Driving qualified traffic to your website is crucial for growing any business online. With over 1.7 billion websites competing for visibility, having an effective website traffic strategy is essential. This comprehensive guide explores proven tactics to increase website traffic across key channels in 2024.

Website traffic measures the number of visitors your site gets in a given timeframe. It’s crucial to understand not just the quantity but also the quality and sources of your traffic.
Traffic Sources:

• Organic Search (54% of traffic)
• Social Media (17% of traffic)
• Direct Traffic
• Referral Traffic
• Email Marketing
• Paid Advertising
• Other (e.g., mobile apps, QR codes)

The best website in the world serves almost no purpose if only a few people visit it. The point of building a website is to communicate with as many people as possible. This means your primary goal should be to increase website traffic.

For businesses, your website serves two primary functions. The first is to cut costs. The second is to increase revenue.

Increasing web traffic helps with both. Specifically, increasing repeat traffic cuts costs by improving your customer retention rate. Attracting new users boosts revenues by attracting new customers.

Benefits of Increasing Website Traffic

Increasing your website traffic is more than just a vanity metric; it’s a fundamental driver of business growth in the digital age. Here’s why it matters:

1. Increased Lead Generation: More visitors mean more opportunities to convert casual browsers into potential customers. Each visitor represents a chance to grow your email list, fill out a contact form, or engage with your brand.
2. Higher Sales and Revenue: With a larger audience, you have more chances to showcase your products or services. Even a small increase in conversion rate can lead to significant revenue growth when applied to a larger traffic base.
3. Enhanced Brand Awareness: Higher traffic exposes your brand to a wider audience, increasing recognition and recall. This can lead to word-of-mouth referrals and a stronger market presence.
4. Improved Search Engine Rankings: Search engines like Google consider traffic as a signal of a site’s relevance and authority. More traffic can lead to better rankings, creating a positive feedback loop of visibility and more traffic.
5. Valuable Market Insights: With more visitors comes more data. Analyze this information to better understand your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and needs, allowing you to refine your offerings and marketing strategies.
6. Increased Ad Revenue: For sites that monetize through advertising, more traffic directly translates to higher ad revenue.
7. Competitive Advantage: In today’s digital landscape, capturing and maintaining user attention is crucial. A well-trafficked site often stands out from competitors, positioning your business as a leader in your industry.
8. Opportunities for Partnerships and Collaborations: High-traffic websites are attractive to potential business partners, sponsors, and collaborators, opening doors to new opportunities and revenue streams.

Remember, the quality of your traffic is just as important as the quantity. Focused efforts to drive relevant, engaged visitors to your site will yield the best results for your business.

Table of Contents

• Strategic Marketing Plan
• 1. Promote your Website Everywhere
• 2. Make the Website URL Memorable and Easy to Spell
• 3. Do Not Send Web Traffic to Others by Accident
• 4. Increase Website Traffic with an Existing URL
• 5. Use Google My Business to Increase Web Traffic
• 6. SEO
• 7. Mobile Devices and Apps
• 8. Paid Advertisement and Social Media
• 9. Contests and Quizzes
• Frequently Asked Questions About Driving Website Traffic:
  • What are the main sources of website traffic?
  • How much website traffic do you need to make money?
  • What is a good website traffic goal?
  • How long does it take to increase website traffic?
  • Should you buy website traffic?
• Increase Website Traffic: Conclusion:

What is Website Traffic? (And Why does it Matter?)

Essentially, web traffic measures the number of visitors your site gets in any given timeframe. For example, you’ll often hear markets talk about annual, monthly or 90-day traffic.

In other words, your traffic figures are a macro-view of who visits your site and when.

Of course, there’s much more to this than simply patting yourself on the back for getting a tonne of visitors. Digging a little deeper into your web traffic can offer many helpful insights.

For example, examining the demographics of your audience might help you to identify an age group that you’re underperforming with. You could even find out you have a major group of users in a far-flung country.

