As a marketer, you know the real struggle behind increasing and maintaining good web traffic.  

What is your website traffic?

The number of users who are surfing through your website is what makes up your site traffic. These users could be referred to as sessions or visits. The website traffic indicates your effectiveness at engaging your audience

Is higher traffic always good for your site? 

If you have high traffic but the number of purchases is less, then you need to work on hooking the relevant audience. The more targeted your audience is, the more ROI you can generate.   

77% of marketing ROI is generated through the segmented and targeted cohorts of your audience.  

Here’s an example to make you understand what is good traffic.

If your website traffic consists of let’s say 100 visitors a day. Now, out of these 100 visitors, 70 are looking forward to using the product and converting. So, the conversion rate of your site traffic is 70%. 

On the other hand, if you have 1000 visitors, and 70 out of these have converted. Then the conversion rate of 7% is achieved. 

Looking at the above two scenarios, it’s not only the higher website traffic is required, but also the right traffic that leads to increased conversions. 

How to drive traffic to your site (strategies explained)

The strategies that you would use to boost site traffic could be paid or free and could be in-depth SEO or other marketing activities. 

Here in the blog, you’ll come across various strategies you can implement to drive traffic to your site.

  1. Promote your website through viral giveaways, offers, etc
  2. Send push notifications to increase site visitors
  3. Content marketing
  4. Promoting your content
  5. Email marketing
  6. Engaging in online communities/forums
  7. Get your SEO done right

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1. Promote your website through giveaway contests, offers, etc 

Viral giveaways are events that businesses create to promote their brand through limited-time offers, gifts, free offerings, etc. It’s a great source to generate website traffic. 

 But, how do you generate traffic using giveaways? 

  • Build user-generated content (UGC)

Suppose you have a giveaway for your audience, let’s say for marketers, and you are providing free access to the marketing suite for a limited time. 

Then give an option to your participants to write about their giveaway experiences and share them on social media handles. 

The user-generated content could be anything from blog comments to an original post by users. 

Brands can use UGC by promoting it on their site and social media handles. It also adds up to the brand’s credibility as it’s your audience that’s speaking about you.

  • Set rules and guidelines for your giveaway participants

Giveaways are all about sharing it among the extended audience as much as you can. 

Some of the things you can do to increase the reach and shareability are:

a) Make mandatory actions such as tagging x number of people in the main post’s comment section.

b) Make people follow your brand’s social media handles, etc.

c) Start promoting your giveaway long before the live date and build your audience’s interests beforehand.  

  • How do you promote your giveaway contest? 
  • Create a blog post for contest announcements on your website with all the details about the program. And, use the same blog URL across all the platforms, so that any interaction that your audience makes, will reflect in your site traffic.
  • Sending an announcement to your email subscribers
  • Submit your giveaway to online directories. Here are some of the websites where you can submit your giveaway events.  
  • Contestchest.com
  • SweepstakesBible.com
  • Giveawaymonkey.com
  • Theprizefinder.com
  • TrueSweepstakes.com
  • SweepGrab.com

What tools can you use to create your giveaway programs?

Viral loops
KickoffLabs
RafflePress

2. Send push notifications to increase site visitors

Any strategy can not be fully executed without the use of marketing tools. We need tools to monitor and analyze the results. 

How you engage your users directly impacts your website traffic. The higher the user engagement is, the b

enter your traffic becomes. 

To boost user engagement, make push notifications a must-have part of your engagement marketing. 

How do push notifications boost your site traffic? 

Push notifications communicate straight to your user. You can send push notifications straight to your users’ desktop and mobile. This reduces the number of actions a user needs to take to revisit a website, and thus a direct source to increase site traffic.

Engaging the segmented audience drives CTRs​

  • While creating your push strategy, you can create your audience segments based on different set criteria (such as based on age, gender, location, last website visit date, and more). 
  • When you segment your audience and engage them with relevant updates and alerts, it increases your push click-through rates.
    The higher the CTRs you receive, the more users are added to your site’s traffic.

