When it comes to web traffic, the more, the merrier.
Part of your job as a marketer is to come up with new and inventive ways to drive more eyes to your site. This has a couple of big benefits for any business, including ramping up brand awareness and sales as well as growing your email subscriber list.
The connection between web traffic and overall email marketing success is a big one, with the more visitors that you can bring to your site equaling more opportunities to sign them up for your emails and make stronger, more impactful connections.
We have lots of advice on how to capture contacts once they make it onto your site, but how do you get them there in the first place? Keep reading for 15 creative ways that you can increase website traffic, then get to work tracking visitor behavior so that you can put website forms and CTAs in optimal spots.
But first, let’s start with the basics.
Types of Website Traffic
Before going into details on how to increase website traffic, you should know that there are six types of traffic:
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to unpaid visits coming from queries on search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.).
To obtain organic traffic, it is necessary to optimize the contents of the website with keywords that respond to the users’ intentions, and other SEO-related practices that we are going to explore later in more depth.
As a result, your website can rank for certain keywords, which will allow you to get organic visits.
Paid Traffic
This kind of traffic comes from paid ads, such as pay-per-click campaigns and ads on social networks.
One of the key differences between organic traffic and paid traffic is that to rank organically on the results page, it is necessary to work on different aspects of the website and engage in SEO off-page techniques, while paid traffic concentrates on the bidding of the ad per se.
Therefore, the results of an organic strategy are seen progressively, while the results of a paid strategy are perceived in a more immediate way.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic comes via links from other websites. Examples include link building, sponsored content, links from reports, and mentions in blogs that direct to your website.
Besides acquiring traffic through links, referral traffic allows us to increase our relevance in the eyes of search engines, which will help to position certain web pages and receive long-term traffic.
Direct Traffic
It is the traffic coming from users who already know your brand and are automatically directed to your website.
Social
This type of traffic comes from any type of social network, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Linked in. Social traffic is usually quite qualified because it comes from users who already follow your brand on social networks.
There is also email traffic, which is website traffic coming from links with the objective of giving you exposure in your marketing campaigns.
All these types of traffic are important, but the approach to increase visits to your website must be customized and strategic. It depends on factors such as the type of service you offer, your current budget, and current resources.
It is also necessary to analyze what your current traffic sources are and if any of them are failing. This can give you an idea of where you need to concentrate your efforts. Some of the most commonly used tools to do this are Google Analytics, SimilarWeb, Bitly, and Open Web Analytics.
With this information in mind, let’s take a look at key useful strategies to increase web traffic and, therefore, subscribers to your contact list.
The Importance of Increasing Website Traffic
As a business owner, you know that generating traffic to your website is essential. That’s because the more traffic you can generate, the more opportunity you have to encourage visitors to join your email list. More traffic means more potential customers and clients, leading to more sales and revenue.
But you might not realize just how important increasing website traffic can be. Below are several key reasons why focusing on generating more traffic to your site is essential.
1. Helps You Reach More People
The more people who visit your site, the greater your chances are of reaching your target audience. And the more people you reach, the greater your chances are of making a sale or landing a new client.
2. Boosts Your Search Engine Rankings
The higher your site ranks in search results, the easier it will be for potential customers and clients to find you online. And when they can easily find you online, they’re much more likely to do business with you.
3. Increases Sales and Revenue
When you increase traffic to your website, you are essentially increasing the number of potential customers who will see your products or services. This leads to more sales and revenue for your business.
4. Increases Brand Awareness
When people see your site popping up in search results or on social media, they’ll become familiar with your brand and what you offer. They’ll learn more about you because your brand is easier to gain access to.
5. Generates Leads
As you drive more traffic to your website, you are increasing the chances that someone will stumble on your content and become a lead or a subscriber to your email list. The more leads you have, the better your chances are of eventually converting them into paying customers.
Speaking of which, below are a few good tips for converting website traffic into useful leads or email subscribers.
Tips For Converting Site Traffic to Leads and Email Marketing Subscribers
Converting website traffic to leads and email marketing subscribers can be challenging, but here are some simple tips that can help.