However, from a marketing perspective, the most important insights relate to how users find your site.

Website Traffic Sources

It’s important to know where your website traffic comes from. Otherwise, measuring the effect of digital marketing campaigns would be impossible. That is, we make all kinds of efforts to attract users to our site. You want to know which ones are working.

This can be measured in any traffic analysis tool, for instance, Google Analytics.

Generally, website traffic can be grouped into the following categories:

• Organic – Where a user finds your site through a search engine, like Google, as a result of your SEO strategy.
• Paid – This is when users find your site due to PPC campaigns.
• Direct – Direct traffic simply means that someone has entered your web address in the URL bar of their browser.
• Referral – This is when a user clicks on a link to your site from an external domain.
• Social – Social traffic comes from paid and organic posts on your social media accounts.
• Email – If you email marketing campaigns, you can measure the proportion of your traffic which clicks through to your site from their inbox.
• Other – This is any other traffic source which doesn’t fall into one of the other categories. For example, if a user clicks through to your site from a mobile app or by scanning a QR code on a piece of physical media.

These traffic sources can be analysed for the entire site or individual pages and subdomains.

Comprehensive Strategies to Increase Website Traffic

Unfortunately, many organisations build websites without researching, planning, or developing a comprehensive strategic marketing plan integrating marketing efforts across all organisation platforms.

A company may use traditional media, such as radio, television, and print advertisements. It may use point-of-purchase displays, billboards, and advertising posters. It also may have an ongoing email marketing campaign.

If the company maximises exposure, it has a presence on social media. The company may develop an app. A company may make frequent press releases and public announcements. Company representatives may attend trade shows and conferences and give public talks.

A company with a comprehensive marketing campaign might do all of these things listed above. To increase website traffic, all of these efforts tie back to the company’s website in some way.

The company’s domain, which is the name of its website, is on everything the company creates for its staff, investors, customers, clients, business partners, affiliated organizations, and the public. The company’s website is prominently displayed on every vehicle it owns.

Some of the best practices to increase website traffic include:

1. Promote your Website Everywhere

A ubiquitous marketing plan for a website means the web address is on everything the company creates and shows up everywhere this material appears. It helps a lot if the website URL is also a popular brand name of the company.

As an example, almost everyone in the world knows there is a Coca-Cola website with the URL www.cocacola.com. On the other hand, less effort is put into marketing Coke’s other brands, like Lilt or Sprite.

2. Make the Website URL Memorable and Easy to Spell

This should be obvious, but you might be surprised how many bad domains there are. A bad example would be a website URL such as rtfftxquisstlo3erf.com. Such a horrible URL is impossible to pronounce, remember, or spell.

It also makes your site appear like a temporary domain, which is very off-putting for users.

It also helps to own domains which are similar to your primary site. Continuing with our Coca-Cola example, the Coca-Cola company is smart enough to know that consumers may look for www.coca-cola.com or www.cocacola.com (without the dash).

Additionally, consumers may enter the URL without using the www prefix, so in this example, www.coca-cola.com, coca-cola.com, www.cocacola.com, and cocacola.com, which are different web URL addresses, all need to redirect to the same main home page for the company.

The same goes for coke.com.

3. Do Not Send Web Traffic to Others by Accident

Consumers frequently make spelling errors and typos when entering URLs. Unless a company captures as many of these mistakes as possible, it can inadvertently send tons of web traffic to the wrong website.

An example of this is gamil.com, which is very similar to gmail.com. It could also be mistakenly entered as a result of autocorrection.

The Gamil company did nothing wrong. They have been in business for more than 28 years. On 29 June 1998, the company registered the domain www.gamil.com. This was six years before the public launch of “Gmail” in 2004.

Gmail is different from Gamal, and more importantly, the company of Gamil has documented prior use, so there is no trademark infringement claim possible.