Create RSS-to-push notifications to automate traffic influx

  • Using a push notification tool, you can automate your content updates, product updates, alerts, sales, offers, etc. 
  • In addition to increasing your site traffic consistently, using the RSS-to-push feature will save you considerable time.
  • You can use Truepush to send unlimited push notifications to unlimited subscribers for free. 

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the most differentiating asset for brands. It establishes thought leadership through your/brand’s opinions. It builds relationships with your audience and defines how you want your brand to be seen by your customers and industries at large.

Create listicle blogs​​

  • Publish blogs that talk about the list of specific things for example 30 marketing tools, top 50 SEO tools, 55 best user engagement tools, and so on. 
  • Blogs that talk about numbers receive more clicks than otherwise.  If you look at HubSpot, you’ll notice how they publish listicle blogs. 
  • For example, “79 Marketing Tools and Software for Every Business & Budget”, and “The 16 Best Digital Marketing Tools in 2021”. 
  • The numbers act as clickbait for readers and thus one of the common practices to drive traffic to your website. 
  • Check it out for yourself. Type “SEO tools” in the Google search bar and see the result that shows on the first page.

Generate content that answers queries (Why, how, when, where, what, etc)

  • If you have a question, the first thing you do is search it on Google. 
  • You might do a Google search on what is the trending news today to what is engaging content? 
  • It could be any possible search query you can think of. 
  • Therefore, write content that answers the questions of your users.
  • The first thing you can do here is to do a simple Google search.
    For example, I searched for “ What are push notifications” and these are the results I found in suggestions.
  • If you look carefully, you will find that search result suggestions are the queries that people have asked in addition to my search query.  If you also cover answers to these relevant questions in your content, it will drive traffic to your site. 

Write long-form content

  • riting long-form content has higher visibility on search engines than shorter blogs. The longer content increases the dwell time of your site readers. 
  • Long-Form Content= More Dwell Time
  • Dwell time is one of the most important parameters of Google’s RankBrain algorithm which also considers long-form content for top search results.  
  • While this is an important metric – giving useful information while maintaining good on-page SEO is important too. You will read more about on-page SEO later in this blog.

Write headlines that receive more CTRs 

  • Higher CTR in the search results correlates with higher rankings. Your post headlines are the first thing that readers will see. Hence, you can directly understand the impact of post headlines on click-through rates. 
  • To write excellent headlines, use headline analyzer tools. These tools give you a score for a specific headline. 
  • For example, you can check your headline in the Sharethrough headlines analyzer
  • If your score is above 70, it’s considered to be a green signal for your headline. 
  • You can also use Advanced Marketing Institute, which analyzes your heading based on Emotional Marketing Value(EMV). If your score is above  40%, your headline is considered to have high emotional value and will result in more clicks. 

4. Promote your content

There are a lot of ways to promote content. Promoting content on various platforms helps in getting visibility from the right and large audience.  

Here’s what you can do to promote content?

Guest post submissions

Most of the websites have a ‘write for us’ section. You can submit your content to these sites and receive the benefits of high traffic and a boost in SEO. 

What you need to do is very simple?

  • Go to the Google search bar and type “Write for us marketing”. You’ll see a list of websites that are open to receiving guest posts on marketing and topics revolving around that. 
  • Reach out to these websites and submit your post based on their guidelines. 
  • In addition to building guest posts, you can also provide a ‘Write for us’ section on your site. There are authors who look for websites to build their writing profiles for free. 
  • In this way, your site will receive good content from authors that help in building traffic in the long run. 

Content Aggregator sites

Content aggregator sites are platforms that collect blogs, stories, news articles, etc from other websites and provide them to their audience. These platforms have higher traffic as users look forward to checking a variety of updates and information.

You can check out these aggregator websites mentioned below and post your content on them.

