Increasing site traffic is one of the number one goals of website owners. Why? Because traffic is the first step towards getting more conversions.
Thankfully, there are some tricks you can use to increase website traffic and get more eyes and clicks on your content.
Here’s exactly how to increase website traffic, using free and paid methods – including search engine optimization, social media marketing, and more.
Learn more about the best marketing strategies for your business with Neil Patel’s Free Webinar Sales Funnel course.
Find your traffic source
First things first, if you’re looking to increase website traffic you need to choose your top traffic sources. No matter how big your business is, it’s not efficient for you to go after every source of website traffic on the internet.
Instead, look at where your target audience hangs out. Try answering these questions to help you find your top traffic sources.
- Who is your target audience and which platforms do they use the most?
- What types of content do they engage with?
- What methods are your competitors using?
- What methods have been successful for you in the past?
- What story do you want to tell about your product or service?
It’s helpful to have a customer avatar to help you answer these – download our customer avatar workbook to help you make one.
Focusing on your target audience is the best way to get a clear idea of how to increase website traffic.
Related: How To Market Online Courses
4 main types of traffic sources
There are 4 main types of traffic sources that you can utilize to maximize website traffic: SEO, Social media, Paid, and Partnerships. Let’s look at each in more detail.
SEO
If you’re looking to increase website traffic, one of the best methods is Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO uses methods like meta descriptions and backlinking to boost your website in search engine searches so that more people see your page and click through to it.
Social Media
Thanks to the rapid growth of social media and the opportunity for including links to websites, social media is now a major traffic source for many brands. With the right social media strategy, you can dramatically increase engagement with your business and increase website traffic. There are both free and paid methods to boost your social media profiles and get more traffic to your website.
Paid
As well as organic methods to increase website traffic, there are also plenty of paid methods you can try. These are largely based around ads but also include influencer campaigns and paid guest posts. The right ad in the right place can dramatically increase website traffic and help you beat out the competition.
Partnerships / Referrals
Another way to increase website traffic is to work on building partnerships and closer relationships with other brands, publications, and influencers. Partnerships are a great way to introduce more people to your brand and reach new audiences. With this method, you’re effectively borrowing traffic from other sites and directing it to your own so it can help you grow your business fast.
Related: 17 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic
3 top tips to increase website traffic
Find your niche
When it comes to digital marketing, a targeted approach is usually more effective than a blanket one. That means finding a niche, sticking to it, and building up your authority around that topic.
When it comes to SEO, search engines reward sites and voices that appear to have authority in their niche. The more you can specialize and build up a bank of quality content on one or two topics, the more likely your site is to rank in searches.
Become a thought leader
Once you’ve found your niche, you can also work on establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. That means becoming the face of your brand and putting your name forward for industry events, webinars, and guest posts.
Thought leadership is a great way to build trust in your business and encourage more people to come to you for advice. If you can get a reputation as a thought leader in your industry, you can increase website traffic and ultimately sell more of your products or services.
Build relationships
As with many things in business, building relationships can make a big difference if you want to increase website traffic. By working on growing your network of like-minded businesses, influencers, and social media accounts, you can increase your brand exposure organically.
Guest posts, reviews and social shares can all help to increase website traffic, so don’t underestimate the power of relationships. No (wo)man is an island!
41 easy ways to increase website traffic
If you want to increase website traffic and get more visitors to your site, here are 41 easy methods you can use.
Social media
Social media content
Social media is a brilliant tool to help you increase website traffic organically. Every platform is designed to keep people engaged, making it the perfect place to get your brand seen, heard and shared.
To drive traffic to your website from your social media accounts, make sure to include a link in your bio, as well as in your posts. You can also utilize features like the swipe-up on Instagram stories.
Video content
Video content is becoming an increasingly important method for marketers hoping to catch the eye and the attention of social media scrollers. 87% of video marketers credit video content with increasing traffic to their website.
This is especially important if your brand is aimed at younger internet users, especially between 15-35. This demographic is most interested in video content and the right clip can dramatically increase website traffic for your business.