The owners of gamil.com do not seem to be willing to sell the domain to Google. No matter how powerful Google may be, gamil.com remains in the hands of its original owners. The domain URL of gamil.com gets enormous daily web traffic from Internet users typing the name of Gmail incorrectly.

When starting a new website, it’s best to make a new brand word that did not previously exist, make a new spelling, and then register as many misspelt entries of Internet users as possible.

4. Increase Website Traffic with an Existing URL

Sometimes, registering a trademark, combined with prior use, establishes the right of the company to own a website made from the brand’s name.

A disputed claim is possible with ICANN, which is the website authority, using the domain dispute resolution policies. For example, an international company, such as McDonald’s, has the right to the URL www.mcdonalds.com.

In the early days of the commercialization of the Internet, businesses paid millions of U.S. dollars for one-word domain names, such as www.insurance.com. There is value in having a domain name that is a good single word.

This trend is not as strong as before, and the prices have come way down from the record millions they used to be, yet there are still domain names that sell for premium prices.

When a domain expires, many of its SEO strengths remain in place. This means you can get much web traffic from buying expired domains.

5. Use Google My Business to Increase Web Traffic

A few years back, Google moved to rank websites based on localization. This infuriated website owners who spent lots of money making their generic websites have a high ranking because they lost out on traffic.

For example, if a person lives in Brighton, UK, and uses the Google search engine to look for insurance, it is now more likely that a Brighton-based insurance agency comes up at the top rank than insurance.com.

This move by Google to prioritize local searches over generic ones created an opportunity for small or local businesses to compete with their international rivals. In some ways, it’s a lot easier to rank for local SEO.

This makes it easy to rank for local searches, as long as your Google My Business profile is completed and your GMB tags are optimised for keywords with a high volume and a local search intent.

6. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most cost-effective way to increase your site traffic. However, it’s also a fairly tricky field. There are many things to fine-tune that make a website more appealing to search engines.

The Google search algorithm constantly changes, so the need for SEO updates for websites is also constant.

Many self-starters like to handle SEO tasks themselves. SEO work is not difficult, and there are plenty of free or low-cost SEO tools that assist in the process. The troublesome part of SEO work is it takes many mundane efforts to keep websites up-to-date.

Google does not explain all the details of how its algorithm ranks websites, so part of good SEO work is a guessing game and testing to see what works and what does not.

Many companies outsource the SEO work to other organizations because of this need for ongoing SEO efforts.

7. Mobile Devices and Apps

More users are accessing the Internet using mobile devices than ever before. It is important that a website is functional and appears properly on any type of device. Another way to attract web traffic is to create a useful app and give it away for free.

However, this isn’t always the most cost-effective strategy. Mobile apps are expensive. They also need to be promoted the same way that your site does. This is difficult if your web traffic figures are already poor.

As such, if a mobile app results in an increase in your web traffic, this should be seen as a bonus. However, increasing your traffic should not be the primary reason you invest in an app.

8. Paid Advertisement and Social Media

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement is a popular way to increase web traffic. Having a presence on social media that links to a website also generates more web traffic. It also allows you to use advanced marketing strategies, like retargeting.

PPC is also an effective way to drive traffic to your site, but there are a few things to remember. The main priority for any PPC campaign is return on investment. That is, you should end up with more revenue than your ads cost you in the first place.

As such, you shouldn’t spend too much money on online ads until you know your site effectively converts traffic into sales. Then, it’s worth investing in PPC to scale your conversions.

9. Contests and Quizzes

Creating contests and having quizzes on a website are proven ways to increase web traffic. These are also excellent ways to drive user engagement across social media platforms and create user-generated content.

However, the goal of a contest or quiz is rarely to drive traffic directly to your site.

Rather, they are most frequently used as fun and subtle lead magnets. This is when a user is given something in return for signing up to your mailing list – in this case, a chance to win a prize.

The user is then entered into an email funnel. This eventually leads them to your site, although this happens indirectly and over time. It’s also important to remember that this will show up in your analytics as email traffic.

