You’ve done everything in your power to create the most beautiful website imaginable. You’ve launched it, and you’re nervous (yet excited) to see where this new traffic will take you! And then…
(crickets)
Unless you have thousands of people that have been waiting patiently for your website to launch, that is the sound you are most likely to hear.
So, how can you get traffic to your website and kill that deafening silence?
We’ll answer that and more in this article, but first!
Who is Your Target Audience?
You can implement all of the most successful tactics and strategies in the world, but if you don’t know who your target audience is, your efforts will fall short. Take the time to understand your target audience to ensure that your efforts are all going in the right direction.
How to Get Traffic to Your Website
Traffic doesn’t grow on trees, it grows based on your efforts. There are proven ways to attract more people to your website, and this article will help you make your website all it can be. We’ll focus on these winning strategies:
- Improve organic search ranking
- Advertise with search engine marketing
- Consistently send emails
- Consistently publish content
- Customize content for other sites
- Start guest posting
- Develop a social media calendar
- Get some paid social promotion
- Connect with social influencers
- Get some press
- Identify and repeat your best efforts
If you actively practice the theory provided in this article, you’ll be so much closer to your goals, it will blow your mind.
Improve Organic Search Ranking
One of the simplest ways to get more traffic to your website is to improve your organic search ranking. What does this mean? This means optimizing your website’s appearance in search engine result pages (SERP). Appearing higher in SERP means more customers will be visiting your website. Be sure to get a solid search engine optimization (SEO) plan together and tackle the following items:
New Content: Every great search engine rewards a website that consistently produces new content. Why? Because continuously fresh content indicates that the website is active, which can command more attention from relevant audiences. Create an editorial calendar and continue to produce content related to your business and/or industry.
Keywords: Conduct some research to discover which keywords your target audience tends to use when searching for anything related to your business. You will notice that there are certain words and phrases that they often search for. Use these discoveries to improve the SEO of your website.
Content Optimization: Using your audience’s keywords to inform your strategy, optimize your existing pages so that each one is targeting a particular keyword. If you ensure that each page targets a different keyword or key phrase, it will improve the search rankings for the individual pages as well as the overall website.
Link Building: Another way to get a ton of traffic is to have other websites link to you. Not only do you get direct traffic from those links, but search engines will also prioritize your website as it appears more credible when other websites link back to you. The quality of the other websites also affect how much impact they will have on your search ranking.
SEO: The bottom line is that search engines want to give searchers the best possible websites so that they will keep coming back to use that search engine. There are various factors that can affect your overall SEO including:
- Website speed
- Sitemaps
- Adaptive/responsive design
- Structured data
Search engines also consider your location. For example, if your business is in a local area, it may appear on a search engine above other competitors who are further away. This means it’s worth it to do some local SEO, which can include registering on local business listings and providing content on local search engines such as Yelp.
Advertise With Search Engine Marketing
Now that you know what it takes to be a master at organic search ranking, you’ll be consistently busy keeping up with it over time.
While you’re busy building your organic search ranking, you can drive traffic to your website by using pay per click (PPC) advertising. This is a form of advertising where you pay to target certain keywords and phrases so that your website can appear in SERPs.
Consistently Send Emails
Your email list is one of your most valuable assets as a business. It enables you to reach your customers directly so you can keep them in the loop and engaged with your business. Here are some of the best ways to use email marketing to drive traffic to your website:
- Build your list: Always be coming up with ways to build your email list so that your emails can give you more ROI.
- Create a series: Come up with a theme or topic that you’d like to focus on for a few emails in a row. Having a strategy like this keeps your audience engaged and looking forward to the next email. (That is… if you choose a topic that resonates well with your target audience).
- Send updates: When you come up with a new service, publish a new post, or have decided to run a charity event, be sure to send an email about it. This is an excellent way to keep your audience interested in checking out your website.
- Use email software: Unfortunately, most basic email accounts do not provide you with a way to send emails to a large list. There are various email clients you can try, including GoDaddy Email Marketing, Klaviyo, and Mailchimp.
Consistently Publish Fresh Content
Search engines tend to reward websites that publish new content. Not only does consistently publishing content improve your search rankings, it also drives traffic for a few other reasons:
- Shareability: The more content you have on your website, the more content there is for different visitors to share on their social media. And, of course, if more people see your content on social media, that might mean a whole lot more visits to your website.
- Linkability: Consistently putting out new content also provides other websites with more options to link back to you. This makes you more of an authority in the eyes of search engines everywhere.
- Length of Visit: If there’s more stuff on your website, there’s more stuff for visitors to check out! It’s that simple; let’s not complicate it.
- A Reason to Visit: This is the ultimate reason. Imagine if you left your website just the way you launched it for five years. Aside from a few seriously loyal fans, why would anyone come back to the website? New content gives them a reason.
There are plenty of content management systems (CMS) out there that you can use to make content production simpler. Check out WordPress, Yoast, and Squarespace.
