27 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

IN ADDITION TO MY BLOG, I’M ALSO A CONTRIBUTOR FOR ENTREPRENEUR AND THRIVE GLOBAL | CHECK THEM OUT & KEEP READING!

Many businesses struggle to come up with new ways to increase their website traffic. There is a lot of misinformation online on how to attract more website visitors, which can lead to using outdated strategies and not seeing positive results.

If you are looking to increase your website traffic with both organic and paid ways, here are 27 ways proven to yield results, as originally discussed by Brian Dean of Backlinko.

The “Upside Down” Guest Post

Truth be told, when most people read guest posts, they would normally skip the author bio section. And we can’t blame them, as most author bio boxes are buried at the bottom of the page.

This poses a problem since readers won’t go and visit your website. Fortunately, an “upside-down” guest post does the trick, aside from other ways to get backlinks in your blog.

First, write a guest post as you normally would, then include “helpful resource” sections throughout your guest post – these sections link to 2-3 helpful resources on the topic you just covered, strategically linking one of your contents as an article to check out.

Overhauling Old Blog Posts

To increase the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and drive traffic, you can update your old content and give yourself an improved freshness score. The truth is, we are more likely to click on articles that are recently published.

First, find a post on your site that is already out of date. If you’re a digital marketing agency, SEO and algorithm guides would need updates every other month or so. Update and improve the posts, sprinkling in new techniques and strategies or eliminating ones that don’t work anymore.

Updating your article will increase the click-through rate and will make it more appealing (telling Google that it is a better resource that should rank higher).

Use “Click to Tweet” Links

Twitter is has a massive audience, making it a great platform for advertising products and services, or sharing your content. According to Statista, Twitter has amassed more than 330 million active monthly users.

This is one of the best ways to get more shares from your content. Find something worth tweeting in your content – this can be a bite-sized tip, strategy, quote, or statistic. Just head over to ClickToTweet.com and write the message that you want others to share in the box. A custom link will be provided, and whoever clicks on it on your blog post will have the message already pre-written to their Twitter status box for easy sharing.

Optimize Your Content With LSI Keywords

It is no secret that SEO is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. That said, most old-school strategies simply do not work anymore (and that is largely because Google’s Hummingbird algorithm changed everything about SEO).

Now, instead of only looking at keywords, Google now understands topics, affecting 90% of all searches. The question is, how do you make sure Google understands your content’s topics?

It’s through Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are words and phrases related to your target keyword.

For example, let’s say you are writing a post about social media. Your LSI keywords would be words and phrases like:

• Facebook page
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Pinterest
• Viral content

And when Google sees these LSI keywords in your content, they say: “Great. This content is definitely about social media”.

So how do you find these LSI keywords? A great free tool is LSI Graph. This tool spits out dozens of LSI keywords related to your topic that you can use in your post.

Get More Traffic From Your Blog Posts With “Content Transformation”

Content transformation is simple. For example, you can convert one of your blog posts to other formats such as e-books, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more. Find one of your blog’s most popular blog posts and convert it to a video format. For example, if your chosen format is video, post it on social media such as YouTube, app, view, watch, and more. That way you can get more traffic from the web.

Go On Podcasts

Podcasts are exploding. Audio content was not seen as direct SEO assets until 2019 when Google announced that podcasts would already be indexed (meaning they would begin to appear in search results).

In fact, one survey found that 26% of Americans regularly listen to podcasts. While this doesn’t mean you should grab a mic and start a podcast, you should consider guesting on other people’s podcasts.

Promote Your Site With Blogger Outreach

So you just published an awesome piece of content. Now what? It’s time to promote it with blogger outreach. Take note that, in modern SEO, link-building is the key to being discovered and indexed in search engines.

Blogger outreach will help you leverage the credibility of the linking site. According to studies, 77% of internet users read blogs and 61% of consumers in the U.S. actually made a purchase after reading recommendations on a blog.

