16 Proven Ways to Increase Website Traffic

16 Proven Ways to Increase Website Traffic

Why You Need to Increase Website Traffic

Website traffic is essential for many reasons. The more people see your site, the more potential customers you will have. The number of visitors to your website becomes the number of opportunities your business has at making an impression.

When you increase website traffic, you generate qualified leads, promote and grow your brand, and build new relationships. Building relationships and trust can ultimately sell your product or service, gain new clients or customers, and help to grow your business.

More website traffic doesn’t just mean more money. Increasing website traffic can grow your business, expand your product line, open more locations, and develop more services and products.

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for driving traffic to your website. Visitors can land on your site in a variety of ways, whether it’s by way of the search engine or a friend’s referral.

That’s why we’ve created this comprehensive guide to boosting traffic.

Ready to get started?

What is Website Traffic?

Website traffic tells you how many users visit your website. Analytics tools will often tell you the number of page views and the number of unique page views.

Pageviews are the total number of times anyone has visited your site. Unique pageviews tell you how many people visited your site, some multiple times and some only once.

The idea is that the more website traffic you get, the more opportunities you have to convert users.

But you’ll often see that with more traffic comes lower conversion rates. Low conversion rates could be because the traffic isn’t as targeted. Though more people are coming to your site, they might not all be highly qualified leads likely to purchase your product(s).

16 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Here are the top 16 ways to increase website traffic in 2021:

1. Optimize Your Website for Search

When you’re starting, focus on finding keywords representing your niche as a basis for your blog content and store pages. Typically, you’ll choose to focus on one or two main keywords per webpage. You can use SEO tools like Rank Math or SE Ranking to help you find relevant keywords.

In the beginning, focus on keywords that have a search volume of under 10,000 searches a month. After a few months of creating blog content and optimizing product pages, you can focus on going after higher volume keywords.

The trick to getting website traffic is to build a strong foundation of relevant keywords first. Be sure to take advantage of the blog on your online store, as it can have the most significant impact on driving organic traffic to your website.

2. Experiment with Content Freshness

Content freshness is an SEO hack people do to drive traffic to your website in a big way. Essentially, you’ll need to remove outdated content from your webpage and add new sections to keep your content relevant. It’s a quick touch-up on old webpage content.

A simple way to do content freshness for product pages is to have a WordPress product review app. Review apps allow your customers to leave reviews on your product page, which shows Google that there’s regular activity on the page and new content. You can also keep your product pages “fresh” by taking the most common customer feedback and turning it into a sentence in your description.

3. Submit your Site to Search Engines

Also helpful for SEO, you can get search engines to crawl and index your site, increasing your odds of appearing on results pages for relevant queries. Here is how you can get the major search engines to crawl and index your site:

According to Google: “Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy. You don’t need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as “web crawlers” that explore the web regularly to find sites to add to our index. The vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our bots crawl the web.”

According to Bing: “Bing recommends webmasters using the URL Submission to get their web content indexed as soon as they published or updated it online. Web admins can submit URLs to Bing programmatically through the Submit URL API or the URL Submission feature in Bing Webmasters Tools. The feature allows Webmasters to submit up to 10,000 URLs per day for most sites, for potential immediate crawl and indexation depending on various signals available to Bing. We reset the quota every day at midnight GMT. Bing also recommends webmasters to have Sitemaps refreshed at least once a day, to help Bing discovering all relevant fresh and non-fresh URLs of their web sites.”

Note: Bing now powers Yahoo, and you should submit your site to Bing directly.

4. Build out your Backlinks

Backlinks are another critical component of SEO. When an external site links to your site, it’s signaling to Google that your site is trustworthy and relevant to the words in the anchor text (the clickable words).

Beyond SEO, backlinks have the potential to drive traffic to your store in and of itself. Users on those sites may click through and explore yours — hopefully leading to a purchase.

5. Use Captivating Headlines.

By captivating, we don’t mean writing clickbait titles. It means writing provocative and enticing titles that pique reader interest. If your blog has plenty of high-quality content yet lackluster traffic results, try editing your post titles to be more attention-grabbing. Impactful post titles will help make your content more clickable, shareable and even help it rank better in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

What makes a headline captivating? Here are a few tactics to consider:

• Use robust descriptors and verbs. For example:
• “outstanding” instead of “good.”
• “excel” instead of “do well.”
• Be clear and accurate, don’t make any false promises.
• Make it short, ideally under 70 characters, to not get cut off in search engine results.
• If it’s relevant, include a number, e.g., “18 Tips for….”
• Avoid overused words and phrases.

Suppose you’ve published a host of articles with bland titles. Set aside some time to give them a makeover. A more captivating headline could be a significant game-changer in driving new users to click on your posts.

6. Create Evergreen Content.

Don’t get us wrong—time-sensitive content can generate substantial traffic in the short term. However, incorporating evergreen posts into your blog’s content strategy can lead to passive traffic for months, even years, after publication.

Evergreen content is blog posts that remain relevant regardless of when they were published. For instance, a post about why it’s crucial to have an emergency fund is evergreen, but not a post recommending the ten best stocks to buy right now.

Can you see why this makes evergreen posts valuable for generating traffic? Their perpetual relevance means people will search for and stumble upon them any time of the year.

7. Write Guest Posts and Invite Guest Contributors.

Whether it’s a link in the author bio or the content itself, guest posts get your name and work out there to other websites’ readerships. It would be best to post on sites in the same or related industry, though, as this will help direct the most relevant traffic your way.

For instance, if you run a blog about pet care, it wouldn’t make sense to guest post on a website specializing in new artificial intelligence technologies.