1. Use Prominent Signup Forms
Your website should have numerous ways for visitors to convert. One of the most effective is email signup forms. Place these forms prominently on your website, such as above the fold, on high-traffic pages, or create pop-ups that appear before visitors exit a page. Make the process quick and easy by keeping the form simple and concise – the fewer fields there are to fill out, the more likely people will complete it.
2. Offer Value
If you’re going to ask for a site visitor’s contact information, make sure it’s in exchange for something they’ll find valuable. This could be a free eBook, whitepaper, or report relevant to their interests. It can also be a free tool, resource, or exclusive content for your subscribers.
Being transparent is essential, as it builds trust immediately and lets visitors know what they can expect when they fill out your forms.
3. Optimize for Conversion
Ensure your website is optimized for conversion by including clear and concise messaging, easy-to-use navigation, and strong CTAs. You should also ensure that your website’s design is clean and user-friendly, making it easy for visitors to take the desired action.
In addition, you improve your website’s conversion optimization when you implement the tips mentioned above. Bold signup forms, effective CTAs placed strategically around your websites, gated content, and persuasive web copy all work together to move visitors from a place of indecisiveness to a place of action.
4. Implement Regular A/B Tests
It can be tempting to set up your lead capture and email subscription forms and leave them be. However, if you want to get the most out of your efforts, you must keep testing.
Test different versions of your signup forms and CTAs to see what works best with your audience. Use A/B testing to try different approaches and see what converts the most visitors into leads or subscribers.
Here are some things you should test regularly:
- The placement of your lead capture forms
- The design of your lead capture forms
- The copy on your website and lead capture forms
- The offer you’re giving in exchange for an email address
- The thank-you page that people are directed to after filling out a form
How to Track Website Traffic
Before we get into the specifics of how to increase website traffic, let’s go over how to figure out where you already stand.
Website traffic can be tracked in several ways, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the most popular methods:
- Google Analytics. Probably the best — and most popular — web tracking tool is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides a wealth of data about website traffic, including how people found your site, what pages they viewed, how long they stayed on your site, and what actions they took while there. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and add a piece of code to your website.
- Bing Webmaster Tools. This is a free service from Bing that allows you to track your website traffic and improve your site’s performance in search results. To use Bing Webmaster Tools, sign up for a free account and add the code to your website. Once completed, you will see detailed reports on your website traffic, including where your visitors come from, what pages they visit, how long they stay on your site, and more.
- Web Server Logs. Every time someone visits your website, their computer sends a request to your web server. Your web server then records this request in a log file. You can analyze these log files to see how much traffic your website is getting and where it’s coming from. The downside of this method is that it can be time-consuming to set up and interpret the data.
- Social Media Analytics Tool. If you have a presence on social media for your business, you can use the built-in analytics tools provided by platforms like Meta Business Suite and Twitter to track website traffic from your social media pages.
- Third-Party Web Analytics Tools. Many commercial web analytics tools offer features beyond what’s available in Google Analytics, such as heat mapping and session recording. Some of these tools are free, while others require a monthly subscription fee. These include SimilarWeb, Bitly, and Open Web Analytics.
- Click Tracking Software. Various software programs, such as Clicky, allow you to track clicks on your website. This type of software can be helpful if you want to see which links your website visitors are clicking on the most (and where people are going after they click).
Digging into your data around web traffic is essential, both for knowing where you stand and what strategies are working out the best for your brand. With that in mind, let’s look at what those strategies might be, with unique ways to increase web traffic and bring more visitors to your page and more subscribers to your email contact list.
15 Ways to Increase Website Traffic
More traffic is always a good thing. Check out this list to increase website traffic and find some new ideas for helping make your site the place to be.
1. Work on Your Web Content
By working on the contents of the website, we begin the path to positioning ourselves in search engines, and indirectly, we can even attract referral traffic. The first three results in Google searches get 75.1% of all clicks. So invest in your SEO strategy to become one of those three.
