Whether you’re a B2B business owner trying to grow your own business, a marketer aiming to improve brand awareness for your clients, or even just a foodie wanting to get more eyeballs on your personal food review blog, you might be asking yourself the following question:
“How do I generate more traffic to my website?”
It’s an age-old question that has been answered time and time again by various blogs and websites with all sorts of large lists and videos telling you the best ways to grow your traffic.
Yet, I’ve noticed over the years that most of this content tends to lack substance regarding how to specifically approach these large lists of different methods.
Therefore, I’ve compiled a list of the best ways to increase your website traffic while also sharing some best practices we utilize here at Nectafy to help ensure we’re providing the best results for all of our clients.
Here are the 5 best ways to increase your website traffic:
1. Growth Content
You might be familiar with the term “content marketing,” or even “growth hacking” for that matter, but chances are you’ve probably never heard the term “growth content” before.
That’s because we made it up! (with good reason)
In a nutshell, growth content is a data-backed approach to creating quality content for your website that then helps drive organic traffic and customer leads to the website.
Growth content comprises keyword research, content planning, and content writing, all revolving around solving the questions and problems your target audience might have across their day-to-day work activities.
Think of it as a more systematic approach to content marketing, which is why we felt the need to create our own term out of it!
The screenshot below shows a stellar example of growth content in use, with one of our clients recently launching their website earlier this year and using it as the only way to grow their organic traffic over the past six months:
They started with an initial amount of 600 organic sessions when they first launched their site in March and recently eclipsed 19K for September.
That’s an increase of 18,400 organic sessions (+3,066%)!
That’s growth of over 18K organic sessions within six months - all driven by growth content!
So, how can you incorporate growth content onto your own website? Check out this step-by-step guide to plan and create growth content on your website.
Don’t have enough time to plan and write your own content? Talk to us about how Nectafy can help your website with growth content!
2. Email Newsletters
If you already have a solid flow or organic traffic coming to your website, you might want to consider further expanding your monthly traffic potential through the use of email newsletters.
Email newsletters are a great way to bring back more traffic to your website, as well as a good way to encourage first-time visitors to convert if they’re not yet willing to schedule a demo or get in touch with you directly.
To start the process of creating your email newsletter, you could do something as simple as putting a form on your website that says “Enter your email to subscribe to our newsletter” and asking your site visitors to submit their email addresses to subscribe.
As people come to your site and begin to subscribe, think about what type of email content your target audience would want to see in a newsletter and test out a few ideas by sending them to your initial list of subscribers!
Here’s an example of a subscription form we use on the Nectafy website to help us gain subscribers to our own newsletter (and other gated content):
For more information on email newsletters, check out this article we did in collaboration with The Daily Carnage, where they discuss how they developed their email newsletter.
3. Social Media Promotion
Think about the different social media platforms that your target audience tends to use, and try to meet them on these platforms to help drive more traffic back to your website.
Here are a few helpful tips to get you started with social media promotion:
- Personalize each post depending on which platform you’re posting to (ex. LinkedIn has a specific tone for its content vs. Facebook or Twitter)
- Encourage responses to each post by asking questions to drive more engagement and create mini-forums on topics that pertain to your target audience (This is also helpful for gathering research on your target audience.)
- Reply to other posts/questions by referencing content on your website and including a link they can follow for more information
4. Refresh Older Content
Does your site have any blog posts or pages that saw spikes in organic traffic that have since dwindled in monthly traffic? If so, those pages more than likely need a content refresh!
Content refreshes are a constant factor across most of our clients, as older content tends to decay over time and lose keyword rankings of former glory. Here’s a case study that details how we refreshed older content from one of our clients that led to an improvement in their website traffic.
More recently, here’s a screenshot of a single blog post’s organic performance from another client that showcases the power of refreshing older content:
As you can see from the chart, refreshing older content is a great way to build more traffic to your website, with our refreshed content now reaching new heights of traffic after its decline throughout the end of 2020.
5. Optimize Website Performance
One thing that’s always been important for driving more traffic to websites is their load time and overall site speed. This is especially true for sites that are trying to rank and bring in organic traffic from Google.
Recently, Google has rolled out a new update to its algorithm, called the Page Experience Update, that places even further importance on website performance and uses a list of metrics to help measure it, known as Core Web vitals.
These Core Web Vitals help determine what the typical user experience is like for people visiting your website and are now being used as a key ranking factor for Google search results.
If you’re looking to improve traffic to your site, especially organic traffic, you need to keep your site performance in mind.
Here’s a screenshot of one of our client’s monthly organic performance that highlights the power of optimizing website performance:
This chart clearly shows the benefit of optimizing your site speed, with our client’s organic sessions now reaching new all-time highs after optimizing their site performance!
Here’s a great post that dives more into this topic and provides specific ways you can discover to improve your website performance.
Starting Your Traffic Growth Journey
Keep in mind, there are plenty of additional ways to increase traffic to your site, but what’s most important is making sure the tactics you choose align with the needs and wants of your target audience.
If you’re interested in learning more about growth content, schedule some time with our founder, Lance, to see how Nectafy can help bring more traffic to your website.
