How to Drive More Traffic to your Website

Many business owners and marketers share a common objective: generating more website traffic. Your website serves as your online storefront where customers can learn about your offerings, form a relationship with your company, and ultimately become leads and potential customers.

You may have a good site that is under-friendly and attractive, but how would you gain customers if viewers can't find your site? This article will help you to learn how to make yourself discovered online to maximize your exposure. I'm going to cover:

• Why is it important to have traffic on website?

• What is quality traffic, and why is it a must?

• Free and paid ways to get more traffic to your site

• Traffic generation strategies you should avoid

Why More Website Traffic?

People wonder why it's important to get traffic on your website. If you are running a business, you should have a good website in the modern world. In this way, people get more familiar with your business, and you can gain the trust of your potential customers. But ideally, it is designed to convert your website visitors into customers.

With this kind of website, your traffic signifies your business growth. It will help you to:

• Analyze how your marketing is working

• Get insights into the audience to make decisions

• Improve your SEO

• Generate more leads and get more potential customers

However, these benefits can be achieved only by driving the targeted traffic to your website and focusing on getting quality traffic. This post will discuss strategies to improve your bottom line.

Free Traffic vs Quality Traffic

By increasing traffic to your website, you improve your ranking, which will generate more traffic. However, you want to ensure that increased traffic is accompanied by increased engagement. You're not bringing in the right traffic if your traffic increases but your conversion rates decrease.

You can optimize your website in many ways, like placing calls to action buttons and lead capture forms correctly, providing all the required information, and making navigation easy. But the main step is to attract the targeted visitors to your site.

Channels that drive quality traffic to your website

There is no single tool that sets everything on your site and generates high-quality traffic to your site. There is a mix of tools and marketing channels used to drive visitors. Some need time; some require your effort, and some demand money. Here are some strategies and media you can use to generate traffic to your site.  

• Online directory listings

• On-page SEO

• Off-page SEO

• Email

• Social media

• Online ads

• Blogging

In the next part of this article, we will detail the effective ways to get free traffic to your site.

Free Ways to Increase your Website Traffic

There are a couple of ways to increase your website traffic for free. 

1- Optimize your Free Google Business Profile

If your Google business listing is optimized correctly, you can get 7x more traffic than an incomplete profile. Your Google listing direct links to your website, so this is a great way to get more traffic to your website. 

It would help if you kept in mind that Google is becoming more innovative in result pages every day. Suppose your listing provides all the required information a customer is looking for to decide whether he should choose you or not. In that case, he might directly contact you or visit your business rather than your website visit.

Google Business Profiles have some additional features and benefits that make it one of the most effective sources of quality website traffic.

Your Google listing:

• It is free and easy to set up

• Allows you to show searches related to your business and location.

• Increases your visibility on a platform where there are potential buyers

• Drives quality traffic to your site and store

• Provide customers with the opportunity to post their reviews which will boost your presence 

Also, keep in mind that Google Business:

• It makes your business visible in mobile searches and surpasses desktop searches.

• Provides visuals that give visitors an idea of what it's like to be at your business, eliminating the uncertainty that is a significant barrier to entry.

• It lets searchers interact with your business directly from your listing, increasing engagement and chances of gaining new customers.

2- Strategize On-Page SEO

You can employ several SEO tactics on each page of your website to improve its ranking in search engines and attract more visitors. Creating high-quality content and writing brief meta descriptions is part of this process. Meta descriptions appear below your URL in search results. Users are much more likely to click on a page when they know what it's about and what it will do. These on-page SEO tactics are free but do require a lot of time. 

3- Get Listed in Online Directories

Another way to increase traffic to your site is to get listed in review sites and free online directories. Your profiles will be linked to your website for these sites, so you need to update the listing actively to get positive reviews, which will increase your website traffic. Additionally, Google gives high domain authority to directories such as Yelp. Your Yelp page could be ranked high for relevant searches if you have a free listing.

4- Build Backlinks 

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. You will gain more exposure for your business and drive quality traffic to your site with backlinks from compatible companies or industry influencers.

Furthermore, Google values backlinks and will increase its trust in your business if it notices that other reliable sites are linking to yours. As a result, your rankings will improve, which will result in more traffic. Quality backlinks will make your site more visible to Google. You can generate quality backlinks to your website by using ETTVI's Backlink Maker.  

5- Post to Social Media

A common free marketing tool, social media is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. Promote blog posts and other pages on your website using Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. As a result, your social media followers can become website visitors, and your content will be shared throughout their networks.  

6- Include Hashtag in your Post

You can extend your reach beyond your network by using hashtags on posts that promote your website pages and blog posts. It will allow users to find you while searching for products and services. More eyes on your links mean more free traffic to your website.  

7- Use Landing Pages

Landing pages are another free source of traffic to your website. The following are pages specific to your offers: a redemption page, a guide download page, or a free trial page. These pages provide the information users need to move forward and convert and a specific call to action, making it more likely that they'll take action.

