Everybody would like more traffic to their website.
More traffic leads to more people seeing your products and services which can grow your bottom line but attracting quality traffic to your website can seem hard and elusive.
While there is no magic bullet, if you read on, you’ll learn some of the fundamentals of building traffic like starting with SEO and creating quality content as well as a handful of current trends that are proving successful for people looking to grow their traffic numbers.
Here are the main sections if you want to skip ahead:
- Start with Keyword Research
- Don’t Forget About On-Page SEO
- Regularly Create Quality Content
- Post on Google My Business
- Enhance your SERP Results with Schema Markup
- Write Guest Posts
- Create Video Content
- Get Interviewed On Podcasts
- Connect with Industry Influencers
- Consider “Expert Round-Up” Articles
- Use Email Newsletters
- Stay Active on Social Media
- Bonus Tip #1: Click-Through Rate Optimization
- Bonus Tip #2: Participate on Forums & Online Communities
Read on to learn 12+ ways to increase website traffic in 2022!
Start with Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation for increasing your website traffic. Knowing how to do keyword research will put you on the right track to showing up in more organic search results, which will ultimately lead to more traffic.
Keyword research is about finding the right combination of keyword intent (the why behind someone’s search), search volume (how many searches a month that keyword gets), and search competition (how hard it is to rank for a certain keyword) based on who else is already ranking for it.
If your website isn’t that well established, start off by targeting long-tail keywords – keywords that are 3 or more words in length. These types of keywords will be easier to rank for than head keywords, which are much broader and tend to rank very authoritative websites.
Don’t Forget About On-Page SEO
After you’ve done your research, it’s equally important that you use your keywords optimally on the page using good On-page SEO.
You’ll want to include your keyword in the page title and meta description, in the main heading and URL of the page, and throughout the body content of the page.
It’s also a good idea to make use of LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) in your sub-headings and body content to provide context to your subject matter. LSI keywords are words and phrases that relate to your primary keyword/topic and can help to signal to Google what the page is about.
Make your usage of the keyword natural as overdoing it might cause your page to be ignored by search engines (or worse).
Your primary objective is to write engaging content that people will enjoy while making sure your page is focused around the keyword you are targeting.
Regularly Create Quality Content
Once you’ve done your keyword research and understand how to do On-Page SEO, the next step is to create some quality content that people will enjoy reading.
As the saying goes, “Content is King”, and if you focus on creating quality content, you’ll likely find that your readers will share the content all on their own, which will contribute to your overall traffic numbers.
Quality content usually consists of a combination of impactful text with relevant links and statistics included, engaging graphs and infographics, and any other helpful and contextual media that helps educate and entertain the reader.
While you’ll most likely be creating content for your regular blog posts, consider creating “Evergreen” content that is relevant for long periods of time.
Examples of Evergreen content include:
- Tutorials
- Ultimate Guides
- FAQs
- Industry Resources
- Glossaries
- “History of” Articles
- Product reviews and round-ups
While this type of content requires more work and regular updating, it can serve as a cornerstone piece of content that drives traffic for months and years to come.
Post on Google My Business
Google My Business continues to be a source of information for those looking for local products and services.
If you’re a local business wanting to upgrade your traffic flow, don’t forget about using your Google My Business profile to help attract more visitors and gain increased visibility in search.
If your profile isn’t claimed, make sure you do that. Also, ensure that all your information is accurate and complete, whether you have one location or multiple locations.
It is recommended to post regularly on Google My Business, adding photos and updates 2-3 times a week, based on what’s happening in your business.
Finally, don’t forget about collecting reviews. Reviews continue to influence consumer behavior, creating credibility and trust in favor of the business.
Enhance your SERP Results with Schema Markup
Adding Schema Markup, a type of metadata that infers additional information to search engines can help create more attractive search results.
With the use of Schema Markup, you can add additional elements to your search results including reviews, sitelinks, FAQs and more.
These elements give searchers additional context that help influence their click.
Write Guest Posts
Guest posting on other relevant websites and blogs is a great way to get more traffic to your website, as well as improving your overall SEO in the process.
Guest posting to add credibility to your brand while improving your backlink profile in the process.
Look for relevant blogs in your industry that you can add value to with your expertise. It will also be easier to pitch a topic idea that they don’t currently have on their site.
Not all blogs are worth publishing on, however. Before you start writing your guest post, ensure that the website in question meets certain quality standards such as:
- Healthy monthly traffic numbers
- Strong domain trust score
- The website is regularly maintained and posts quality content
Ensuring the website you guest post on meets these quality standards will have the best ROI in terms of traffic, brand exposure, and overall SEO improvement.
Create Video Content
Not everyone likes to read, so why not take advantage of video content on the second most-visited website on the internet?
YouTube attracts billions of users every month and, apart from being a proven way to increase traffic, it can also help improve conversions.
Take it from Bunn, an Independent musician from Toronto who recently started a YouTube channel to document his journey becoming a full-time musician:
“YouTube changed everything for me. It is the very best vehicle for me to connect with my avatar. Prior to YouTube, I was experimenting with blogging and paid social ads. The quality and quantity of traffic, and ultimately conversions from that paid ads compared to what YouTube fostered was unparalleled.”