Optimize your bio
Your social media bio is your digital elevator pitch so it’s important to get it right. If you can optimize your bio to tell people exactly what you do then you can use this tiny bit of text to increase traffic to your website.
Bear in mind that your bio is searchable so include relevant keywords. It’s also a good idea to include your brand logo or a friendly, professional headshot to make your social media profiles easy to recognize.
Focus on engagement
Don’t underestimate the power of engaging with your audience on social media. The most effective social media accounts are the ones that connect with their followers through comments, reposts, and replies.
No matter how big your brand is, people want to feel like they’re being heard. If you can increase your engagement on social media, you can increase website traffic organically.
Tag high traffic accounts
Another effective method to increase website traffic is to engage with high-traffic social media accounts. That might be other brands, influencers, or thought leaders. If you can get your content shared by these accounts, that can drive a huge amount of people to your profile and your website.
The best way to do this is to create posts that you can tag them in. You might want to share their content, repost a photo or highlight something they’re doing that’s relevant to your niche. People like to be flattered so use this method to get high traffic accounts to engage with you!
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is quickly becoming an invaluable resource for marketers looking to increase website traffic. While influencer marketing is usually paid, it doesn’t have to break the bank. If you can find the right micro influencers who share your target audience, you can capitalize on their followers and drive more traffic to your site.
Testimonials
Like reviews, testimonials are a good way to generate more interest in your products and services. Utilize testimonials on your social media channels to drive more traffic to your website to check out your products and services.
The best testimonials are really specific. You want to pick out the testimonials that quantify how much your products or services helped them. This is a great way to increase website traffic and boost the social proof for your brand.
Live streams
Another method to increase website traffic for your brand through social media is live streaming. Live streaming is a great way to give your brand a human face and social channels like Instagram reward users for Live streaming, giving your followers a notification whenever you begin.
Live streams can take the form of a Q&A, a demo, tutorial, or anything else. The important thing is to keep your viewers engaged and remember to direct them to your website after watching!
SEO
On-page SEO
To rank increase website traffic, it’s important to get your on-page SEO sorted. On-page SEO refers to the optimizing of front-end and back-end components on your site, including your header, meta description, URL, and image alt-text. If you want to increase website traffic, work on your on-page SEO.
SEO keywords
If you’re looking for ways to increase website traffic, it’s important to invest time into your site SEO. Tailoring your site to SEO will help you rank higher in searches and drive more people to your website.
Try using more SEO keywords on your website. These are words and phrases that your audience will search for. It’s a good idea to look for long-tail SEO keywords – these make up the majority of searches and tend to have less competition than shorter keywords.
Backlinks
When it comes to SEO, backlinks are one of the key tools for improving your search engine ranking. If you can get your website linked to the content of relevant sites, you can increase your site authority. High-quality backlinks can increase website traffic by boosting your search engine ranking and encouraging referrals from other sites.
Unfortunately, increasing the number of backlinks your site has doesn’t happen overnight. For this method, you need to focus on creating high-quality content and be patient. However, you can try reaching out to other sites and offering to exchange backlinks – you add one of their links to your post and they do the same.
Internal links
Like backlinks, internal links can also help your SEO. Not only do they direct people to other pages on your site – driving traffic to those pages – they also increase the amount of time someone stays on your site and boost your chance of converting that visitor.
Internal linking is easy to do and can increase your site’s credibility on search engines, making it a useful tool to increase website traffic. Simply add links to relevant pages on your website like blog posts or landing pages that you reference in your text.
Newsletters
Using newsletters to promote your business is nothing new but sometimes the old ways are still the best! A newsletter is a great way to generate interest in your new content and increase website traffic. It also helps to keep your brand in the front of your audience’s minds with a weekly or monthly update.
Email list building
If you’re creating high quality content on your site, it is a good idea to start focusing on email list building. Utilize your current readers and customers by collecting their email addresses, you can then use this to promote your content through email marketing.
To start building your email list, include a sign-up form for a regular newsletter on your site and consider producing gated assets that require users to input an email address to access.
For more tips on using lead magnets in your marketing, check out this list of lead magnet ideas with examples.