10. Cross Promotion with Other Websites and Backlinks

In any business sector, it is important to know who the influencers are. They may be industry associations, bloggers, news organizations, or others.

To create links between these sources and a website, first, create some outstanding content that gives the viewers significant value, then reach out to the webmasters of those other websites and ask for permission to include a link to their website in the content. At the same time, ask them to link back to your website.

If you don’t have experience in link building, as it is quite a complex process, you can hire a link building agency for this purpose. To choose the right company, it is important to familiarize yourself with their case studies, reviews, and understand whether the company has the necessary expertise. For example, if you want to build links for a SaaS business, a company like Editorial Link would be a great fit, as they build high authority links for many successful SaaS projects.

If you don’t have experience in link building, as it is quite a complex process, you can hire a link building agency for this purpose. To choose the right company, it is important to familiarize yourself with their case studies, reviews, and understand whether the company has the necessary expertise. For example, if you want to build links for a SaaS business, a company like Editorial Link would be a great fit, as they build high authority links for many successful SaaS projects.

This is important to grow your domain authority (DA). This is a measure of how credible your site is within your niche. It’s also an increasingly important SEO ranking factor, and increases in DA will lead directly to increased traffic:

Optimizing Your Website for Organic Search:

Search engine optimization is the #1 long-term strategy for driving qualified visitors. Key elements include:

• Optimizing Page Speed – Faster loading pages improve SEO rankings. Pages should load in under 2 seconds. Minify code, compress images and optimize servers.
• Creating Keyword-Focused Content – Research low competition, high traffic keywords and optimize new content around them, including in titles, URLs and H2 tags.
• Enhancing On-Site Link Building – Update site navigation and internal links to enhance crawlability and SEO flow. Link to related content.
• Improving Mobile Optimization – Ensure responsive design and mobile layouts, and compress images for faster loading. More than 50% of search is now mobile.
• Generating Backlinks – Build links from industry websites, directories, and reputable media sources. Focus on contextual, natural backlinks versus paid.
• Updating Site Architecture – Organize your site into logical clusters of related content around topics, products and services. Enhance site search.
• Producing Fresh, Useful Content – Search engines favour sites that regularly add new, high-quality content with relevant keywords. Blog consistently.

Best Ways to Increase Web Traffic

By following these tips and making regular efforts to increase web traffic, it is possible to see real results. Improved results come from testing to learn what works best and monitoring web traffic results to see what increases performance.

There are thousands of ways to get traffic to a website. The above strategies have been chosen as they are easily actionable by just about anyone.

One of the exciting things about digital marketing is that there is pretty much no limit to the number of new and exciting strategies you can use to drive traffic. Ultimately, this means that there is no ceiling on how far you can grow your business either.

Also Consider: Advanced Strategies and Tactics

While the core strategies we’ve discussed form the foundation of increasing website traffic, the world of digital marketing offers a vast array of additional tactics and approaches. As you grow more comfortable with the basics, consider exploring these advanced strategies to take your traffic generation to the next level.

Leveraging Social Media to Drive Referrals

Social media platforms are powerhouses for driving referral traffic to your website. Beyond basic posting, consider these advanced tactics:

• Content Synergy: Align your social media content calendar with your website’s content strategy. When you publish a new blog post, create a series of social media posts that tease different aspects of the article, encouraging clicks through to your site.
• Platform-Specific Content: Tailor your content to each platform’s strengths. For instance, create carousel posts for Instagram, short-form videos for TikTok, and thought leadership articles for LinkedIn.
• Social Listening and Engagement: Use tools to monitor mentions of your brand or relevant keywords. Engage in conversations and provide value, subtly directing users to relevant pages on your site.
• Employee Advocacy: Encourage your team to share company content on their personal profiles, expanding your reach organically.
• Social Proof: Showcase user-generated content and testimonials on your social profiles, linking back to relevant product or service pages.

