Increase Website Traffic in 2022: 10 Great Ways to Do It
Whether you’re an e-commerce store or a brick-and-mortar business, increasing traffic to your website is a goal shared by many business owners and marketers. Your website is your online storefront, where visitors can learn more about your offerings, build trust in your brand, and ultimately become leads and customers.
But having a beautiful, easy-to-navigate site won’t get you more customers if no one can find your site in the first place. In this post, you’ll learn exactly how to get discovered online so you can maximize your exposure. I will cover:
- Why Website Traffic is Important.
- What Quality Traffic Means and Why It is a Must.
- 10 Free and Paid Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Site.
- Traffic Generation Strategies to Avoid.
Why More Website Traffic?
Some businesses wonder why it is important to get website traffic in the first place, let alone a website. In today’s world, even for brick-and-mortar establishments, a website is an absolute must. At the very least, potential customers can become more familiar with your business. But ideally, it is formatted in such a way that your visitors can enter your funnel and eventually convert into customers.
With this type of website, your traffic is both a leading indicator and a driver of business growth. It can help you:
- Understand if your marketing strategy is working
- Collect information about your audience to make decisions.
- Improve your SEO and search engine credibility.
- Generate more leads, increase conversions, and get more customers.
However, to get these benefits you need to drive traffic to your website the right way and focus on driving quality traffic, which is why this post covers strategies that will impact your bottom line.
Increase Website Traffic
Increase Traffic to Your Website
traffic to your website helps improve your rankings which in turn generates more traffic, but you want to make sure that increased traffic is also associated with increased engagement. If your traffic is increasing but your conversion rates are decreasing, you’re not bringing in the right traffic.
There are a number of ways to optimize your website for conversions, such as including calls to action and lead capture forms in the right places, providing the information your visitors are looking for, and making navigation easy and intuitive. But the first step is to attract the right visitors to your site in the first place.
Your goal when it comes to website traffic is to bring more qualified visitors to your site. That is, those who are most likely to convert into leads and customers.
Channels That Drive Quality Traffic to Your Website
There is no “set it and forget it” tool that generates free, high-quality traffic to your website. Instead, there is a mix of channels that work together to attract visitors. Some require effort, some require time, and some require money. Some of the strategies and channels that drive traffic to your website include:
- Online directories (Google MyBusiness, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc)
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Social media
- Paid ads
- Blogs
In the next section, we’ll dive into the most effective (and reliable) ways to increase website traffic for free.
Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic Through Google
There are a couple of free ways you can use Google to increase your website traffic.
1. Optimize Your Free Google Business Profile
Did you know that an optimized Google business listing gets 7 times more visits than an incomplete one? Don’t forget that your GMB profile links to your website, so this is a great way to get more traffic to your website.
Also keep in mind that Google is getting smarter with its results pages. If your listing provides all the information a potential customer needs to make a decision, they may skip your website and contact/visit your business directly, even better than a website visit!
Here are some additional features and benefits of Google My Business that make it one of the best generators of quality website traffic.
Your Google Listing:
- It’s free and easy to set up.
- It lets you show up for searches that are relevant to your business and location.
- It increases your visibility on a platform where people are looking to buy.
- It drives qualified traffic to your site and store.
- It gives customers the opportunity to post reviews and further increase your presence.
Also, keep in mind that Google My Business:
- It helps your business be found in mobile searches, which have overtaken desktop searches.
- It uses visuals to give consumers a sense of what it’s like to actually be in your business, eliminating the uncertainty that is a major barrier to entry.
- It gives users the ability to interact with your business directly on your listing, increasing the chances of engagement and acquiring new customers customers.
With the many benefits of a Google My Business listing, you can’t afford not to have one as a local business. Create your listing and keep it as up-to-date as possible.
2. Implement On-Page SEO
There are many SEO tactics you can perform on each of your website’s pages to increase their search engine rankings and get more visitors. This includes producing high-quality content that your audience is looking for and writing concise meta descriptions for your pages. The meta description appears below the URL in search results. Knowing what a page is about and what will result in a click makes users much more likely to do so. We’ve covered this in depth in this article on On-Page SEO.
Increase Traffic to Your Website: Other Free Ways
Here are 10 additional steps you can take to increase your website traffic.
3. Get Listed in Online Directories
Another way to increase traffic to your website is to get listed on free online directories and review sites. For most of these sites, your profile will link to your website, so actively updating these listings and getting positive reviews will likely generate more traffic to your website. Additionally, many directories like Yelp have strong domain authority on Google. It’s possible that your free Yelp business page could rank highly for relevant searches.
4. Get Backlinks
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Backlinks from complementary businesses or industry influencers will not only get your business in front of a wider audience, but they will also drive qualified traffic to your website.
Plus, Google collects backlinks and will increase its trust in your business if it sees other reputable sites linking to yours. More trust from Google leads to higher rankings, which leads to more traffic. Get noticed on Google for free with quality backlinks.
5. Post on Social Media
Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools out there and plays a role in driving traffic to your website. Use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote blog posts and other useful pages on your website. This can help you turn your social media followers into website visitors and drive traffic from their networks if you post shareable content.
Creating useful content is free and not as hard as it may seem. You are the expert on your product/service; your job is to simplify it for your audience.
By adding hashtags to posts that promote your website pages and blog posts, you can extend your reach beyond your network and get discovered by people searching for your products and services. The more eyes on your links, the more free traffic you get to your website.
7. Use Landing Pages
Landing pages are another free source of traffic to your website. These are pages that are specific to your offers, such as redeeming a discount code, downloading a free guide, or starting a free trial. They contain the details users need to go ahead and convert and focus on a specific call to action, making it more likely to happen.