Optimize Your Web Content with Relevant Keywords
The goal is to optimize pages for relevant keywords in the content, headers, URLs, titles, and descriptions of each page. Beforehand, we need to perform keyword research to find out which are the keywords used by our competitors, the number of searches and identify the right ones to optimize our pages with them.
Don’t forget voice search; it is becoming more and more popular. Check that your keywords and strategic content are optimized for voice search as well.
Create a Blog and be Strategic About it
Creating a blog can be very effective in driving both organic and referral traffic to your website. If you are strategic about it, you can acquire quality traffic and potential leads. In order to make this happen, keep the following points in mind:
- Develop topics optimized by informative keywords that respond to the user’s intention and interests.
- Create relevant and quality content to reduce the bounce rate and encourage sharing.
- Work on internal linking. This encourages the user to stay on the website for longer as they visit different pages.
- Publish frequently so that your site keeps reaching the attention of users looking for new information.
- Update outdated content. Search engines prefer updated content.
Get rid of duplicate content. Search engines don’t like when you have multiple posts on the same topic, so merge them into one master post instead.
Try Out Video Marketing
Produce original videos and then share them (along with site links) on YouTube and other social media channels.
Get in on Trending Topics
Use a site like Buzzsumo to find out what your competitors are talking about, and then create content that adds your own voice to the conversation.
2. Collaborate with Your Niche Network
Collaborating with people, media, or organizations within our niche can help us attract our target audience to our website.
Write Guest Posts
Publish original and authentic content on sites like Medium to reach a bigger audience and get them interested in what you’re doing.
Marc Schenker from The Glorious Company, a copywriting and content marketing agency, uses a guest-posting campaign to get valuable backlinks back to his site. Marc uses anchor text that corresponds to keywords his agency wants to rank for, such as “copywriting agency” or “content marketing agency.”
Using keywords effectively will help the content you place on these sites rank higher in search results, which increases the likelihood that searchers will click on the content, read it, and click the links leading back to your site.
Connect with Influencers
Invest in an influencer marketing strategy by having micro or nano influencers share your products, services, and content, sharing your brand with their fans.
Find Guest Contributors
Make it easy for others to write for your site or contribute to your content. They’ll almost certainly share that link with their own audience, which will increase exposure and cast a wider net for your efforts, bringing visits to your site. Try creating a co-branded opportunities page where people can contribute thoughts and input or pitch content for your site.
Run a Referral Program
Incentivize referrals so that your current happy customers bring others to your page.
3. Get Involved in Social Media
Stay active on social media to increase engagement and followers and promote content on your website. There are several ways to do this:
- Run contests and promotions. Run a giveaway that requires people to visit your website in order to submit an entry, offering shirts featuring cool designs as part of the prize. Showcase trendy designs to attract more participants and boost engagement.
- Join Facebook Groups. Aside from just general Facebook posts, join one or more groups to connect with a new audience of potential site visitors.
- Post to LinkedIn. Use LinkedIn as a platform to share original content, as well as company news and other relevant info.
- Become part of the community. Join communities like Reddit, Quora, and public Slack groups and find and engage with more of your target audience.
- Post a Twitter thread. Turn content into a shareable Twitter thread with links to your site throughout.
4. Pay for Ads
Advertising can be a great and effective way to get more people to visit your website. However, you must ensure that you target the right audience with your ad campaign. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of money on ads that don’t perform well.
When you are planning your ad campaign, take some time to think about the following:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are they looking for online?
- What kind of ads would they likely respond to?
Once you understand your target audience, you can start planning your ad campaign around that.
You can place ads to reach your target audience in a few different places. One option is Google Ads. Google Ads allows you to place ads on Google’s search results pages. When people search for keywords related to your business, your ad will appear next to the search results.
Another option is social media advertising. You can advertise your business on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social platforms. With social media advertising, you can target people based on their interests and demographics.
Once you know where to place your ads, you need to create an ad that will appeal to your target audience. Ensure that the headline and copy are attention-grabbing, relevant to what your audience is looking for and that the visual is appealing.
One thing to remember when paying for ads is that you will need to continuously monitor and adjust your campaigns to ensure that you are getting the most bang for your buck. You also need to track the results to determine whether or not it is worth the investment.
