How to Increase Website Traffic & Site Visitors in 2024
Website traffic is a vital driver of overall business growth, so it’s important to learn multiple methods to increase your website traffic.
It improves your rankings, which in turn generates even more traffic. Traffic allows you to measure marketing methods, improve search engine credibility, gather audience insights, and the most important benefit, gain more customers. Yet when searching for how to increase traffic to your website, you’ll quickly realize there are countless methods and ideologies out there. Where do you even begin?
In order to understand how to increase traffic to your eCommerce website the right way, you need to focus on attracting quality website traffic. Traffic means nothing if your engagement is stagnant and conversion rates are plummeting. That’s where we come in. The following are 15 effective ways you can boost traffic in a way that will ultimately impact the bottom line and also increase online sales numbers.
Use SEO to Increase Your Website Traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most impactful and valuable things you can do to drive organic traffic to your website. There are countless tactics you can use on each webpage to increase its rank in search engines, resulting in more visitors.
Consider every aspect of your site and do thorough keyword research. Ensure you’re producing optimized, high-quality content that your potential customers are searching for (more on this a bit later). Make sure you’re making the most of every bit of text on your site.
- Are you using image alt text?
- Are your meta descriptions concise and do they use targeted keywords?
- Is your landing page copy clear, informative, and the best that it can be?
- Are you answering the common questions a visitor may have about your topic?
You should also look at internally linking to high-ranking landing pages and externally linking to reputable sources. This helps with SEO and results in a better experience for the reader.
🔥 A Real Shopify SEO Study 🚀
Target Long-Tail Keywords Organically In Your SEO Campaign
High-ranking keywords, secondary keywords, and latent semantic indexing (LSI) terms are all a major part of performing on-page SEO. Once you have these covered for a page, you’ll want to focus on your long-tail keywords. Longer and more specific keywords or key phrases might get less search traffic, but they have a much higher conversion value. It’s not just about the amount of traffic you get, but making sure that traffic turns into customers!
Write Irresistible, Educational Website Content That Ranks
Google wants to see informative, authoritative content on your site that provides true substance and value to readers. As there’s no exact magic formula for writing successful content, it’s smart to change it up from time to time.
- Make compelling headlines that will lure readers in.
- Vary the length and format of your content to better gauge what works and what doesn’t.
- Make your content easily digestible by using imagery, infographics, videos, and other visual elements that will break up the content and engage the reader.
- Keep your blog content educational. Readers can sniff out when they’re being sold to. But if you’re providing valuable content, they’re more likely to stick around.
- Check out our SEO Content Writing Guide.
Use Google My Business to Increase Traffic
If you haven’t already, you need to create a Google My Business listing. It is an essential tool for local SEO. Google My Business allows your business listing to appear in local search results for product or service-specific search queries. This listing links to your website and is thus a great way to increase traffic and business leads.
Below, notice the advantages of a claimed Google My Business page when people search for your brand or company online:
Get Backlinks To Your Website
A backlink is simply a link to your website from another website. When backlinks are used from complementary sites or influencers, they can get your business in front of a much larger audience while driving qualified traffic to your site. Google often picks up on these and will boost trust in your business if it sees other reputable websites linking to yours.
Ensure Your Site Is Responsive & Mobile Friendly
Long gone are the days of exclusively using desktop computers to browse the internet. Today, more people use their mobile devices to access the web than ever before. This means you need to make your website accessible and viewable across a range of devices. If people have to zoom or scroll to see your webpage, they are going to go elsewhere.
Google switched over to mobile-first indexing and will even warn you in Google Search Console if any of your content is not mobile-friendly.
Online Directories Can Drive Traffic
Another free and easy way to boost traffic to your website is by getting listed in online directories and review sites. Just make sure to actively update your listings. Most sites will link to your page, which can result in even more website traffic if updated correctly. And when listed on sites with a strong domain authority on Google, your business has the potential to rank even higher for relevant searches.
- Industry-specific directories (see screenshot below)
- Claim Your Google My Business Page! Might as well do the same on Bing Places as well.
- Broad directories (Yellow Pages, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, etc.)
