There comes a point in every website’s life when website traffic would begin to stagnate. And to move past that hurdle, you’ll need to be proactive. You have to make an effort to push your site traffic up. How?
In this post, we’ll show you 51 ways for you to grow your website traffic. To make this post easier to digest, we’ve split this list into four sections: site improvement, content creation, self-promotion, and community building. Implement any or all of these, and you should see quite an improvement in your website traffic.
Site Improvement
The first step you should take is to go over your entire site to make sure that it’s optimized. Since you have control over your domain, all changes are easy to implement and wouldn’t cost you anything. Making tweaks to your pages can have a significant impact on improving your website traffic. In a case study by Michael Karp that he published on robbierichards.com, he specifically credits on-page optimization tactics for generating 20,314 organic page views for his client, UAV Coach.
Let’s look at some of the ways you can improve your on-page SEO.
1. Insert Keywords in Your H1
If you’re not doing so already, add your primary keywords to your main heading (H1). Not only will it help search engines find your post, but it will also give readers better context as to what your post is all about — which is the title’s job anyway. However, there’s a need to exercise caution. You run the risk of being spammy if you don’t control how many keywords you add to your headings.
You can leverage subheadings to add other relevant keywords.
2. Check Your Metadata Information
What metadata information you put—specifically in the meta title and description fields—also has an effect on your post’s visibility in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Elise Dopson managed to increase her search traffic by 54% after optimizing her meta tags. Not only that, but her average ranking also jumped by ten positions. Her impressions also grew by 57%.
Use your metadata fields to insert keywords. But keep them looking organic. Make sure you have compelling titles and descriptions.
3. Fix Your URL Structure
Do your URLs have random strings of characters at the end? That is called dynamic URL strings, and these are not good for your site. You want to use descriptive words in your URLs. Why? Because URLs can contain keywords and search engines can also use them to determine the content of your pages.
4. Find New Keywords
Don’t expect to rank just because you’re focusing on a high-volume keyword. You’ll need more than that to see any progress. Keyword research is crucial for improving website traffic.
In a case study published in Online Business Case Studies, the author managed to rank for 30,911 keywords. Though not all of them managed to rank in the number one position, it’s still an impressive feat. To accomplish this, the author carefully picked what keywords to use. For example, the author of the study chose keywords that aren’t too competitive. Buyer intent was also put into consideration.
5. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
In the same case study above, it mentioned that aiming for low-hanging fruit keywords (also known as long-tail keywords) can be an advantage. Long-tail keywords are phrases that are longer than a typical keyword. They have three or more words and are usually very specific. The reason why people don’t use them as often is that they have low search volumes.
However, as voice search develops, the phrases people use to search online change. To be specific, search queries are now getting conversational. So using long-tail keywords would help with ranking for voice search queries.
6. Place Internal Links
It’s not enough for the homepage to link to your subpages. There should be a hierarchy so that there’s a logical structure for your whole site. Dave Davies made two internal linking tweaks to his site, Trophy Central. He introduced better navigation so that search engines discovered his deeper pages. Next, he made smart link placements. This involved adding links to his sub-categories.
The result? If you’d like to see similar (or better) results, look at your internal linking structure and see if there are aspects you could improve on.
7. Spread Keywords Throughout Your Posts
There’s no reason why you should limit keywords to heading tags or metadata. You should add keywords to the body of the post as well. In SEO, there’s a thing called latent semantic keywords (or LSI) which are conceptually related terms that Google uses to understand the content of your post.
Here’s an example: If you’re writing a post about growing herbs. In your post, you’d likely mention “gardening”, “pots”, “soil”, “mint”, “chives”, and other terms that relate to your main topic. And while these LSI keywords don’t contain either “growing” or “herbs”, search engines put two and two together and figure that your post is about growing herbs.
If you need more information, Backlinko published a comprehensive post on LSI keywords. You should include LSI keywords in your posts as often as possible.
8. Look at Your Competitor’s Keywords
If you’re having trouble finding keywords on your own, you can look at your competitors and see what words and phrases they’re targeting. Ahrefs has a tool called Content Gap that will show you what keywords they are ranking for.
One company, The Hair Bow Company, focused on a few keywords. But it wasn’t until it looked at its competitors that it realized that there were 28 other keywords they were missing out on. They built content around those keywords. Now they are on the first and second pages of the SERPs.