Use video
If you’re struggling to rank for high-volume searches, consider utilizing video content to help your website stand out. Video tutorials and how-tos can help to increase your search engine ranking. Videos also enable you to keep the attention of your audience, offering information in a way that’s easy to digest for everyone.
Templates and tools
Giving site visitors something they can use and share is another effective way to increase website traffic. Downloadable tools, templates, worksheets and more can increase your brand awareness and encourage people to return to your site for more helpful content. Templates and tools make great lead magnets, giving you the chance to capture the email addresses of new site visitors.
E-books
If you want to take your content game to the next level, consider producing an e-book or series of downloadable guides. E-books are great for increasing your authority in your niche. If your e-book is full of good stuff, it will be shared or reviewed which can also increase website traffic over time.
Challenges
Why not try gamifying your content? Creating learning challenges for followers and customers is a great way to increase website traffic. Choose a topic, promote the challenge via your social media or newsletter and let people read or watch the content in their own time. You’ll get more visits to your page while also giving people a taste of what they can expect from future courses and content.
To take your challenge one step further, provide certificates for successful participants who finish the whole challenge. Encourage people to share their certificates online and benefit from the extra publicity boost!
Social share buttons
If you’re producing a lot of content for your website, make sure you include social share buttons on every page. This simple step makes it easy for viewers to share your content via their social media and increase the reach of your content. Social share buttons are a quick and easy way to start increasing the traffic to your site.
Update old content
Of course, you don’t have to produce all-new content to increase website traffic and generate more leads. Updating and repurposing old content is also an important step for improving your SEO. This includes improving the formatting of old content, adding more SEO keywords, and making sure the content is relevant to today.
Voice search optimization
As more people switch to voice search functions like Siri and Alexa, voice search optimization is becoming more important for brands. As many as 62% of Americans report using some kind of voice assistance technology so to increase website traffic, consider optimizing your website for voice searches too.
Improve your website speed
If you’ve ever had the experience of trying to visit a website that takes ages to load, you’ll understand why website speed is important. Search engines will penalize you if your site is slow so to increase website traffic, you need to improve your website speed. If in doubt, get expert help for this. If you want to grow your online business, it’s worth investing in.
Make your site mobile friendly
No matter how much effort you put into your site SEO, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly then you’re going to have trouble increasing traffic. In 2021, mobile devices accounted for half of all website traffic globally. If you do nothing else, make your website mobile-friendly!
SSL certification
Though it’s often overlooked when it comes to increasing website traffic, whether or not your site has an SSL certification can make a difference to your site’s ranking. SSL certificates make sure that a user’s sensitive information is encrypted when they use your site, adding an extra layer of security. While this is important for user confidence, it can also affect your website traffic dramatically.
Partnerships
Write guest posts
If you’re looking to increase website traffic, writing guest posts on reputable sites is a good tool for driving people to your site. Guest posts give you a chance to establish your authority on a certain topic while letting you tap into new audiences. To get started, find a list of sites that share your target audience and then get in touch to see if they’re open to collaborating.
Encourage guest posts
As well as writing guest posts on other sites, you can also invite others to write a blog for your website too. A high-quality guest post from a thought leader in your industry can help to give your site more authority. There’s also a high chance that your guest blogger will share links to your site on their website and social channels – that means more traffic!
Reviews
Encouraging reviews of your products and services is a great method to increase website traffic by generating more interest in your brand. You can purchase paid reviews from 3rd party sites but don’t rule out getting reviews organically too. Try reaching out to other sites and see what happens. You can offer to review their products in exchange for a review of yours. Reviews will help you to get more backlinks to your sites, giving your SEO a nice boost so this is a great trick to have up your sleeve.
Comments sections
Though often overlooked, comment sections can be another way to increase website traffic. You want to avoid coming across as spammy or doing the hard sell so focus on writing thoughtful comments and contributing to the discussion on topics relevant to your niche. This works for articles, videos, social media, and more.
Press releases & media coverage
Getting your product, service, or brand covered in the media can provide a huge boost to your website traffic. Though not every article will include backlinks to your website, media coverage introduces your brand to a wider audience and increases the authority of your brand. To help improve your chances of being featured, consider getting help from a PR expert.