5. Email Marketing

  • Today, close to 3.9 billion people use email. This is almost half of the world’s population.
    With the higher availability of users on email, it has become necessary for brands to create their email marketing plans in order to generate high traffic. 

Build email list​​

To have a solid email strategy that drives traffic, it’s important to build your subscriber base first. This is how you can collect and build your email lists

a) Newsletter Subscription

  • Include the newsletter subscription section on your website’s home page. 
  • For example, the Search Engine Journal sends a daily newsletter to which you can subscribe
  • Based on the various categories you put on your subscription message, you can create segments of these users there themselves. 
  • For Example ‘ Job title’ is what differentiates these users. If someone writes ‘SEO manager’ in the job title, then you can push all the resources about SEO to those specific users.  

b) Use web pop-ups

Web pop-ups are still the most used method to build your email list.

  • In fact, more than 23 lakhs of mail ids were generated by Sumo users using Web pop-ups in less than two years. 
  • You can use a pop-up on top of your web pages and deliver a message that asks for email addresses. You can reach out to these subscribers, through your marketing campaigns and continuously engage them.

c) Provide downloadable resources

Have you ever noticed that some companies provide their useful resources only through downloadable content?

  • Create eBooks, guides, and other research-based blogs and give access to your site readers by collecting their mail IDs.  
  • Once you have a good subscriber base, it’s time to engage them. 

d) Run campaigns for a segmented audience​

  • According to HubSpot, marketers that use segmented emails, see an increase in revenue by 760%. 
  • To continuously drive traffic to your website, it’s important to engage your subscribers and users and bring them back to your site. 
  • However, sending marketing emails too frequently to your subscribers could result in increased unsubscription rates
  • Therefore, set a plan for your marketing campaigns.
  • For example, send campaigns on a weekly basis, bi-weekly basis, and monthly basis. 

e) Here is a quick checklist for your emails-

  • Build a subscriber list.
  • Choose your email marketing tool. Check this list of user engagement tools for that. 
  • Play around with your subject line. Make it catchy and prompt your audience to open your mail. 
  • Add social media sharing buttons to increase shareability through email.
  • Add Call to Action buttons.
  • Avoid bumping your subscribers with too many emails. 
  • Make sure your email template has unsubscription links so that you avoid engaging unsubscribers in the next campaigns you send.
  • Push all your blogs, and case studies updates through email marketing.  

6. Engage in online groups

  • Online communities are the places where audiences from varied demographics become part of the niche and in-depth discussions.
  • Although it takes time to become an active member of a community, however, once done, it can generate high amounts of traffic to your site as people are continuously checking these groups and land on your website through these discussions. 

You can start with these groups:

Quora groups

  • Quora is an important place for marketers (or your audience) to hang around and become a part of discussions.
  • You must have noticed if you put any query on search engines, some of the queries that show up are from Quora.  It has close to 600 million monthly visitors.
  • Quora works on the upvoting system where higher upvoted answers are visible on top. 
  • To search for your preferred topics, type in a keyword, for example, ‘Digital marketing’ in the search URL.
  • You can see above the suggested topics and spaces for the specific search query. These pages have huge followerships and are the best place to start the engagement. You can put comments and engage with people there. 
  • Also, make sure to write answers that cover the topic in detail and not go into direct promotions. It’s all about creating engaging and useful discussions that yield conversions. 
  • You can check out this detailed guide on Quora for marketing.

Facebook Groups

  • Facebook is yet another not-to-miss group that has the potential to drive visitors to your site.  
  • There are over 1.8 billion people who use Facebook groups today and there are millions of Facebook groups. 
  • You can search for Facebook groups by typing relevant keywords. 
  • For example, if you type in ‘digital marketing’ in the search result, Facebook will show you all the groups that fall under the same category. 
  • Click on search all groups for ‘digital marketing’  (as shown in the image below) and you should see all the relevant groups. 
  • Send a request to be a part of these groups and follow group guidelines to engage with your target audience here.   