9. Do Guest Posts
Guest posting does two things. First, it gives you backlinks which is one of the ranking factors that search engines use to establish domain authority. Second, it exposes you to more people. That means more website traffic going to your domain. Adam Enfroy published eight guest posts in 15 days to see what effects they can have on his blog
As a result, he got 247 new backlinks and added 12 points to his domain rating. His organic traffic also went up by 372%. There are many ways of tracking your progress. If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can use Alexa Rank. Or you can use Google Analytics to monitor your website traffic activity.
10. Minimize Your Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the number of people who click off your site after seeing only one page. There are many reasons why people click away from the site. Though the culprit usually is lack of engagement. A bounce rate of 30% to 50% is considered excellent. Anything lower could be an indication of bad analytics tracking (which you should address).
Some of the tips in this post would address high bounce rates. In general, you want to provide a better user experience. If you lack in that department, you need to fix your site ASAP. In one case study published via Sonician, tweaks made to the site made its conversion rate go up. However, the site’s owner noticed that the bounce rate went from 36% to 51%. So the SEO agency hired to do the fixes changed the text formatting, improved internal links, and added video to the homepage. The result: The bounce rate started to go down without affecting the conversion rate.
11. Make Your Site Responsive
Google now looks at site responsiveness as an indicator of quality. It has even built a tool to help users to test if their site is mobile-friendly. A case study by Vorbly shows how they increased site visits by optimizing a cafe’s site to be mobile-friendly. The cafe enjoyed 53% incremental sales after the first month. They also had 1,120 unique daily visits. And 70% of their users use mobile devices, so they made the smart move.
Make sure that you optimize your site for phones and tablets. WordPress users have the option of choosing a responsive theme, so they don’t have to start a design from scratch.
12. Improve Your Site Speed
Google wants its users to have the best experience. That’s why it rewards sites that load fast. There are case studies that show how optimizing websites to load faster leads to increased rankings and website traffic.
What are some of the things you can do to make your site load faster?
You can compress the images you use in your posts; minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML; lessen page redirects; take advantage of browser caching; improve your servers; and make use of content distribution networks.
13. Look at Your Analytics
Your analytics data can tell you a lot. Not only does it show how many visitors you’re getting every month, but it can also show you which posts are popular with your audience. Google Analytics even has a heatmap feature, letting you know how users interact with your site. This information can be crucial, especially when you decide how to link your pages internally. It also lets you know what kind of information your readers are looking for. You can optimize your page around this information.
14. Use Schema
Schema is a special code (structured data) that you place in your posts that search engines show in the SERPs. Schema comes in many forms. In the example above, the star rating gives users information about the book even before they click on the link. This is Schema Markup in action. You can easily add schema markups by using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool. Just enter your URL and tick all applicable answers.
Content Creation
Content plays a significant role in getting more website traffic. Brian Dean of Backlinko famously introduced the concept of the Skyscraper Technique 2.0, which he used to increase the organic website traffic of one of his pages by 652.1%.
This widely used content strategy relies on publishing high-quality posts to drive traffic to websites. It’s proof that content creation still plays a vital role in driving traffic to a domain. The following strategies below will help improve your posts, so they have higher visibility on search engines.
15. Find Your Niche
The first thing you should do is find your niche. What is your site about? What kind of information are they looking for and what do you specialize in? These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself.
Having a defined niche helps you know what keywords to research, and what kind of posts to write, and gives you a better sense of who your audience is. You don’t want to build a site that caters to everyone. You want a website that’s focused.
16. Publish Regularly
If you want people to take you seriously, you’ll need to have a posting schedule. By having a set date on when you’ll be posting your content, your audience will know when to come back to your site. It’s something they could look forward to. And it lets people know that you are serious about your commitment to sharing knowledge and information.
After all, why would they come back knowing that nothing new will be on your site when they arrive? By posting regularly, you’re helping your site to sustain its organic website traffic.
17. Write Better Headlines
Headlines draw the attention of readers. Without a compelling headline, they won’t click on the article and read further. Search engines also look at it to figure out what the post is about. So you’d want to insert your main keyword in there somewhere. There are tools like CoSchedule’s Free Headline Analyzer that you could use to improve your existing post titles.
If the headline fails to capture the essence of your post, your audience won’t even bother reading the body. So make sure the words you use in the title would pique the interest of your target audience.
