20 Proven Methods to Increase Website Traffic

The word “Traffic” is very important for you if you are a blogger, or an online marketer or a business owner with a website. As an online marketer what you like most are more customers. After the customer what often comes on a business’ wish list is more traffic to their website. But increasing visitors to a site is not an easy task. As we are talking, there are more than 1.24 billion websites in the world and the number is increasing every minute. So that’s a lot of competition. Therefore, we should apply multiple methods to bring new traffic to our website and keep old visitors engaged together with our content. In this post, I will cover 20 proven methods that will help you increase website traffic.

The Importance of Website Visitors

Website traffic is a very significant indicator of business growth. So before dig into the main article let me discuss some of the importance of website visitors so that you can understand why you should give more focus on increasing website traffic. They are:

• Website traffic helps you understand how well your marketing is working
• Help you gather information about your audience to make decisions
• Improve your search engine credibility
• Generate more leads, increase conversions, and get more customers
• Traffic from targeted users allows you to market to them for long-term
• Help to expand your product lines; develop more amazing services and products
• More traffic means more sales and more sales means more revenue

20 Methods to Increase Website Traffic

In order to increase website traffic, there are several things you can do. But you have to remember that increasing website visitor is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to apply the methods appropriate way and keep applying them until you get the desired traffic. Here are 20 proven methods to increase website traffic:

Quality Content

The most fundamental and effective way to increase website visitor is quality of the content. If your website has rich and quality content then people will come back to your site again and again. Moreover, they will refer your site to other and help grow your website’s reputation. Not only that a quality content help you get quality backlinks. All this help you get a huge number of visitors to your site.

Write Irresistible Headlines

One of the most important parts of your content is Headlines. Without a compelling headline, even the most inclusive blog post will go unread. So it’s very important to write an eye-catching headline for your content. Many writers spent hours to create the perfect headline for their post. So think carefully about your headline before you hit “publish.”

Tips: Analyze your competitor’s headlines and viral post’s headlines to get the idea and create an eye-catching headline for your article. Use Headline Analyzer to see how your headline will perform.

Use Stunning Photos

A study by Socialbakers shows that images on Facebook constituted 93% of the most engaging posts, compared with all other status updates. The result indicates how important it is to use eye-catching photos for your post. When you combine your title with a strong image, you give your post the best opportunity to generate visitors and increase the CTR. The fun part is you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars for these images. There are free sites like Pixabay, Unsplash etc. from where you can download stock Images for your blog.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Don’t be stunned to hear that, many online marketer or blogger don’t know what a content marketing strategy is. This is where their businesses or website fall off the tracks. Believe me, without a strong content marketing strategy, there is no way you can increase website traffic. So in order to create a better content marketing strategy, you have to comprise the following elements of your plan:

• The primary goal of your content (Increase traffic, generate leads, etc.)
• Analyze your audience (Who are they? What are their problems and queries? How can you help them through your content?)
• How you plan to construct your article and overcome your competitor
• Frequency of publishing post
• Content amplification

Now that you know how to create a better content marketing strategy, let’s see the types of content that you should include in your strategy:

• Blogs
• EBooks
• Videos
• Infographics
• Podcasts

Social Media Appearances with Hashtags

Social media plays a very important role while you are trying to increase website traffic. You must use every social media channel that is available to promote your website. But you have to remember that every social media has their own way of sharing. Like Twitter is ideal for short, snappy, and tempting links, where Google+ promotion can help your site show up in search results and it’s very effective in B2B niches. You can use Pinterest and Instagram to bring traffic to your site through images. Use Facebook for branding and LinkedIn for professional build up.

Tips: Use Hashtags when promoting your website on social media. It will help your website reach beyond your network and get discovered by users searching for your products and services on social media.

Start Guest Blogging

One of the most effective ways of increasing website traffic is guest blogging. This method is profitable in many ways as guest blogging helps improve your ranking in SERP, and it also introduces your content to new audiences. Moreover, it will increase your reputation as an expert in your field. Believe me; it’s worth investing time in guest blogging.

Tips: Outreach email is very important for guest blogging. So while outreaching another blogger for guest posting, make sure your email has this information:

• Introduction of yourself
• Explain why you outreach them
• Share 2 writing sample
• Share at least 4 guest post idea
• Ask if they have any particular requirement
• Sign off with your name and website URL

Accept Guest Posts

You can increase website traffic by accepting other bloggers post on your site. Because they will share these posts on their social profile and link to their guest article and it will bring new visitors to your site.

Tips: While accepting guest posts from other make sure they are not your competitor. Moreover, don’t forget revision the post. Don’t accept low-quality content or content with spammy links, because Google started to take action against low-quality guest blogging.

Implement Schema Micro-data

There is no evidence for the fact that implementing schema increases the website visitor. But it makes easier for the search engine bot to find and index your pages. Moreover, using Schema Micro-data result in better rich site snippets in the result page, which can improve click-through rates.

Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to adding links from one page to another page of your website. This is a great way to circulate your visitor to your website. Moreover, it is a very important On-Page SEO method. But unfortunately, most blogger or online marketer don’t use internal linking nearly enough. Properly optimized internal link building will increase both your SEO ranking and website visitor. While internal link building, you must consider these:

• Create more quality content and inter-link them
• Use the right anchor text for internal links
• Always link to relevant content that will add value to your readers’ experience
• Create 3-5 internal links for minimum 1000 word blog post

Collect Email Addresses and Start Email Marketing

There are a lot of software, plugins, and browser extensions available to collect email addresses. Nowadays it’s very easy to collect email address and make a niche based email list. Email marketing is the next big thing in the marketing sector and it already started to dominate this sector. But most people ignore this simplest method of increasing website visitor. Believe me, this method is worth trying.

Tips: While promoting your website, blog post or product through email make sure that you don’t bombard your subscriber with email after email. Because it will make them unsubscribe from your emails. Besides, keep a very close eye on your email’s subject lines. They can either make or break your email marketing campaign.

Submit Content to Aggregator Sites

This is a great way to bring traffic to your site and increase your reputation as an expert in your field. You can share your blog post on different community site and forums. But remember members of communities are extraordinarily savvy to spam. So if you are hoping to “hit the jackpot” of referral traffic by spamming, that’s not going to happen.

Tips: Here are some community sites where you can submit your blogs: Reddit, Bloggeries, Inbound.org, Blogarama, Blog Lovin, Bloggernity, Scoop.it, etc.

Optimize Your Site for SEO

SEO is not dead and there are a lot of SEO tactics you can apply on your website’s pages to increase their rank in SERP and get more visitors. Don’t forget to use image alt text or creating internal links to new content. On-page SEO is not so hard to adapt and it will definitely boost your organic traffic. Moreover, there are a lot of software and browser extensions out there to help you audit your site for SEO and show you what you should fix. You should spend at least one hour a day to fix all the problems and optimize your site for SEO.

Tips: Some of the very popular SEO audit tools are SEMrush, Moz, SpyFu, SEO Site Checkup, Seoptimer, Screaming Frog etc. Some of the popular browser extensions for SEO are SimilarWeb, MozBar, Impactana, Page Analytics, Keywords Everywhere, WooRank, SEOquake, Majestic Backlink Analyzer etc.

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the future of SEO and people like to search with long phrases. On the other hand, short-tail keywords are the most competitive keywords to fight for and it’s more difficult to rank for them on SERP. So if you want to rank quickly and easily on result page then you should target the long-tail keywords. It will help you increase website traffic.

Make Your Website Responsive

There was a time when people browse internet only on desktop PCs. But time changed and now people browse the internet on different devices like mobile phone, tablet, laptop etc. So it’s very important to make your website responsive to different devices or you will lose your visitors.

Speed Up Your Website

Website speed is a very important Google Ranking Factor and it will decrease website visitors if your site takes a lot of time to load. A survey by Aberdeen Group shows that 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. So make sure your pages are fast enough to load quickly.

Tips: You can decrease the page loading time by minimizing HTTP Requests, reducing server response time, Minify Resources, reducing image file sizes etc.

Host Webinar

The webinar is a great way to share your experience with your customers or audience and increase website traffic. People love to learn and if you can combine people’s eagerness of learning with an effective social promotion campaign then webinar will be a great traffic source for your website.

Tips: The trick of a successful webinar is to identify the right topic and create a fun and engaging presentation. You can follow these tips on how to host a webinar.

Create Quiz

This is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Moreover, it will increase user engagement as quizzes are fun pieces of content and people like to share this kind of things a lot in social media. There are a lot of sites where you can create free quizzes and then post on your blog. Search for the term “List of free quiz creating sites” and you will find your resources.

Create Podcast

Afraid of presenting before a live audience or develop the right message, no need to wary, podcast is there to help you. The podcast is a great way of distributing your expertise and is a guaranteed way of driving traffic to your website. But for a successful podcast campaign, you have to be consistent and promote it regularly.

Tips: A great way of getting a boost in your podcast audience is to invite a guest that has a large number of social followers. Because the guest will share the podcast with his/her followers and help you promote it.

Create Online Courses

With the help of the internet, you can publish any type of content you want. So if you are not comfortable with the webinar, quiz or podcast then you can create long content like courses that will drive more traffic to your site. Moreover, there are a lot of online course websites like Lynda.com, where you can add your course to further your reach.

Social Advertising

Finally, I am sharing a method where you have to spend some money. If you are too busy with your work and no time to go for the free methods then you can go for Social advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks. Because these advertising costs are relatively low compared to AdWords. Moreover, some of these social advertising allows you to segment down by demographics so that you can hit your desired audience.

The Closure

Well, that just about does it for today’s post. Here I share some of the many methods that will help you increase website traffic. The only question remain is which methods are you going to choose to apply on your website?

Feel free to share your experience in the comment section about what system works for you. And don’t forget to mention any strategies that you think will work better.

Should Read: How to Do a Full Website Audit Like a Pro