Reddit groups

  • Reddit has been expanding ever since its launch in 2005. In the past 15 years, Reddit has grown to a community of more than 1.80 billion monthly users, or ‘Redditors’ as we call them. 
  • In Reddit groups, the members can share links and relevant resources. All the members can go to the specific landing page through these groups. 
  • In order to drive traffic to your site, you need to be consistent in making discussions and be active.

How do you search for your niche groups on Reddit? 

  • Reddit has ‘subreddits’ which are nothing but topics/categories. 
  • And subreddits have unique URLs: https://reddit.com/r/subreddit
  • You can search for relevant topics using the URL shared above. 
  • For example, if I want to be a part of the SEO community, I’ll search for https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/  and become a part of the discussions present in it. 
  • You can join the groups and share your useful blogs and other resources that Redditors can click on and bring to your site. 
  • Here are some quick tips for posting on Reddit:
    • First, become a member of the group
    • Post original content and engage in a genuine way.
    • Don’t use a fake account
    • Don’t use spam links. 

7. Get your SEO done right

  • Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to drive traffic that’s consistent. 
  • There are two ways you can use SEO to build your site traffic: Off-page SEO and On-page SEO.
    • Off-page SEO
  • Off-page SEO is all about building your site presence through external activities other than on the website.  Off-page SEO could include building strategic backlinks for your site, doing PR promotions, etc. 
    • On-page SEO
  • Your website’s on-page SEO covers all the SEO techniques you implement on your web pages to improve your site ranking. Majorly, on-page SEO deals with optimizing your site’s content. For example, doing competitor keyword research, optimizing meta titles, etc. 
  • Here, we will be focusing on keyword optimization that enhances your site’s visibility in SERPs and thus the traffic. 
  • Here’s how you can use off-page SEO to increase your site traffic:

Work on building website backlinks

  • It is not only enough to have good content present on your site. You need to find ways to increase the reach of these existing blogs and resources. 
  • Link building is an effective way to increase website traffic. Through link building, you can reach out to relevant websites and ask for a backlink to your resources like blogs, case studies, etc.
  • If Page A links to Page B, then link juice “flows” from Page A to Page B and that helps Page B rank higher on Google.
  • Building backlinks to your site helps in maintaining a good domain score. Domain score shows how likely it is for your website to show up in search results. 
  • The higher your domain authority is, the more websites will prefer to backlink your content.
  • A domain score of 40-50 is considered to be an average score, a score between 50-60 is considered to be good, and anything above 60 is considered excellent.
  • Getting backlinks from external resources contributes to your site traffic. Also, it passes on the link juice. Link juice is a term that measures how much SEO value a backlink passes to the backlinked URL.

Now, what can you do to gain more backlinks?


a) Find out the blogs and URLs backlinking to your competitors.

Let me give you an example using the most used SEO tool- Ahrefs.

  • Go to Ahrefs, and in the ‘Site Explorer’ option, enter the name of your competitor.
  • For example, I have put HubSpot in the search URL .

b) After the page loads, click on ‘Backlink’ on the left side of the panel.

  •  You will be able to see the lists of URLs that have backlinked your competitor as shown in the below screenshot.
  • Export the list using the export option on the page (highlighted with the arrow in the image above.) 

c) Once you have the list of URLs, you can reach out to the authors or marketing stakeholders to ask for a backlink. You can use ContactOut or VoilaNorbert to generate mail ids.

Here is an example of a mail campaign for backlinking. 

Leveraging the power of PR platforms 

  • PR platforms are often overlooked when it comes to building your site traffic. Press release distribution platforms have good traffic as companies from around the world release their trending updates. 
  • In addition to driving your website traffic, PR publishing also builds your brand reputation as these platforms establish your brand as an industry expert. 

