No matter how effectively your brand’s website converts visitors into leads and leads into sales, it only benefits you if people are actually visiting your site. And that doesn’t always happen easily in the crowded field we call the internet. It takes considerable and ongoing effort—including some or all of the following ways to get more targeted traffic to your website.
How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website
- Pay attention to on-page search engine optimization (SEO) elements like keywording, page titles and meta descriptions, headlines, image alt tags, URL optimization, and so on. This is essential to being found via search engines and so important if you want to get more targeted traffic to your website. And don’t neglect technical SEO, either.
- Optimize your site for “near me” searches by focusing on local SEO and capturing traffic from voice search.
- Publish original, high-quality content on your blog that provides focused information that your target market is looking for. And remember: Content isn’t just written material; video, audio, and image content is helpful too.
- Share links to your content and other pages on your website from your social media accounts. Just remember to stay focused on delivering value to your audience and to share lots of content from other sources; people quickly stop paying attention to overly self-promotional social media pages.
- Include social sharing buttons prominently on your content pages so readers can easily share links to your site with their connections.
- Be proactive about getting quality backlinks to the content on your site.
- Send out links to your original content, coupons or other special offers, and product or service highlights to your opt-in mailing list via a newsletter or occasional marketing emails.
- Use paid ads on social media sites, which are affordable and offer useful targeting options, and they’re a great way to experiment with different messaging, images, pain points, audiences, etc.
- Try pay-per-click (PPC) or retargeting ads with Google AdWords or other search engines, but keep in mind that this generally requires a higher spend than paid ads on social sites to be successful.
- List your business in these online directories (and make sure all your business information is accurate and consistent on each one).
- Solicit guest post opportunities on blogs your target audience reads. This is a great way to build brand authority, reach new consumers, and get off-site links leading to your website.
- Write and distribute press releases when you have something genuinely newsworthy to share about your brand.
- Reach out to influencers in your industry or who are otherwise relevant to your target market and see if they’ll share a link, a review, a discount code, or something else that will get more targeted traffic to your website.
- Provide thoughtful, informative, accurate answers to user-submitted questions that are relevant to your brand on sites like Quora, including a link back to your website.
- Contact media outlets and try to get coverage for your brand. Offer to serve as an expert source for stories related to your industry in exchange for a link back to your website.