On the flip side, having others write for your blog can also cause a traffic boost, given that guest contributors typically promote their work to their followers.

Be warned, though: not every writer will produce quality content for your website, so it’s best to be prudent when deciding what and what not to publish.

8. Optimize for Long-Tail Keywords.

While many shorter keywords may come up in your keyword research, it’s essential also to pay particular attention to long-tail keyword opportunities. Often, these keywords are more specific. As such, they typically have less search volume and, as a result, less competition. That means it’s not only easier to rank for relevant long-tail keywords, but it’s also easier to guess the searcher’s intent.

When you create a website experience tailored to the searcher’s intent, you’re more likely to deliver related content. Relevant content will help drive more organic search traffic to your site from a targeted group of users.

9. Add New Products or Content Daily

Because one of Google’s ranking factors is how fresh the content is, it’s also a good idea to update your website content regularly, daily if possible.

But this isn’t just a good move for SEO. It also gives users a reason to keep coming back to your site. If they know there’s something new to discover, they’re more likely to visit your website to find out what that is.

10. Update Old Blog Posts

It’s natural for blog posts, even evergreen ones, to grow “stale” over time. That’s why you should periodically update old posts and republish them for a second chance at traffic.

These could be posts that have done well historically or posts that have flopped and could be better optimized. Either way, updating old content can increase exposure and save you the trouble of developing entirely new material altogether.

To refresh outdated content, try making some of these changes:

• Replace old stats with new ones.
• Improve your content formatting.
• Add new internal links to your more recent content.
• Fix any typos, broken links, and other page issues.
• Optimize your post to boost conversion rates.

Google’s algorithm is ever-changing, making keyword rankings shift from time to time. As a result, your content shouldn’t remain stagnant. Make periodic updates to ensure that your blog posts stay relevant.

11. Repurpose Your Content.

If you’ve got a particularly successful blog post, it’s worth considering repurposing it for steady traffic. After all, a blog post is just one medium of content—who knows how many more users you can draw by repackaging it in different forms?

There’s no single technique for repurposing content. You can do so in several ways, such as by creating:

• An infographic
• A podcast
• A slide deck on SlideShare
• A webinar
• Video content

Regardless of what form it takes, a repurposed piece presents an additional opportunity to further bring old but successful content.

12. Host Exclusive Content on Your Website

Start a blog, create a free course, develop Slideshare presentations, host webinars, and publish other relevant content on your site. Maintain a regular publishing schedule and allow users to subscribe, so they have a reason to keep coming back.

13. Create Quizzes with Share Results Features

Quizzes are an effective lead generation tool to use in your content marketing mix. According to Coumba: Quizzes have an average conversion rate of 50%. And not only are these emails of users you can market to in the future, but you also have data about them through their quiz answers.

But let’s get back to the main goal: website traffic. When users finish a quiz, they get shareable results. They then post those results on social media, and their networks can click on the link and take the quiz themselves. Use this tactic to drive more traffic and grow your email list at the same time.

14. Add Social Share Buttons

Add social share buttons to shareable pages like blog posts, product pages and images, and other website content. These social share buttons make it easy for users to post your content (with links!), giving you social proof and traffic. When their network sees these posts, they can click through to your site.

15. Link Internally

Suppose your landing pages and blog posts don’t link internally. In that case, your readers are, in effect, trapped and limited to the specific page they land on without the ability to explore more content. Thus, by incorporating more internal links, visitors will be better able to navigate your website.

In addition, internal links help create a framework for your site. Internal linking ultimately helps search engines like Google understand which pages make up your website’s cornerstone content, or in other words, your most important content. A solid website hierarchy makes it easier for web crawlers to find and index your web pages.

16. Engage in Email Marketing

With email marketing, you’ll be able to keep driving website traffic to your store as long as your customers stay subscribed. With social media sites continuously limiting your reach, email marketing is one of the only marketing channels you can have complete control over.

Building a list for email marketing can take a long time, so it’s essential to start on day one. You can create your email list using Mailchimp or Constant Contact and add opt-in forms to your website.

Increasing Website Traffic on Your Website

Many businesses might be wondering how they can increase the traffic on their site to keep their website relevant and noticed. Try focusing on results, not features. Tell your potential customers the benefits that your products or services will provide for them.

It is also beneficial to talk about your customers instead of focusing too much on yourself. Focus on why your customers should care about your company and how you can help them, not too much about how awesome you and your company are.

Attract Repeat Visitors

Make sure you work on building your reputation around your company based on the quality of your brand identity. And remember that repeat visitors are essential. People tend to continue buying from companies they know and trust.

There is virtually no chance people will randomly click on a product they searched for and buy it right away. They tend to stick to what they know. Make sure to keep those repeat customers informed about your products to remind them to buy from you.

Concentrating on your website traffic is vital to maintaining repeat visitors and gaining potential leads and new clients.  Increase your website traffic, stick to your target audience and work on your website conversion numbers. All this and more will help your website become a successful website and, in turn, a successful business.

Do you need help increasing your website traffic and making your website one that draws in customers? Let’s talk! Let PixoLabo help you to establish, maintain, and grow your online presence.

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of business website consulting and WordPress web design services, including website design and development, e-commerce solutions, search engine optimization, and WordPress optimization.

Any Questions?

And if you are still not sure how to get the most out of your business website, let’s talk. We will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine if we are a good fit for your WordPress web design needs or if we should help you find a different design partner!

Do you have anything to add to our tips for increasing website traffic? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our tips with your audience!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By PixoLabo
A Next-Generation Web Design Agency
@PixoLabo