Because landing pages are so specific, you can be very targeted in your messaging, increasing traffic (and conversions) for those pages.
8. Work on long-tail keywords
While short-tail keywords are often searched for more frequently, they are harder to rank for in search engines. Targeting long-tail keywords, on the other hand, gives you a better chance of ranking higher (even on the first page) for specific queries about your products and services, and a higher ranking means more traffic.
Plus, as search engines and voice search capabilities have improved, people are using more specific phrases to search online. There are many free tools available to help you find keywords to target, such as WordStream’s free keyword tool.
9. Start Email Marketing
Sending regular newsletters and promoting offers via email is a great way to stay in touch with customers and can also help drive traffic to your website. Provide helpful information and links to pages on your website where they can learn more, such as blog posts and landing pages for particular offers.
Just make sure you don’t bombard your readers with emails all the time or your customers will disengage, unsubscribe, or unsubscribe from your emails.
Also, think carefully about your email subject lines. These have a major impact on whether or not a user opens your email. If your emails never get opened, they can’t drive traffic to your site!
10. Guest Posting
Having an industry influencer post on your site or turning an interview with them into a blog post can help drive traffic both through organic search but also through that influencer promoting the content to their audience. This can also help add more variety to your content and show your visitors that you are active in your field.
Click to learn more about Guest posting.
11. Engage with your audience
It’s free to be active in online groups and websites that are relevant to your business and community, and it helps you get more traffic. Comment on blogs and social media posts, answer questions people post, and join in conversations about your industry. The more you engage with your community, the more visibility and profile visits you’ll get.
If your social media profiles link to your website, then you’ve turned your engagement into another channel for website traffic. Just make sure to keep your engagement moderate and sincere, and avoid including links to your website in comments, as this can make you look spammy and damage your online and business reputation. Increasing traffic should not be the goal of your engagement, but rather a secondary outcome.
12. Learn from your analytics data
Google Analytics is free, and the information it gathers can help you drive more traffic to your website. Use the tracked links for your marketing campaigns and check your website analytics regularly. This will help you identify which strategies and types of content are working, which ones need improvement, and which ones you shouldn’t waste time on.
Increase visits to your website: paid ways
Paid advertising on Google is a great way to drive people to your website who are looking for the services you offer.
13. Google Ads
With Google Ads, you pay to have your website (usually a landing page) appear at the top of search results for certain keywords. When a query is entered using these keywords, Google examines all accounts bidding on those keywords and displays and ranks the paid results based on the quality and relevance of the ad.
Paid search results appear first, at the top of the results pages. This type of exposure is a great way to increase visits to your website from qualified visitors. Plus, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
14. Advertising on Google Maps
You can also select preferences through the Google Ads platform to have your business appear at the top of Google Maps search results. As with regular paid search ads, there will be an indicator next to your listing that it is a paid result, but the exposure you get from appearing at the top is invaluable.
Other Paid Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Social media, display, and retargeting ads are all great types of online advertising strategies to increase website traffic.
15. Social Media Advertising
While with search engine advertising, you pay to appear at the top of relevant searches, with social media advertising, you pay to appear in relevant feeds. With both forms of advertising, you can specify the type of audience you would like to appear in front of, but with more psychographic data, social media offers excellent targeting.
16. Retargeting
Retargeting ads can appear on websites or social media feeds. They are placed in front of people who have already visited your site once and are therefore more likely to return.
Avoid Instant Website Traffic Generators
There is such a thing as free website traffic, but there is no magic button or tool that will simply magically generate it regardless of your efforts. If you are considering an automatic website traffic generator of any kind for your business (paid or free), here are three reasons to avoid it:
Automatic website traffic generators can hurt your rankings
Google can detect spammy behavior, suspect spikes in activity, and monitor how users interact with your website. Using a bot or automated traffic generator is likely to attract the wrong kind of attention from Google, which will hurt your reputation with them and therefore your rankings.
Your traffic will not be targeted
The ultimate goal of getting more visitors to your website and ranking higher on Google is to increase the number of people who interact with (and hopefully become customers of) your business. If your visitors aren’t targeted, they’re unlikely to engage with your website and you’re more likely to see your lead and conversion rates decline.
Your Site Could Be Banned
If your website is attracting bot traffic, you run the risk of being blocked by online advertising platforms or, worse yet, removed from Google. Cheap website traffic isn’t worth it! Take the time to build sustainable, high-quality traffic to your site.
As mentioned above, there’s no point in getting more traffic to your website if those visitors are unlikely to engage with your pages, convert into leads, or become customers. Increasing your website traffic doesn’t happen overnight. It takes effort, but the effort you put in will equal the quality of the traffic you generate.
Plus, we’ve taken the hard part out of the way for you: knowing what to do in the first place. By using Google My Business and the other secure channels listed above, you can get the right visitors coming to your site and, more importantly, more visitors converting into customers.
How to Increase Website Traffic: Conclusion
Here is a list of the strategies we have covered in this post that can help you increase visits to your website:
- Optimize your free Google Business Profile
- Implement on-page SEO
- Get listed on online directories
- Get backlinks
- Publish on social media
- Include hashtags in your posts
- Use landing pages
- Target long-tail keywords
- Start email marketing
- Guest posting
- Engage with your audience
- Analyze data in Google Analytics
- Google Paid Ads
- Google Maps Advertising
- Social Media Advertising
- Retargeting
If you need a 1:1 consultation to increase visits to your website, you can request a free strategic consultation.
