Whether you have an e-commerce store or a brochure website, increasing website traffic should be one of your primary goals as a business owner or marketer. Your website is your online storefront, through which visitors can get an impression of your knowledge, the products, or services you provide, learn more about what you offer, build trust in your brand, and ultimately convert into leads and customers.
It is important to clarify that a quality user experience is essential, but it won’t necessarily bring more users to the site if they can’t find it in the first place. Out of all the existing digital marketing and SEO methods, there are a few particularly effective ones that can truly produce results and bring a continuous flow of quality users and new leads to the site, and to achieve this, you must focus on them.
On the importance of increasing website traffic
It is known that in today’s world, even for marble fabricators or electricians, a website is a must. Users know how to locate products and services, but through a website, we allow them to get to know the business better. Ideally, a web design that guides users and leads them through the marketing funnel is the effective way to increase the number of conversions on the site, making the website an important indicator and a driver for business growth.
In fact, this is precisely the parameter that can help the website owner assess the effectiveness of the digital marketing activities they perform, gather insights about their audiences to make decisions, improve the website’s SEO, generate more leads, increase the number of conversions, and gain more customers. But, and there is a big but, to achieve all these benefits, user traffic must be driven to the site the right way, focusing on driving quality traffic.
Quality traffic and its importance
Website traffic helps, among other things, to improve its organic ranking, but as an SEO specialist and business owner, it is important to ensure that the traffic growth is also linked to an increase in engagement and conversion rates. If traffic increased but conversion rates dropped, it is a sign that the desired traffic did not reach the site. The bottom line is that the goal of every business owner or digital marketer regarding website traffic is to bring more qualified visitors who are most likely to convert into leads and customers.
How do you do this in practice?
There are actions that every website owner or SEO specialist must perform in order to increase traffic to their site. This mainly involves optimization and behind-the-scenes work—the technical aspect of optimization designed to create the best user intent for promoting the website on search engines.
Alongside the essential actions for every website, it is important to build a personalized strategy tailored to each business to define milestones and goals, timelines for achieving them, and of course, define the target audiences you wish to attract to the business or promoted brand. In most cases, this is where many marketers fail due to a lack of marketing understanding, rather than just operational understanding.
The first step, without which you don't start driving traffic to the website
The first and most important thing is to check what we are working with. This is a very basic step where we evaluate the client’s website, what platform it was built on, whether it has the right infrastructure for SEO, and what steps have been taken so far to increase incoming traffic. Once there is a good and accurate assessment, expectations can be aligned with the client and a personalized digital marketing strategy can be built to increase website traffic.
The actions that every website owner must take to promote the website and increase quality traffic
This is a big headline – ‘driving traffic to the website’ – and it is important to understand that there are many actions that need to be performed behind the scenes, prior to and in parallel with those done on the frontend, meaning those that users are exposed to.
Let’s try to go over the main ones:
The most important step for most clients who come to digital marketing and SEO agencies is keyword research, designed to bring relevant audiences to the website during the Google search phase. This means that once users type in the keywords we chose to promote, they will be exposed to the client’s website. To do this optimally, it is important to use keywords with high user intent that matches the content on the website’s pages, including meta tags. The emphasis is on naturally integrating keywords without detracting from the central idea or distracting the user.
Alongside keywords, in the frontend work, it must be ensured that the site features up-to-date and engaging information relevant to the users’ search and provides them with the best answer. This is essentially where what the site offers and user intent meet, and it must align with the needs and goals of both. Proper correlation will ensure that the user stays on the site and continues to consume information.
In the next step, it is important to ensure that the user can navigate the site easily and is provided with the best user experience. This refers to a combination of elements, including web design, mobile responsiveness and compatibility with various devices, integration of technologies that make it easier for the client to communicate with the business owner, calls to action, loading times, and more.
Quality content is very important for increasing website traffic
It is not enough to just publish content. In order to drive quality traffic to the site, you must create memorable content that keeps the user on the site and makes them ignore all the noise on the web, other advertisers, and distractions. In fact, useful and memorable content is one of the leading ways to increase website traffic, because users are looking for specific, thorough, and precise answers. Ignoring their needs will lead to them ignoring the website.
The bottom line is that when we care about the content we produce, publish regularly, and research what the client’s audience wants to see, web traffic is bound to improve, along with conversion rates.
Not all traffic comes to websites from Google. A large number of users come from social media
Advertising on social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and more provides powerful platforms for digital marketing and attracting users, but to leverage their potential for this purpose, it is important to publish diverse content consistently. This can include infographics, videos, podcasts, and various other types of content. Concurrently, it is important to engage with followers, respond to them, stimulate discussions, and publish enticing information from the site to attract users for further reading.
PPC advertising is effective for increasing the number of website visits
PPC advertising on Google and social media can be an effective way to increase website traffic, but it is important to know that each option comes with its pros and cons – for example, users can block ads on social networks, and in certain industries, the cost per click for Google PPC can be so high that it makes the investment less worthwhile. Therefore, when choosing advertising channels, it is important to know all the options available to the advertiser.
For example, when running PPC on Google, it is important to start with one campaign and several different ad groups containing the keywords you want to target the most users with. Once the campaigns launch, it is necessary to check how audiences behave with different keywords, and examine whether one keyword only brought impressions that did not increase website traffic, while another keyword brought clicks and conversions.
Aside from Google and social media, additional platforms promise to increase website traffic
One of the popular ways to increase website traffic and build a strong, trustworthy brand is through articles on Taboola and Outbrain. These are content marketing platforms that guarantee a very high amount of impressions across large, well-known websites and portals displaying “Content you may like” or similar recommendations to users. Read more about Taboola and Outbrain campaigns.
Choosing inbound links for building the backlink profile carries great weight in SEO
Inbound links (backlinks) are intended to bring traffic to the site from other websites. It is important to emphasize that you should not fill the site’s link profile with irrelevant or ineffective links. It is important to approach large websites with high authority that will offer the site’s content as an additional resource and allow an influx of additional users.
Summary
It can be said that increasing website traffic requires a strategic, pre-planned, and meticulous promotional and advertising effort. Still, all the elements and steps mentioned here are only part of the mix of actions that must be taken to increase website traffic. At the same time, it is important to note that in order to increase website traffic, one must be patient, as there are actions whose impact can be seen immediately, while others require waiting a bit to see their effect.
Aside from that, before starting work, the client’s starting point and their digital assets are evaluated, goals and milestones are defined according to schedules, and the entire strategy is tailored to the available budget. It is complex and challenging work, but ultimately, when done thoroughly and professionally, the client’s ROI increases, and the results translate into business growth, making the success clearly visible and tangible.