and you more credibility with organic search traffic and search engine bots.
- Use Medium – your blog post should always be search traffic focussed, but Medium is a user generated site that cares about quality above everything else. So if you have a great idea that tallies with your keyword research but not your google analytics in terms of how competitive the rest of the internet is, then use Medium. Your blog content will be saved to drive traffic to your website, and content on Medium can be used to impress others – ultimately driving traffic your way, anyway!
5. Merge/repurpose content
Merging and repurposing content is our last idea for you to help with driving traffic. Why?
Because when you merge similar content, you often get long tail keywords you hadn’t thought about before (long tail keywords are great for ranking higher in search results because it matches with what people type into search engines).
They’ll also attract more search traffic, help create a better meta description on a Google search results page, and, ultimately, bring your target audience your way – which is all we’ve been trying to do today!
Trends are always changing so updating old content is like an already powerful post on a very new topic.
Website traffic round-up
The main takeaway today is this: treat your customers like humans, focus on finding and impressing them, and more traffic will arrive at your website, we promise!