5. Work on Your Email Campaigns
By sending out regular emails to your subscribers, you can keep them updated on your website’s new products, services, and events. With email campaigns, you can build relationships with your customers and keep them returning to your website.
You can get more traffic from your email campaigns by doing the following:
- Include calls to action in your emails. Aside from just sharing information, use your emails as a place to encourage (and maybe even incentivize) visits to your site. Even though your emails are being sent to people who have already opted in to receive them, people share emails with their colleagues and friends who may not already be subscribed.
- Optimize your emails. Web traffic is crucial for email marketing and vice versa. Segmenting your audience and sending out a regular newsletter are two of many ways you can be sure to attract people to your content and links.
- Create automated email workflows. Connect with your audience when you’re most likely to grab their attention, such as when they first subscribe to your emails or when they abandon their cart. Using email automation tools comes at handy when you want to send such emails.
6. Get Reviews
Ask existing customers to leave reviews for your company through sites like Google and Yelp.
But don’t stop there. Do what Marko Maric from Clockify, a time-tracking software, does and tie this approach in with your SEO strategy. They read every customer review and tailor their content strategy to target the specific problems and use cases their customers are talking about.
By focusing on customer issues and needs, they’re able to ensure the content they create capitalizes on the right keywords and is informative and helpful to their audience.
7. Increase Brand Awareness
Increasing our brand recognition can help increase referrals and direct web traffic. Here are some of the methods to consider:
- Apply for awards. If you’re hitting it out of the park with content or products, apply for awards that increase brand recognition and authority.
- Publish press releases. Spread the news on company updates through syndicated sites like PRWeb and PR Newswire.
8. Test Your Website and Correct Technical Errors
Search engines, as well as visitors, prefer websites that work better and faster and that are more accessible to all users. Make sure your site is optimized and loads quickly, as that will create a pleasant user experience that can encourage repeat traffic.
Another aspect that may be hurting your positioning is broken links. It is important to evaluate if the website contains them and to fix them immediately. Most SEO tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs contain features for identifying broken links.
9. Start a Podcast
Podcasts are becoming an increasingly effective tool for outreach. Starting your podcast is a great way to attract new visitors and build up a loyal following of listeners who will keep coming back for more.
There are a few things you’ll need to do to get started:
- Choose a topic that you’re passionate about and that will be of interest to your target audience. Even better if this topic is related to your business interests and industry. This is essential to increase engagement and keep your audience coming back for more.
- Find a co-host or invite guest hosts who can add their insights and perspectives on the topics you discuss.
- Invest in some quality recording equipment so that your podcast sounds professional.z
- Edit your episodes carefully. Remove any dead air or bloopers to keep your show polished and professional.
- Promote your podcast on social media and other platforms where your target audience is active, or you can also hire a podcast promotion company. Make sure to include links back to your website so that people can easily find it and subscribe.
10. Create Surveys and Polls
Send surveys to your audience or create polls on various topics to help you comprise data that others will find useful. Creating surveys and polls is a great way to engage your audience and get feedback. It also enables you to understand what they want and needs from your website and brand.
Proprietary data is great because people can’t get it anywhere else, and they’ll not only share it but also link to where it came from in their content. When creating surveys, make sure to keep them concise. Only ask questions relevant to your topic, and be sure to offer incentives for survey completions, such as a discount or free shipping.
Creating a survey or poll is easy and only takes a few minutes. You can use a tool like Survey Monkey or Google Forms to easily create your survey or poll. Once you’ve created your survey, promote it to reach a wide audience. The more people who see it, the more likely you are to get responses.
Once the survey is over, analyze the results and use them to improve your website. This feedback can be invaluable in helping you figure out what works and what doesn’t work on your website and business in general.
11. Attend Conferences
Network in-person to put a human face to your brand and forge connections that encourage web visits. Attending conferences can help you in a few different ways:
- You’ll be able to network with potential collaborators and customers.
- You’ll learn about new trends and technologies in your industry.
- You’ll be able to build relationships with other attendees, which can lead to referral traffic or joint ventures down the road.