18. Insert High-Quality Images
If you have a habit of stealing images from other people, you should stop doing it right away. Not only can this potentially lead to lawsuits, but it’s also not doing your site any favors. People want to see high-quality, original images from you.
There are different scenarios wherein images matter:
- Users use images to understand the point you’re trying to make.
- Users want to share your images on social media.
- Users want to look at images they’ve never seen before (as in the case of travel bloggers).
- Users use it to understand a product better (especially for those in e-commerce).
Having unique images makes you a reliable source of information. This alone is enough to make your audience come back for more.
19. Update Old Blog Posts
Do you have a vast collection of old posts? Have they done well in the past but are no longer getting any website traffic? Or maybe they were relevant years ago, but they’re no longer relevant today?
Then it’s time to repurpose your old posts. Try updating them to make them more current. Because you’re only updating your posts, part of the work is already finished. You only need to update a few sections to make them relevant again. This also justifies you updating the publishing date to make the whole page seem newer than it is. You can add new quotes, update the images, replace sections that no longer work, and do anything else you feel need to change to make it more appealing to today’s audience.
20. Publish Infographics
Infographics do a few things. You’re making it easier for your audience to share your message (which means free advertising for you). And by sharing information that’s uniquely from you (stats, figures, graphs, and any other information that’s not as accessible), you’re increasing your profile.
You’ll come off as an expert in your niche. And this kind of attention will draw people toward your site. Creating your infographic is not as hard as you think. There are services like Canva that let you make infographics without the need for a graphic designer.
21. Upload Videos
Adding videos to your site is a surefire way of getting eyes on your website. Videos do a couple of things:
- They help explain the purpose of your website or post.
- They serve as eye candy for new visitors.
- They improve customer engagement.
- They increase the time a visitor stays on your page.
- The longer people stay on your page, the better your bounce rate would be. So consider adding videos to your pages.
22. Do List Posts
List posts are popular because users can consume information at a faster rate. They are also, arguably, more comfortable writing than other types of posts. If people are not digging the long-form posts you publish, maybe your audience is not keen on lengthy articles. In cases like this, list posts are a good alternative.
But you don’t have to stick to list posts. Other kinds of content do exist. You can try how-to posts, quiz posts, and infographics above. Choose whatever form suits your audience best. Don’t stick to one type. Mix it up now and then. You’ll never know which ones would work. It’s different for everyone.
23. Launch a Podcast
Podcasting grew in popularity in the last couple of years. Now it seems like everyone has a podcast. And if you don’t, you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity to get more views. The reason why podcasts are so popular is that it’s easy to produce. You don’t need a lot of equipment to have a podcast setup. You can film it anywhere, like a bedroom or a home office.
Releasing a podcast regularly (monthly or weekly) can drive new users to your site. Or if you’re not excited about starting your podcast, why not try to be a guest on someone else’s? This could lead to more exposure, and it improves your profile.
24. Conduct Interviews
Rather than publishing content from your perspective all the time, why not consider interviewing a professional in your field? Not only is this a great way of building relationships with influential people in your sphere, but it’s also a good way of getting in the eyes of that influencer’s audience.
Some might even say that interviews are quick ways to add new content to your site. All you have to do is mostly transcribe the conversation. There’s also the added benefit of appearing in online searches for the person you interviewed.
25. Publish In-Depth Posts
Earlier, we mentioned that you should publish lists as an alternative to long-form content. The opposite is just as true. In-depth posts are useful because search engines appreciate lengthy content. They’re also suitable for consolidating competing keywords. Because the copy is long, there’s room for all your long-tail and LSI keywords.
Users also spend more time on your site as a result. Plus, who doesn’t like an informative post?
26. Improve Your Click-Through Rate
As its name suggests, the click-through rate refers to how many people click on your posts when they see them in the SERPs. Google has an explanation of how it calculates the click-through rate.
We’ve mentioned earlier that you should optimize your headings and metadata, compose better titles, improve your URLs, and add your keywords in all these places. All of these will help improve your click-through rate. Try to look at all these things together to see which needs improvement.
Self-Promotion
Your website traffic will improve if you get your name out there. There are different channels you could leverage to achieve this goal. There are social media, forums, conferences, and more. Social media services provider, Hootsuite, ran an experiment to see if social media has any effect on SEO.