Podcasts
Much like guest blogging and social media posts, finding podcasts to partner with is another fun and effective way to drive more traffic to your site. If you can find podcasters working in your industry or niche, this is a great opportunity to increase awareness around your brand and win new followers.
Use the opportunity to promote your brand and make sure you tell people how to find out more about you. Ideally, plug a specific lead magnet to help you not only increase website traffic but also generate new leads for your business.
Attend online events
Online events hold a lot of advantages for business owners, from networking opportunities to promoting your brand. If you can secure a place to speak as a guest at an online event – that’s even better. Hello free advertising! While attending online events won’t immediately increase website traffic, they’re a good tool for boosting your brand awareness in your industry.
Host online events
As well as attending events, you might also like to try hosting your own! Events like webinars, conferences and tutorials are perfect for building a community around your brand. You can also encourage people to share your event on social media and drive more traffic to your website.
The Thinkific community
If you’re a course creator, remember that you can also tap into the Thinkific community as a way to find and build partnerships with other educators. Search out like-minded entrepreneurs who are also looking for people and brands to partner with and see how you can help each other out. Remember guest posts are a great way to increase website traffic!
Paid ads
Pay-per-click ads
If you have a marketing budget, you might consider using pay-per-click (PPC) ads to increase website traffic. While this can be an expensive option, it can also provide a huge boost of visitors to your site.
Options for PPC ads include:
- Search ads
- Display ads
- Remarketing ads
- Google shopping
- Gmail sponsored promotions
PPC ads can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website by reaching your target audience efficiently. However, the costs of PPC advertising can quickly rack up so do your research first.
Paid social media ads
Make the most of the social media buzz with paid social media ads. If you’re struggling to grow your social media audience organically, you might consider investing in paid advertising to get your posts seen by more people. It can be a game-changer for some brands and dramatically increase website traffic – but it can also be a flop. If you’re a solo entrepreneur or SME, enter into paid social media advertising with your eyes open and make sure you’re strict about what you can afford.
Influencer posts
If you’re looking for an effective way to increase website traffic, consider influencer marketing. This form of paid advertising uses influencers to promote your brand or your products. With the right influencers, you can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site. The best campaigns are authentic and genuine so take care to choose influencers who will make your investment worth it.
Related: How Do Social Media Influencers Make Money?
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing can give your brand a boost by borrowing from the existing audiences of other content creators. With the right affiliate scheme, you can increase traffic to your site and boost your conversion rates. You also benefit from affiliate reviews and backlinks.
Extras
Create a community
A powerful way to boost your brand presence and increase website traffic is to create an online community around your product or services. A community allows you to foster a closer connection with your customers while fostering more brand loyalty and trust.
Thinkific includes built-in tools to make creating a private community easy, including customizable user interfaces, community memberships and more. Find out more here.
Viral content
When you’re creating content for your website or social media, try to keep in mind the power of shareable content. The beauty of digital media is that with the right campaign, you can be seen by thousands of people in a single day. The viral nature of digital content means it can transform your website traffic overnight.
Generating viral content is easier said than done but the more you can focus on shareable content like video, infographics and audio clips, the more you can increase your chances of success.
Merchandise
If you want to go old school, why not try making up some merchandise for your brand? Stickers, pens and other merchandise is a fun way to increase your brand awareness. Add a QR code to any packaging or promotional material to increase website traffic too. Even better if you can do a brand collaboration with a well-known company and get extra publicity from them.
A/B testing
Whichever forms of marketing you choose to drive more traffic to your website, if you want to increase the ROI on your campaigns it’s a really good idea to use A/B testing.
A/B testing is a split test that lets you evaluate which version of your campaign is best. The test is designed to give you an insight into what your audience responds to. By using A/B testing, you can make sure that you are using the most effective version of your marketing campaign to increase website traffic and boost conversions.
Ready to boost your website traffic?
We’ve looked at over 40 easy ideas to increase website traffic and generate more leads. For more expert tips on marketing your course, create a free account on thinkific, then take our Free Webinar Sales Funnel course featuring Neil Patel.
This article was originally written November 2021, and was refreshed June 2022.