- You’ll increase your brand exposure which in turn improves the visibility of your website.
When choosing a conference to attend, be sure to select one that is relevant to your industry or niche. This will ensure that you’re networking with the right people and learning about the latest trends that could impact your business.
Also, choose a conference with a good reputation that is well-attended – this will help you get more of the right exposure for your website. Make sure to have business cards and flyers with your website’s URL so people can easily find your website. Better add QR Codes on your conference networking material. You can generate QR Codes using a tool that will help you efficiently network and share your website’s URL. Additionally, take the time to chat with people to set the foundation for ongoing communication.
12. Become a Benchmark
Becoming a reference in your sector will encourage your audience’s curiosity to visit your website. Try to make yourself known in your niche with these methods:
Put together a webinar
Organize webinars and host both the signup and the link on your site. Consider partnering up with another brand in the endeavor to tap into their audience too. However, make sure it’s a brand that has a similar or adjacent audience base as yours so the new leads you acquire are qualified and interested in what you have to offer.
Write an eBook
Publish an original ebook on your site and gate it, so people have to provide their contact information in order to download it. Make sure you include a box to opt-in to your emails or provide a disclaimer that explains they’ll automatically be opted-in. Promote it on your social channels so it gets more exposure.
13. Invest in SEO
As mentioned earlier, SEO is one of the best things you can do to drive traffic to your website. SEO can help you attract more visitors from search engines like Google and Bing, and when you rank higher in search results, you’ll get more clicks and traffic.
To improve your SEO, try the following:
- Start by optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions with your target keywords to help people find your site. These elements appear in search results, so make sure they’re clear and concise.
- Create quality content that is informative and contains strategically placed keywords. This will not only help people find your site, but it will also keep them coming back for more.
- Submit articles to directories and post comments on other blogs with links to your website. As long as you create quality content, these links will help improve your site’s authority and visibility in search results.
Spend time, money, and effort developing an SEO strategy and implementing it to become one of the high-ranking results on SERPs. If you find SEO to be difficult to understand and execute, you can always consider hiring an SEO consultant to take some of the work off of your hands.
14. Grab that Featured Snippet Spot
The featured snippet on Google — a.k.a. position zero — is a great place to be and a coveted spot on the SERP. While it may seem like an impossible task to achieve, there are a few things you can do to increase your chances.
To aim for Google’s Featured Snippet, start by understanding what types of queries it appears for. Then, create content that directly answers those queries. Your content must be well-researched and written in a clear, concise manner. Google wants to provide its users with the best possible answer to their queries, so ensure your content is up to par.
Secondly, use schema markup on your website to give Google more information about your content. This can help Google better understand your content and determine whether it’s a good fit for the featured snippet.
Finally, keep an eye on your competition. If they’re ranking in Google’s featured snippet for a certain keyword, that’s a good indication that you can too. So create your content around those keywords and give yourself a better chance of appearing in the featured snippet and driving more traffic to your website.
15. Focus on Link Building
One of the most effective ways to increase website traffic is to build links from other websites to your own. Link building improves your search engine ranking and can result in direct traffic from the referring website.
Link building can be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth it if you want to see your website traffic grow. Here are some tips for building links:
- Reach out to other websites in your industry. If you have something valuable to share with them, chances are they’ll be happy to link back to your site.
- Write guest blog posts on other websites. This is a great way to get exposure for your website and build links at the same time.
- Participate in online forums and include a link to your website in your signature. This will help people who are interested in what you have to say find your website easily.
- Submit your website to online directories so people can find you when they’re searching for websites in your industry.
- Make sure your website is well-linked internally. This means linking to other pages on your own site from each page of your website. This will not only help visitors navigate your site easily, but it will also help search engines index your pages more effectively, which can lead to higher rankings and more traffic over time.
- Use social media. It is a great way to get people talking about your website and linking to it. Be sure to post interesting content and share it with your followers.
Pick and choose a few things to try off this list to increase your website traffic, then tweak as you go based on what’s working. Then as your traffic grows, you can take targeted steps to turn that traffic into email growth — a win-win on all fronts!