It determined that there is an impact. To be specific, it observed that posts shared in the first 48 hours performed better in the SERPs. This is the opposite of what happened to posts that were not put on social media. Those that weren’t promoted lost their rankings. These are some of the ways you can improve your website traffic through self-promotion.
27. Promote on Social Media
You want to share your posts on social media platforms like Facebook. Not only do these social media platforms make it easier to spread the word about your post, but it also lets you build a community of fans that’ll go to your site every time you publish a post. In a Color Whistle case study, the company detailed how they were able to increase site visits by 218% thanks to social media sharing.
28. Make Free Online Courses
Promoting free online courses can get people talking about your site. Not only that, but they’re also a great way of generating backlinks to your website as people put them on their resource pages. You can create courses for your niche. Photography bloggers, for example, can create camera guides or courses on using the right lighting for portraits. Best of all, it establishes you as an authority figure in your niche. Just remember that you’ll need to know what you’re talking about. If you provide false information or don’t do enough research, your course could backfire on you.
29. Do Giveaways
Who doesn’t love an excellent giveaway? This is one of the tried-and-tested strategies for building a loyal following. And the good thing about giveaways is that you can ask your audience to do something in return (within reason, of course) to qualify. You can ask them to comment on your blog, like your social media pages, sign up for a newsletter, and more.
30. Go on Forums
The good thing about online forums is that you’ll likely encounter people who are already into the same things as you. If you have a site that sells food supplements, then you’ll find interested customers of food supplement forums. And it’s the same case for every niche.
Don’t use forums to promote your product. Instead, engage the community and develop a relationship with them. Soon enough, they’ll work their way into your site, and that will help with website traffic.
31. Launch Contests
Similar to giveaways, you can get people to participate in your website by asking them to help you out with your promotion. Here’s a tip: By asking people to provide their email addresses when they enter the contest, you can build your list of leads. You can use this list to offer products and services in the future. As the FTF Agency notes in their case study, there’s merit to running contests for SEO purposes.
32. Reply to Blog Comments
Replying to blog comments gets you on the radar of the blog owner. And once you are, you can do a couple of things — all of which can help you increase your website traffic:
- You can collaborate on a project.
- You can reach out for a guest blog spot.
- You can ask the blogger for an interview request.
- You can ask for a backlink.
- Who knows? Maybe the blogger would link to you organically, and you wouldn’t have to ask for anything.
You’re also introducing yourself to the other commenters on the post. If they like what you have to say, they might just check out your blog.
33. Go to Conferences
If you want face-to-face interactions with other people in your industry, then going to conferences is the right move for you. There are a lot of meet-and-greets in conferences, giving you the perfect opportunity to get the word out about your site. You’ll also interact with influencers who are looking for possible collaborators for future projects.
34. Host Webinars
You can interact with fans and potential leads when you host webinars. As with podcasting, you don’t have to invest in high-end equipment. Some hosts just use a typical webcam to get started. Again, hosting your webinar makes you seem like an authority figure in your niche. This helps get your name out there. And if you want to get the most out of your webinars, you could have them transcribed and used as a blog posts in the future.
35. Publish on SlideShare
SlideShare (by LinkedIn) is where you go if you want to share reports, tutorials, conference notes, or any other type of presentation with the world. However, it’s also a good dumping ground for repurposed content. People are actively going through SlideShare to find slides that are of interest to them. If users aren’t able to find your posts on search engines, they might be able to find them on SlideShare. You can include a link pointing to your site if the user wants more information.
36. Do Collaborations
What do we mean by collaborations? You can work with influencers or brands on a project they’re working on. If you’re in the fitness industry, for example, you and a partner can work on building a workout routine and ask people to determine which one they think is the best. Then you can write a blog post about it, telling the story from your perspective. Your partner could do the same. Both of you can then link to each other’s posts as part of your cross-promotion.
37. Sponsor Events
Event sponsorships introduce you to people who may not have discovered you yet. By sponsoring events, your brand name will appear on all promotional materials, including banners, signs, and websites.
You don’t have to sponsor big events if you don’t have the money. You can try local events first, especially if you’re a local business.
38. Send Newsletters
Believe it or not, people still send newsletters. They’re great reminders for people who may not visit your site as often as they should. There you can tease your most recent posts along with other site promotions you’re currently running. Shane Barker explains how you can get more website traffic by sending newsletters.