Scott Bunn
If writing content isn’t your thing, consider video marketing to improve your traffic levels.
Get Interviewed On Podcasts
Podcasts are bigger than ever. In fact, statistics show that 82.4% of podcast listeners spend more than seven hours weekly listening to podcasts.
While you could create your own podcast, that’s not necessary if you want to get more traffic to your site. All you need to do is find podcasts to interview you.
It’s simple really: find podcasts that are covering your niche and reach out about being interviewed.
I did this for a client of mine who is an Online Personal Trainer. I reached out to some podcasts in the fitness world and am in the process of securing some interviews.
Podcasters are happy to schedule in quality guests, and in return, you introduced to a new audience and more potential traffic.
Connect with Industry Influencers
Similar to guest posting and being interviewed on podcasts, connecting with influencers in your field is a great way to tap into a new audience and drum up some potential website traffic.
To connect with industry influencers, you should go where your audience is spending time and engage with what’s trending. That could be leaving a comment on a post or blog, or just following those who are active in your niche.
When the time comes when you have something interesting to offer or contribute, you’ll likely already be on their radar and can more easily broach the subject of working together in some capacity.
If you’re in more of a rush to connect with influencers in the field, there are platforms that exist like Upfluence where you can connect you to industry influencers faster but more than likely, you’ll have more success building relationships organically than through a paid service.
Consider “Expert Round-Up” Articles
Similar to taking the industry influencer approach, another way to connect with influencers in your industry is to conduct an “expert round-up” type of blog post.
This is where you interview industry experts and thought leaders about some burning question or topic in your industry and share their response on your blog.
More than likely, if you’ve found an interesting enough topic, the participants of the round-up will be more than happy to share your article with their audience and get your content in front of some new faces.
It’s a win-win for both parties. They gain some new brand awareness and industry credibility, and you gain some new consumer exposure.
Use Email Newsletters
Businesses that use emails as a marketing tool get 6 times more traffic than those that don’t but success with this will rely largely on building up your subscribers list.
One of the best ways to do this is to offer a “lead magnet” (some form of evergreen content) on your website that people can opt in to in exchange for their email address.
As you continue to develop your email subscriber list, you should make sure you’re offering up personalized, actionable, and scannable emails (that look good on mobile!) that leads readers to a relevant landing page or article.
Focus on providing easy to read and valuable content to your readers and the traffic will follow.
Stay Active on Social Media
Finally, regularly engage on your social media channels to increase your website traffic. This takes a little but it need not overwhelm.
You don’t have to be on every platform. Instead, choose the platforms that your audience uses the most. This could be LinkedIn if you’re more B2B or Instagram if you’re more B2C.
You should aim to be as engaging as possible, so be sure to use eye-catching visuals and engaging headlines as much as possible to draw attention to your posts.
Also, take advantage of #hashtags and @mentions when relevant to include other people and communities to your post.
The more you post quality stuff and connect with others, the more of a following you can build and the more potential traffic you’ll attract to your website.
Bonus Tip #1: Click-Through Rate Optimization
Your click-through-rate (CTR) is determined by how often people click on your search result when it appears in the search results.
What influences people to click on your result is how well you craft your titles and meta descriptions as these will most often translate into what people see on the search results page.
Crafting enticing and engaging titles and meta descriptions, as well as carefully selecting your URLs, can you give you a boost in clicks and traffic.
When writing your title and meta description tags, keep the sentiment positive and focus on the benefits of the topic instead of the specifics. That is, focus on the what and not the how and think about the emotional benefits the reader will get from checking out your content.
When in doubt, study the search results of the top ranking pages and see what’s working for them. Remember to speak to people’s emotions and not their logical brains and see how higher click-through-rates improve your website traffic.
Bonus Tip #2: Participate on Forums & Online Communities
We’ve already talked about engaging on social media as a means to drive more search traffic but spending some time on community forum and Q & A sites like Reddit and Quora can be a great place to connect with an audience looking for unique information.
Both of these sites see millions of visitors a day, and by offering your insights about a topic, your answers could be seen at the top of the SERPs, as pages from Quora and Reddit regularly appear at or near the top of the search results.
By engaging on sites like Quora and sharing your knowledge and expertise, you can reach a new audience and potentially drive fresh and relevant traffic to your site.
But be careful not to try and spam the system. If you do, you can get kicked off these sites, so make sure you’re sincere in offering help and information.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a variety of ways to increase your website traffic. While this list is by no means exhaustive, my goal was to focus on what I found to be the most current and effective strategies to increase website traffic in 2022.
At the end of the day, doing proper keyword research and creating content around that research will form the foundation of your success. From there, it’s a matter of knowing your audience and connecting with others in your industry to share your content more widely.
Whether you choose to create videos, go on podcasts, or develop a community on Reddit, remember that content is king, and by providing value to others will reap the greatest benefits.
With that said, I turn it over to you:
What are your top tips for increasing website traffic this year?
Leave a comment below and thanks for reading!