Customize and Republish Content
Since you’ll have so much great content to choose from, now it’s time to repurpose it so you can spread the love. This is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website by leading third-party sites to refer people back to you. You can also republish some of your content, but be sure to read below so you can make sure you’re doing it right. Make sure you:
Repurpose content: You can turn a blog into something totally new. For example, you can turn a blog into a video and publish it on YouTube and Vimeo. You could also create a slideshow featuring key points from your blog post that might make them easier to digest for a less patient audience.
Republish content: While republishing previous content as is can lead to penalties from search engines, tweaking pieces of content with updates information before republishing is actually rewarded by search engines. It gives the impression that you are keeping your pages up to date rather than allowing it to go stale and become obsolete.
Link back to your website: Whatever content you publish, whether on your website or on another website, should always include some form of a call to action (CTA) to lead you back to your main website.
Make sure your content is high-quality and of tremendous value to your target audience. There’s no use in creating a ton of content if your potential leads don’t enjoy the value it provides.
Start Guest Posting
This is a highly underrated way to get traffic from other websites. Guest posting simply means to write a post for other websites. Many people skip over this one because they think something along the lines of (Why should I give another website my brilliant content?)
However, it is a high-value way to drive traffic back to your website. It increases brand awareness, establishes authority, and it is one more way to expand your link network. There are a few key points you’ll want to remember when guest posting:
- Create a powerful bio: This is one of the best ways to get traffic crawling back to your website. If you have an impressive bio with some personality and a reason to remember you, it will make people want to check out your website.
- Link back to your website: Not every guest post allows you to have links in your bio, but if they do, be sure to create a CTA along with a link back to your website.
- Find the right audience: You don’t want to just guest post anywhere. Make sure it’s worth the value you are delivering. An article on “How to Make a Delicious Cocktail” might not work for an audience that doesn’t believe in drinking.
Continue to guest post, and you’ll see some long-term SEO boosts overtime.
Develop a Social Media Calendar
Another way to get traffic to your website is to promote your content on social media. To optimize your social media strategy, consider the following:
Promote new content: This strategy works best if you have an editorial calendar set up. If you have one set up, you can create several posts to promote your new content whenever you plan to release it. Be sure to customize each post for each social media platform.
Make custom graphics: Different social media websites have different image dimensions. The best thing you could do to promote your content properly is to create an image specifically for each social media platform.
Promote old content: If your content is “evergreen” which means that it will be relevant years from now, then promoting some of your highest quality content is a no-brainer. You’ll notice that people will be coming back to your website more often than not with this strategy.
If you have followers on social media, these steps are unique opportunities to connect with your fans and encourage new followers to visit your website.
Connect With Social Influencers
If you’re sharing your content on social media, you’re off to a great start! However, you can get even more traffic to our website by connecting with social influencers.
An influencer is someone with a large social media following of loyal fans. Try these tips to get this strategy right:
Make it shareworthy: Simply asking an influencer to “promote your stuff” isn’t very helpful. To really pull this off, it’s best to provide the influencer with an interesting and unique promotion so that they can really put their hearts into it. Be original.
Be kind and patient: There’s no need to get pushy. Influencers get solicited for promotions all the time. We are living during an economy when kindness really pays off. Try building a positive relationship with them first and then going in for the ask.
Make sure their target audience is very similar to yours: It is essentially a waste of time and money to promote your products and/or services on the first influencer you see just because they have tons of followers. To truly get ROI for your efforts, make sure that the influencer has the target demographic that you’re attempting to reach.
Take the opportunity to get traffic to your website by utilizing this powerful tactic. Many people skip this step, yet many more simply get it wrong, but not you!
Get Some Press
Some people might think that getting press is an old school idea, but having people talk about you in various contexts is always useful. In today’s day and age, you’ll probably want to go for some digital PR.
One simple way to get some high-quality press is to reach out to blogs and publishers within your industry. You can ask them to do a story about something related to your business. It’s best to do press about new announcements. For example, if you come out with a brand new unique product or you’re hosting a special event that people should know about. See if you can get them to write something about your latest and greatest stuff.
Identify and Repeat Your Most Effective Efforts
There’s not a one-size-fits-all when it comes to getting traffic to your website. The best thing you can do to maximize your traffic is to analyze each of your efforts. Find out which strategies are working very well and which ones are not.
Collect data using whichever software you prefer. However, Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used websites as it can provide you with key info such as:
- Pages being visited
- Referral sources of your traffic
- URLs sending you traffic
- The number of new visitors
- The number of old visitors
- Pages getting viewed
- People who visited your site
Use this info to determine which of your strategies had the most effect on your overall traffic goals. This way you can double down on your successful strategies, and perhaps trim down the efforts that are not seeing as much success.
Conclusion
If you just got done building your website, there’s nothing more disappointing than watching it slowly age with nothing but the deafening silence that crickets love. Use the strategies discussed in this article and you’ll be well on your way to more traffic than you could have imagined. Customize it to make it your own, and you’ll be watching your numbers jump in no time.
What do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! 👇