Content Marketing Mastery

Elevate your content marketing strategy beyond basic blogging:

• Content Pillars: Develop comprehensive, authoritative pieces on core topics in your industry. These serve as central hubs, linking to and from related, more specific content.
• Skyscraper Technique: Identify popular content in your niche, create something even better, and reach out to sites linking to the original content to suggest your improved version.
• Content Repurposing: Transform your best-performing content into multiple formats. Turn a popular blog post into an infographic, video, podcast episode, and social media series.
• Newsjacking: Create timely content that ties your expertise to current events or trending topics, potentially capturing search and social media traffic.

Immersive Video Marketing

Harness the power of video to engage your audience and drive traffic:

• Behind-the-Scenes Content: Give viewers an insider look at your company, building trust and personal connections.
• 360-Degree and VR Videos: Create immersive experiences that stand out and encourage sharing.
• Video SEO: Optimize your video titles, descriptions, and tags for search engines. Create video sitemaps to improve indexing.
• Shoppable Videos: Implement interactive elements in your videos that allow viewers to click on products and go directly to purchase pages.

Podcast Proliferation

Tap into the growing podcast audience to increase your reach:

• Niche Podcasting: Instead of broad topics, focus on specific, underserved areas in your industry to attract a dedicated audience.
• Podcast SEO: Optimize your podcast titles, descriptions, and show notes for search engines to capture both audio and text-based searchers.
• Cross-Promotion: Partner with other podcasts in complementary niches for guest appearances and shared promotions.
• Podcast to Blog Pipeline: Transcribe your podcasts and turn them into SEO-optimized blog posts, capturing both listeners and readers.

Strategic Influencer Collaborations

Expand your reach through carefully crafted influencer partnerships:

• Micro-Influencer Focus: Partner with niche influencers who have smaller but highly engaged audiences for more targeted traffic.
• Long-Term Ambassadorships: Move beyond one-off promotions to create lasting relationships with influencers who become genuine brand advocates.
• Influencer-Exclusive Content: Create special landing pages or content pieces exclusively for an influencer’s audience, tracking engagement and conversions.
• Collaborative Product Development: Work with influencers to create co-branded products or services, driving their audience to your site through shared interests.

Interactive Content Experiences

Engage your audience with elements that encourage active participation:

• Personalized Assessments: Create tools that provide users with personalized recommendations based on their inputs, encouraging them to explore more of your site.
• Interactive Storytelling: Develop choose-your-own-adventure style content that keeps users engaged and clicking through multiple pages.
• Gamification: Implement game-like elements on your site, such as points systems or challenges, to encourage repeat visits and extended browsing sessions.
• Virtual Try-Ons: For e-commerce sites, use AR technology to allow users to virtually sample products, increasing engagement and potentially driving sales.

Community Cultivation

Foster a sense of belonging around your brand to drive engagement and loyalty:

• Expert Q&A Sessions: Host regular ask-me-anything sessions with industry experts, driving traffic through promotional lead-up and post-event content.
• User-Generated Content Campaigns: Create campaigns that encourage users to submit their own content, with the best entries featured on your site.
• Community Challenges: Organize competitions or challenges that require participants to engage with your site regularly.
• Exclusive Community Platforms: Develop a proprietary platform or app for your most engaged users, providing a reason for regular return visits.

User Experience Optimization

Refine your site’s usability to encourage longer visits and return traffic:

• Behavioral Flow Analysis: Use tools to understand how users navigate your site, optimizing pathways to key conversions.
• Micro-Interactions: Implement small, delightful interactions throughout your site to enhance user engagement and encourage exploration.
• Progressive Disclosure: Structure complex information or processes in a way that reveals details gradually, preventing overwhelm and encouraging continued interaction.
• Accessibility Enhancements: Ensure your site is usable by people with various disabilities, potentially tapping into underserved markets.