Utilize Social Media
Social media is one of the biggest no-brainer marketing tools around. It’s free and plays a major role in driving traffic to your website — why wouldn’t you use it? But knowing how to drive traffic to your website using social media takes a little bit of strategy and effort on your part.
You should be using Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram to promote blog posts and other informative pages on your website. This way, you can convert social media users into website visitors and then potentially into customers. And if you create shareable content, you can draw traffic from their network of friends, broadening your overall reach even further.
Be Social: Engage And Participate
Social media management doesn’t begin and end with creating an account and posting once a week. You need to engage and be active on your accounts, online groups and other websites that are relevant to your business. The more you engage, the more exposure you’ll get. Just remember to be helpful and sincere, avoiding any spammy wording or links to your website.
- Comment on blogs and posts.
- Answer people’s questions.
- Actively participate in industry conversations.
Create Landing Pages To Drive Leads and Sales
Landing pages are a free way to build out your website and get more traffic to your site. Typically, landing pages include information potential customers need in order to move forward and convert. Feel free to get targeted and specific in your messaging as this will only increase the overall traffic going to those pages. And be sure to have an engaging call to action (CTA) on each page that encourages readers to take that next step. This could be anything from signing up for a newsletter to reaching out for an estimate to taking part in a free trial.
If you’re trying to think of landing pages to build considering industries you sell to, different customer types, and specific detailed services potential customers may search. These pages can often drive more traffic than broadly focused landing pages and convert much, much higher. If you need help, check out our landing page design services.
Invite Guest Bloggers To Create Content
A good way to add a little variety to your content is by having an industry influencer or expert write a guest post on your site. It shows that you’re credible and both active in and up-to-date on things going on in your market. This not only drives traffic through organic search but also through the influencer or thought leader promoting the content to their own audience.
Another option is to ask an influencer or industry expert to mention your business in a review or post. While still free, this will require a little more collaboration from both parties.
Email Marketing Increases Traffic & Converts to Sales
Just because you’re focusing on content marketing, doesn’t mean you should forget about those tried and true traditional methods. Email marketing is alive and well and can be an incredibly powerful tool if done correctly. The key to successful email marketing is to find the right balance of reaching people on your email list with helpful content without bombarding them with relentless messages. When done right, it can result in a major uptick in traffic.
Learn From Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an invaluable resource and one that you should be using on a regular basis to help drive traffic. Use it (it’s free) to track links for marketing campaigns and website analytics, demographics, popular pages and more. This will give you a good idea of which strategies and content are working, and which may need some improvements. You should also pay close attention to visitor data in order to gauge where and when your traffic is coming from.
Drive Traffic To Your Website With Google Ads
The easiest way to get instant website traffic is to pay for it with Google Ads. A paid Google Ad result is your website showing up at the top of search results for a specific keyword. When a search query is entered, Google reviews all accounts bidding on the keywords used in the search and displays and ranks the paid results by quality and relevance. This is an awesome way to generate website traffic from qualified visitors. Plus, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. If other organic marketing methods, such as SEO are taking time to get ramped up, consider running a Google Ads campaign right away.
Pro Tip: If you’re an eCommerce business, you can promote your products through Google Shopping. Don’t get solely rely on text ads, get that shopping feed going!
Bonus: Google Ads also allows you to select your preferences, so your business appears at the top of Google Maps search results. Buying branded keywords is a great way to maximize your company’s square footage in the SERPs.
Reach Your Target Audience with the Right Advertising
Paid advertising is obviously a fantastic way to get eyeballs on your website. The following are a few of the most popular channels you can build into your paid strategy.
- Display ads (also known as banner ads) are typically placed on relevant websites. It’s a smart way to reach your niche target audience and drive relevant traffic to your website.
- Paid social ads, similar to search advertising, allow you to specify the type of audience you want to target. It then positions the ads to show up in relevant social feeds.
- Retargeting ads can be used on both websites and social feeds and are used to target people who have already visited your site and thus are more likely to return.
Justin Smith
Justin Smith is the Founder & CEO at OuterBox. He’s has more than 20 years of experience in SEO, paid search, eCommerce and digital marketing. His accomplishments have been referenced by many well-known publications and industry experts such as Forbes, Neil Patel, Clutch, CNBC, USA Today and more.