What to consider while creating your PR? 

a) Create your own PR plan: Have a goal in your mind and set it for the right audience.

For example, is your goal to increase the plugin downloads through PR? or, to get more sign-ups, etc?   

b) Choose the right media outlets: It’s important to choose the distribution channels that publish the PR in your audience’s geolocation.
For example, if you are looking to bring in the US audience to your site, then focus on PR platforms that publish the news in the US region.

c) Set up the PR platforms list and necessary material: Once you are done collecting the PR platforms, create its list and start working on your PR content.

Some of the necessary material you would need to pitch the publishers:

    • PR document
    • High-resolution images of your products
    • Contact information
    • Links to include (these are the links that readers can use to navigate between your site and press release platform.
  • d) Create a perfect email pitch:
  • Once you have all the required collateral, mail these PR platforms asking for the publishing. Here’s an example of email pitching to media platforms.  
  • If you look at the above PR pitch, you’ll see it’s to the point and takes less time to read. You can set up the PR pitch structure as follows:

    – Quick introduction to your brand. 
  • -Talk about the new release/updates.
  • -Insert necessary links to homage, product page, sign-up page, etc.
  • Where can you submit your PR? 
  • Free PR distribution platforms:
  • Express Press Release
    For Press Release
    PRLog
    Prsync
    Newswire Today
  • Paid PR distribution platforms:
  • GlobeNewswire
    PR Newswire
    Business Wire
    Linking News
  • Use on-page SEO methods to boost traffic:
    • Target topics with higher search volume keywords

  • While preparing your marketing content, include keywords with high search volume. High search volume keywords are the phrases or queries that people search in search engines globally.
  • The higher the search volume for a keyword is, the more visibility you can gain in a search engine.

How do you find keywords with high search volume? 

a) Go to Ahrefs

b) Click on ‘Keywords Explorer’ and enter the keywords in the space provided. 

c) Once you click on the search icon, you’ll see various KPIs like keyword difficulty, volume, CPC, etc.

d) Search for various keywords and pick the one with higher search volume and lower keyword difficulty.

Include long-tail keywords in your content

Long-tail keywords are keywords with low search volumes, but higher conversion rates. It’s easier to rank low search volume keywords on SERP than the higher ones. 

How do you find long-tail keywords?

a) Through Google search:
Enter the topic you want to search for and let Google provide you with more suggestions. (as I have explained in an example in the beginning.)
Pick up these topics and find the relevant ones matching with your domain and write content for these queries.

b) Through ‘People Also Ask’ questions:
Do a Google search for your query, for example, ‘push notifications’.

  • Once you scroll down, you’ll be able to see the ‘People also ask’ section as shown above. Make a list of these queries and write it on your site. 

Consider Keyword gaps

There are keywords that your competitors rank for. In order to rank for your competitor’s high-ranking keywords, you can do the following:

a) Find out what are the keywords that your website ranks for.

b) Find out the keywords your competitor’s website ranks for.

d) Find the missing keywords from your competitors that your website doesn’t rank for.

e) Including missing keywords and optimising it to start ranking and gaining visibility.

This is how you can do it using Ahrefs:

a) Go to Ahrefs and click on ‘Site Explorer’ on the top. 

b) On the left side menu, click on ‘content gap’.

c) Enter the domain you want to compare with your URL.

d) Click on ‘show keywords’ and you’ll be able to see keywords that competing domains rank for and you need to work on it.  

  • Ahrefs Keyword Explorer (PAID)
  • Google Keyword Planner (FREE)
  • UberSuggest (FREE)
  • Keyword Sheeter (FREE)
  • SEMrush (PAID)

Conclusion

Driving traffic to your website needs countless activities to be worked upon. However, the strategies I have mentioned above are the major ones without investing hefty amounts. It’s a continuous process to build your site traffic. Gradually, using these strategies, you’ll notice your website traffic going up within two to three months.  

Let me know which strategy worked best for you?