Here are some steps you need to take for an effective blogger outreach strategy:

• Specify your goals

For example, if your goal is to bring more traffic to your product or landing page, you can reach out to authoritative influencers and ask them to share your content through social media. But if you want to rank higher on Google’s search results, then you should ask for a link from one of their posts. Learning the differences between a share, link, or guest post is all there is to this step.

• Look for influencers

Targeting the right influencers is one of the keys to successful blogger outreach. You can create a simple spreadsheet, labeling the top row with the name, email address, URL, status, and notes. You can change the terms as you like, as long as you fill in the same information. If your specific goal is to generate more shares, you need to make sure that your target influencers have substantial social reach.

• Reach out in a personal way

Now that you have identified your key influencers, the next step is to reach out to them in a personal and friendly way. Take note that key influencers deserve something more than generic-looking emails. If you want to be taken seriously by influencers, you need an email outreach strategy that centers on relationship-building. You need to approach them as a friend – someone who wants to form a close and mutually beneficial working relationship.

The Content Relaunch Strategy

This is similar to overhauling blog posts, but instead of just improving your content, you completely relaunch it – treating your new and improved content like a brand new post. You can start by reading, analyzing the top 10 results that pop up for your focus keyword to understand and see what is unique in your top-ranking content and why it is performing well. After relaunching your post, don’t forget to focus on building links and promoting your content.

Create Content That Appeals to Influencers

If you want influential people to share your content, you need to write about topics that appeal directly to them. A study by BrightLocal found that 85% of people trust online reviews just as much as they trust personal recommendations.

The involvement of an influencer can give your brand a human touch. An influencer’s endorsement builds trust for your brand in the minds of the influencer’s followers.

Share Videos on Linkedin

Linkedin is growing fast, with the number of people sharing stuff on Linkedin increasing significantly in the past few years. Linkedin’s audience is inherently less receptive to the whimsy of Facebook or Instagram. Users usually go there with one of two clear purposes:

• Discover relevant content that helps their career
• Create and share content with the intent of making themselves more visible to prospective employers or business partners

Just like you target certain keywords when optimizing a website, you need to do the same when optimizing your LinkedIn and give considerable thought to user intent when approaching the SEO of a website.

Host a Giveaway Contest

People love free stuff, and this comes as no surprise. What might surprise you is how you can use free stuff to get more traffic. To enter the contest, people need to enter their email addresses (which you then add to your email list). Plus you can incentivize people to share your contest with their friends. 

Add “Share Triggers” To Your Content

Content largely succeeds or fails based on one factor: whether or not it has share triggers.

Share triggers are things you include in your content that push people to share it. A lot of these principles were first discovered by behavioral scientists like Dr. Jonah Berger, Dr. Katherine Milkman, and Jure Leskovec. And they’ve proven in the lab what I discovered through trial-and-error:

When you include Share Triggers in your content, people are significantly more likely to share and link to it.

Retarget Visitors With Facebook Ads

Let’s face it, Facebook ads are getting expensive. Fortunately, one little “loophole” that can help you get laser-targeted visitors is retargeting.

First, create a Facebook ad that sends people to a blog post. Then target people that have visited your site in the last month or two. Finally, run the ad. And you’ll probably find that your CPC is dirt cheap vs. most other types of advertising (like Google Adwords). 

Reduce Your Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate damages your site’s page views and conversions, and it can even hurt your SEO. In fact, thanks to Google’s RankBrain algorithm, bounce rate is now a super important ranking signal.

The good news is that improving your bounce rate is insanely easy. A while back, BuzzSumo analyzed a million articles. They wanted to see which types of content worked best. And they found that long-form content gets more shares and backlinks than short posts (<1,000 words). In fact, long content (>3k words) gets an average of 208% more shares than short articles.

Optimize for Google’s Mobile-First Index

As you might have heard, Google rolled out their “Mobile-First Index”. This update means that Google now counts the mobile version of your site first, and largely ignoring the desktop version of your site.