39. Try Paid Search
Paid search can be costly, but there’s no doubt how effective it can be. It does almost everything all the other strategies we’ve discussed so far can do. It can drive more traffic to your site, it can help improve your conversion rate, and it gets your domain in front of people. Lyfe Marketing use paid search to bring website traffic to their clients’ domains. And in one of their case studies, they detailed how they increased sales by as much as 457%.
40. Explore Email Marketing
Email marketing makes it possible to send promotional material directly to your audience’s inbox. It’s useful because emails are highly targeted, boost brand recognition, you can make it work no matter your budget, and it’s measurable. Promodo makes a compelling case for email marketing in their case study. Thanks to their efforts and brilliant email strategy, their client increased both website sessions and revenues.
Community Building
People may recognize your site and visit it from time to time. However, if you want to build lasting relationships, you have to engage a community. Fans are what drive website traffic. They visit regularly and promote your site to their friends and loved ones. They might even directly influence how your site grows.
This is the case for Sales Hacker. Their organic growth was due to content provided by their community of B2B sales, marketing, and customers (though there were challenges since they had to edit the posts themselves). But still, it’s a good argument for why you want to develop relationships in your community to drive traffic to your site.
41. Add Share Buttons
This is a straightforward addition to your pages that might improve your site visits. It’s not that hard to add social sharing buttons to your site. WordPress users can add a plugin that would add buttons with a few clicks.
You won’t even have to mess with your site’s code. Here are a few of the available social share button plugins on WordPress.
42. Add Click to Tweet
Another WordPress plugin, Click to Tweet makes it easier to share quotes, statistics, and other phrases or sentences you think are worth sharing. It’s a step up from adding a Tweet button since you’re able to set which exact quote to pull.
43. Create Facebook Community Pages
Facebook community pages are a great way to interact with your community and get a pulse on what kind of content they want from you. The company gives you tons of ways you could interact with your community. And businesses have been using all of them to not only increase their website traffic but also to get name recognition. Just check out these case studies from HubSpot.
44. Be Active on Twitter
Same to Facebook, Twitter gives you a platform to not only promote your latest content but also hear what people have to say about it. Utilizing hashtags lets you join in on other conversations around your areas of interest. If your post becomes part of the trending list, you can expect to receive more traffic.
45. Leverage Instagram to Drive Website Traffic
If you have images to spare, then maybe you should post them on Instagram. Not only is this great for bloggers, but it also works for brands who want to reach a wider audience. This is great for lifestyle brands.
46. Share Images on Pinterest
Pinterest is another site that you could use to post images. However, it does stand out since other forms of images also work on the site. This includes infographics, how-to guides, and even long-form content. If your page has pictures on it, you can add them to Pinterest. Leanne Wong used Pinterest to increase her organic views. And in one week, she saw an increase of 459%.
47. Promote on LinkedIn
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, posts on LinkedIn are more professional by nature. So it’s the right spot for promoting business articles and anything similar.
48. Post on Reddit
Most marketers would usually avoid Reddit because of its savvy community that can smell promotional materials a mile away. However, if you have a post that’s relevant to the community’s interests (and you find the right subreddit to post them in), you might surprise yourself with the amount of website traffic it can bring. Shane Barker wrote an interesting piece on using Reddit for SEO if you want to learn more.
49. Make Your Presence Felt on YouTube
YouTube is simply a fantastic platform for video promotions. You can start your vlog to accompany your existing site. You can subtly hint that people should check out your website once you’ve built a following.
50. Publish on Medium
You can use Medium to syndicate your content. It’s a blogging platform that’s getting more and more popular for its simplicity and community features. Now you might be wondering: Is it okay to refurbish content?
Moz seems to think so. They even published a Whiteboard Friday episode all about it.
51. Advertise on Social Media Platforms
If advertising on Google doesn’t seem like a good deal for you, then why not advertise on social media platforms instead? Some organizations found success on social media. School Year Abroad, for example, was able to increase its site sessions by 515%.
What makes this amazing is that they only had to spend $350 a month on the campaign.
Conclusion
Any combination of these strategies should help you increase your visitors per month. Most of these don’t even require you to spend money. All you have to do is invest your time. And if you do have a team working with you, you’ll be able to work on some of these changes (especially the on-page optimization strategies) in no time.
Go ahead and try these strategies so you could drive more traffic to your site. There’s no real reason why you shouldn’t.