Voice Search Revolution

Prepare for the growing use of voice-activated search:

• Featured Snippet Optimization: Structure your content to increase chances of being selected for voice search results, which often pull from featured snippets.
• Conversational Keyword Integration: Incorporate natural language phrases and questions into your content to match voice search queries.
• Speakable Schema Markup: Implement speakable schema to identify sections of your content that are particularly suitable for text-to-speech applications.
• Voice-Activated Rich Results: Optimize for rich results like FAQs, how-tos, and recipes, which are commonly used in voice search responses.

Global Traffic Expansion

Extend your reach to international audiences:

• Geo-Targeting: Use location-based personalization to serve relevant content to users from different regions.
• Translation and Localization: Go beyond mere translation to truly localize your content, considering cultural nuances and preferences.
• International Link Building: Develop backlink strategies specific to target countries, focusing on locally authoritative sites.
• Global Social Media Strategy: Tailor your social media approach to popular platforms and usage habits in target countries.

Remember, the key to successful traffic growth is continuous experimentation and refinement. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so it’s crucial to test different strategies and tactics to find what resonates with your unique audience and aligns with your business goals.

By implementing a combination of these advanced strategies and consistently monitoring your results, you can create a sophisticated traffic generation system that supports sustainable business growth. The digital marketing landscape offers virtually limitless opportunities to drive traffic to your website – the only ceiling is your creativity and willingness to adapt and innovate.

Leveraging Social Media to Drive Referrals:

Active social media accounts are powerful for referring followers to visit your site. Tactics include:

• Sharing New Content – Post blog articles, videos, reports, infographics and other site content across social channels.
• Utilizing Clickable CTAs – Write compelling calls to action to visit your site or specific landing pages.
• Cross-Promoting Content – Share website content across multiple platforms to maximize reach.
• Running Targeted Social Ads – Promote premium offers, downloads and site content via paid social advertising.
• Leveraging Influencers – Partner with relevant influencers to share or feature your brand and content.
• Promoting Discounts and Sales – Offer exclusive deals for social followers that drive them to your site.
• Using UTM Tracking Codes – These reveal which social referrals convert best.

Boosting Traffic with Email Marketing:

Email subscribers are 18 times more likely to visit your site than social followers. Drive traffic by:

• Promoting New Site Content – Share blog posts, videos, offers, etc., via dedicated emails. Send 2-4 times per month.
• Segmenting Your List – Send targeted content based on subscriber interests and behaviours.
• Offering Lead Magnets – Free downloads, discounts and gated content in exchange for emails.
• Automating Drip Campaigns – Send new subscribers a pre-scheduled automated email series.
• Coordinating With Social Posts – Promote the same content across email and social channels.

Frequently Asked Questions About Driving Website Traffic:

What are the main sources of website traffic?

• Organic search, social media, email, and paid advertising account for most website traffic. Referrals and direct visits make up smaller shares.

How much website traffic do you need to make money?

• The amount varies widely by business model. Focus on converting visitors into leads and sales vs just driving raw traffic volume.

What is a good website traffic goal?

• Benchmark against your industry. 10k, 50k, or 100k+ monthly visitors are common goals for established sites.

How long does it take to increase website traffic?

• Done right, you can begin seeing results in 1-2 months, but SEO and social media efforts compound over 6-12+ months.

Should you buy website traffic?

• Low-quality paid traffic has limited value. Invest in driving qualified organic and social visitors instead for long-term impact.

How often should you post content to increase traffic?

• 1-2 times per week is a good baseline. Monitor your site analytics to determine ideal posting frequency.

Increase Website Traffic: Conclusion:

Gaining more website traffic requires using the full breadth of digital marketing channels available today. Combine SEO, social media promotion, email marketing, and select paid efforts to maximize qualified visitors over both the short and long term. Set measurable traffic goals, track online and offline conversions, and continually refine your strategies based on data. With persistence and optimization, your website can attract all the traffic needed to grow a thriving business.