You can find out if your site is mobile optimized by Google’s own Mobile-Friendly Test. This tool tells you if your site is optimized properly for mobile devices while giving you specific recommendations to make your site better.

Create an Active Youtube Channel

As the second most popular website on the planet (only behind Google), YouTube has to be on your radar screen if you want to drive more traffic to your website.

Publish Viral Content

While there is no formula for creating content that can go viral, here are three things you can do to increase the odds of your content spreading like wildfire.

• Viral content tends to contain lots of visuals.

These visuals can be a bunch of images. Or an infographic. Or a video. The type of image doesn’t matter all that much. The important thing is that you use images in your content, as industry studies show that image-rich content gets 90%+ more social shares vs. content that’s all text.

• Viral content tends to have a high “utility”.

This simply means that your content is super useful in some way, as research shows that extremely practical content has a very high chance of going viral.

• Viral content needs an initial “push” to get going.

Already-viral website content can get more visitors when shared to other sites like Reddit.

Promote Blog Posts and Videos on Quuu

Quuu Promote is a dead-simple way to get people to promote your content on social media.

All you need to do is submit your best content and they’ll ask influencers to share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

Republish Old Articles on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an awesome place to syndicate your content. While some of your articles may have done well, there are thousands of people that can benefit from it but just hadn’t seen it yet. Try republishing your own content as a Linkedin article.

​​Use a “Question Analyzer” To Create Insanely Useful Content

This strategy is an awesome way to make your content better. All you need to do is find questions that your target audience asks online, and answer those questions in your content.

First, use a tool like Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer or Answer the Public to find questions that people ask. Then, either create an entire post to answer these questions or incorporate the answers into your content.

Add Enticing Content To Social Media Posts

Sharing content on social media without giving people any reason to click is one mistake a lot of people make. Adding content to your posts can dramatically increase your CTR.

For example, instead of just tweeting the link to your article, you can provide a bulleted list of things they would find in the article.

Adding content to your posts can dramatically increase your CTR

If you want more traffic from Google, you do not need higher rankings. Instead, you can focus on improving your click-through-rate (CTR).

For example, let’s say you rank #3 for your target keyword. And your CTR is 4%, and you got to double that CTR to 8% – you just doubled your organic traffic without improving your rankings.

CTR is now an important ranking signal in Google’s algorithm. So when you get a higher CTR, you will also improve your search engine rankings.

Here are a few tips that work great in improving your CTR:

• Add a number to your title (like “21” or “98%”)
• Write a compelling meta description
• Test different titles and see which one gets the best CTR
• Use titles that are highly emotional
• Include your keyword in your URL

Publish More List Posts

There is no way around it. When it comes to driving traffic to your website, list posts work great. As previously mentioned, BuzzSumo recently analyzed a million articles, and it showed that list posts got 6x more shares than how-to posts (and 40x more shares than infographics).

Steal Your Competitors’ Traffic Sources

Did you know you can see all of your competitors’ top traffic sources for free with SimilarWeb? Not only does it show you a sweet overview of a site’s traffic, but also exactly where they get that traffic from.

Drive Traffic To Your Website From Forums

Forums are a very underrated traffic source. When you become an active, respected member of a forum, you’ve built a funnel that can bring people back to your site. While SEO and social media are both great ways to get traffic, they take time to kick in. One way to give your traffic a headstart is to become an active member of a marketing forum.

​​Syndicate Your Content on Medium

Medium.com is one of the best places to syndicate your best stuff. All you need to do is repost your content (word-for-word) on Medium. Then, once your post is live, share it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

And when Medium sees that people are engaging with your post, they’ll start to promote it within their platform.

By taking these steps, you can expect to see an increase in website traffic over time. While many of these tactics can provide instant gratification, others will take more time and patience. Keep pushing forward by trying a variety of methods and analyzing the results.

Originally posted and discussed by Brian Dean of Backlinko.