Because landing pages are so specific, you can target your messaging precisely, increasing traffic for these pages.

8- Target Long-Tail Keywords

Short-tail keywords are frequently searched, but ranking for them is more complicated. In contrast, targeting long-tail keywords increases your chances of ranking higher (even on the first page) for queries relevant to your products and services. Higher rankings are linked to more traffic.

Plus, as search engines and voice search capabilities advance, people use more specific phrases to search online. Many free tools are available to help you find keywords to target, such as ETTVI's keyword Suggestion Tool.

9- Start Email Marketing

Staying in touch with your customers and promoting offers via email can help to increase traffic to your website. Link the pages with your website where they can find more information, such as blog posts or landing pages for particular offers.

You need to ensure you are not often sending emails to our customers. There is a possibility that customers will disengage or unsubscribe from your emails. Be witty while writing the email subject line; this greatly influences whether or not the customer will open your email. 

10- Write Guest Blog

Having a prominent industry influencer publish a blog post or translate an interview into a blog post, you can drive traffic from organic search and the influencer promoting the article to their audience (see the backlinks section above for more information). Additionally, this can help show your visitors that you are active in your field while adding variety to your content.

The influencer could also mention your business in their round-up or review. You can still use this method for free, but you must work with the influencer to reap the benefits.

You can also become a guest blogger. Look for complementary businesses in your area with a similar audience to yours. You could write a blog post on their site with a link back to yours. Ensure your content is relevant and valuable to their audience so that it's more of an even exchange.

11- Engage Community Online

Actively participating in online groups and on relevant websites helps you get more traffic to your business and community. Participate in discussions about your industry by commenting on blogs and social media posts and answering questions people are posting. You get more exposure and profile views as you engage with your community.

If you link your website from your social media profiles, you turn your engagement into another way for traffic to come to your site. If you wish to participate, please be moderate and sincere, and don't include links to your website in your comments-less; you appear spammy and hurt your business's reputation online. Increasing traffic shouldn't be the goal of your engagement. Instead, it should be a secondary outcome.

12- Learn From your Analytics

The insights you get from Google Analytics can help you drive more traffic to your website. Google Analytics is free to use. Use tracked links in your marketing campaigns, and regularly watch your analytics. It will allow you to identify which strategies and types of content are effective, which need to be improved, and which ones should be avoided.

Paid ways to drive website traffic from Google

Here are some paid ways to get your desired traffic to your site. 

1- Google ADS

Google Ads allows you to pay to have your website (usually a landing page) appear at the top of search results for specific keywords. The paid results will be displayed and ranked according to the quality and relevance of the advertisements when users search with those keywords.

Paid search results appear first on the results pages. This exposure is the best way to get traffic to your site through quality visits. You need to pay when someone clicks on your ad. 

2- Google Maps Advertising

You can also set preferences through the Google Ads platform so your business will appear at the top of Google Maps search results. If you appear at the top of a search result, you'll indicate that it's a paid listing like any other paid ad. However, the exposure you'll get from being at the top is worth a lot.  

3- Social Media Advertising

The difference between search and social media advertising is that you pay to appear in top spots for relevant searches. In contrast, you pay to appear in relevant feeds with social media advertising. As with both types of advertising, you can specify what kind of audience you want to reach, but social media offers more psychographic data that allows for better targeting.  

4- Display Advertising

A display ad is a banner ad that appears on relevant websites. If you place an ad on a website about cooking, your site will likely receive relevant traffic. And from this traffic, you can convert visitors into potential customers. 

5- Retargeting

Websites or social media feeds can display retargeting ads. Advertisers place them in front of visitors who have already visited your website once and are more likely to return.

Avoid Instant Website Traffic Generators

Free website traffic exists, but no button or tool can generate it for you without any work. Here are three reasons to avoid an automatic website traffic generator (paid or free) for your business:

Ranking Down    

Google can detect spammy behavior, notice spikes in activity, and monitor how users interact with your website. If you use an automated traffic bot or generator, you are likely to attract the wrong kind of attention from Google, negatively affecting your reputation and, consequently, your ranking.

Less Engagement 

Getting more organic traffic to your website and ranking higher on Google will increase the number of people interacting with (and hopefully becoming customers of) your business. If your website visitors aren't targeted, they're less likely to engage with your website, decreasing lead and conversion rates.

Your Site Could Get Banned

Your website could be removed from Google or online advertising platforms if it attracts bot traffic. It's not worth getting cheap traffic! Make sure your site gets high-quality and sustainable traffic.

There's no point in getting more visitors to your website if they don't convert into leads, become customers, or engage with your content. Growing your website traffic takes time. Although it requires effort, it will translate into the quality of traffic you generate.

Bottom Line

Businesses can expect more significant website traffic over time after taking the above mentioned steps. Many tactics provide immediate results, but others require patience and time. You need to be consistent, keep trying new methods, and see the results.