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A ground-breaking 2019 study from the experts at BrightEdge found that approximately 53% of website traffic comes via organic search. Understandably, brands across B2C and B2B have taken this as a sign to invest in content creation and SEO.
But this also means roughly half of your visitors come in through other sources, such as social media, paid advertising, or direct traffic. Given how crowded and prone to change the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) are, it’s crucial that brands invest in a holistic approach to bringing in web traffic.
Business owners and marketing departments need to ensure that they optimize all website traffic channels, not just organic search.
In this blog post, we’ll guide you through a number of strategies proven to increase your website traffic. From a high-level perspective, these strategies fall into four main chapters:
- Chapter I: Understanding Your Audience and Building Engagement
- Chapter II: Content Marketing
- Chapter III: SEO Strategies
- Chapter IV: Content Distribution
But before we get started, let’s take a quick look at the marketing channels you can use to funnel traffic to your website.
Types of Website Traffic as Defined by Google Analytics
If you want to learn about website traffic types, there’s no better source than the biggest search engine itself: Google. The tech giant gives all owners of websites indexed by its search engine access to Google Analytics (GA)—a comprehensive platform that provides data about your website’s performance.
Google Analytics tracks a number of different channels that contribute traffic to websites. Some of the most popular of these include:
- Organic Search Traffic: Organic Search traffic originates from visitors finding your site through search engines like Google or Bing.
- Direct Traffic: Direct traffic comes from people who directly type your website’s URL into their browser.
- Referral Traffic: Referral traffic is from visitors who click on a link to your website from another site.
- Social Traffic: Social traffic stems from people who click on a link to your website from a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter.
- Email Traffic: Email traffic originates from people who click on a link to your website in an email.
- Paid Search Traffic: Paid Search traffic comes from people who click on an ad for your website displayed on a search engine results page.
- Display Traffic: Display traffic is from people who see your website’s ads on other websites or in apps.
In addition to GA, there are a number of other platforms you can use to track how visitors reach your website. Traffic analytics platforms like SimilarWeb are great for this, as well as SEO tools like Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
What Factors Affect Website Traffic?
There are myriad factors that influence your website traffic, some of which are under your control and others which aren’t. On the one hand, you can optimize your website structure, site speed, and content quality to perform better in the SERPs. You can also invest in content distribution to make sure your content gets in front of as many people as possible.
On the other hand, there are many factors that influence website traffic that are outside of your control. These include things like changes to search engine and social media algorithms, consumer interest in your product or service, and the emergence of disruptive technology like artificial intelligence.
To make the most of what you can control, here are 21 strategies and tips for increasing your website traffic in 2024.
21 Strategies to Increase Website Traffic in 2024
In an ever-changing digital world, staying ahead with effective strategies to drive website traffic is critical. With increased competition and smarter algorithms, adapting to new trends and refining time-tested methods are essential.
This section will explore 21 actionable ways to boost your website traffic, divided into four easy-to-follow chapters.
Let’s chart a course towards greater online visibility and success in 2024.
Chapter I: Understanding Your Audience and Building Engagement
The first step towards building engagement and increasing website traffic is to achieve an in-depth understanding of your audience.
Here are five strategies that will help you understand your audience and lay the foundation for stronger website traffic building.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
At the heart of every successful traffic enhancement endeavor lies a clearly defined target audience. This isn’t just about knowing demographics; it’s about understanding motivations, pain points, and aspirations.
There are many ways to identify your target audience. Some of the most common methods include:
- Surveys: Ask your current customers and prospects about their demographics, psychographics, and behavioral characteristics.
- Focus groups: Bring together a small group of your target audience to discuss their needs and interests.
- Customer personas: Create fictional representations of your ideal customers.
- Web analytics: Track the demographics, psychographics, and behavioral characteristics of your website visitors.
You can also use CRM data from current and past customers, your social media following, and analytics tools to confirm your ideal audience. This truly is the foundation of a solid marketing strategy—research from the Content Marketing Institute reveals that 96% of marketers credit audience identification as a crucial factor for their success.
2. Create User Personas
User personas, also known as customer personas, are fictional representations of your ideal customers, created based on market research and real data about your existing customers. They help in identifying and understanding the needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals of your target audience.
Don’t let the fictitious part fool you—personas are built on data from the affinities, behaviors, and goals of real people.
User personas help inform all the marketing content you use, ensuring that it aligns with user intent, targets the right keywords, and provides as much value as possible.
3. Analyze User Behavior
After creating user personas, you still need to continue to analyze the behavior of your customers and potential users. This will help you to understand how they interact with your website and what content they are interested in.
There are many ways to analyze user behavior. Some of the most common methods include:
- Web analytics: Track the pages that your visitors are viewing, the time they are spending on each page, and the links they are clicking on.
- Heatmaps: Visualize the areas of your website that are getting the most attention from visitors.
- A/B testing: Test different versions of your website to see which one performs better.
You also need to pay specific attention to behavior metrics like bounce rates, session duration, and click patterns to provide a roadmap to optimize your website for optimal engagement.
4. Monitor and Engage Your Audience on Social Media
Social media platforms offer an excellent opportunity to engage with your audience. They allow you to share content, respond to comments, participate in discussions, and provide analytics tools for content analysis.
You can also use social listening and audience intelligence tools like Meltwater, BuzzSumo, and Audiense to get more insights from potential customers.
In the later parts of this post, we’ll delve into other ways you can use social media to drive website traffic.
5. Analyze Customer Feedback
Feedback gathered from the sales and customer support team or a customer feedback tool isn’t just valuable for improving your products and services; it’s also great from a content perspective. For instance, you can look at the CRM data from leads and customers to identify the following:
- Aspects of marketing personas that are outdated
- Gaps in audience understanding of products and services
- Pain points that aren’t currently addressed by your content
Chapter II: Content Marketing
Content marketing is a crucial aspect of any successful digital strategy. According to Maika Global, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates over three times as many leads.
In this chapter, we will discuss five effective content marketing strategies that can significantly increase your website traffic.
6. Create High-Quality Content
High-quality content helps keep your audience engaged, establishes your brand as an authority in your domain, and improves SEO. HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2023 Report finds that high-quality blog and social content are virtually tied with influencer marketing for the highest ROI of any marketing channel.
For examples of high-quality content that drives website traffic, check out our case studies on 6Sense and Kong.
7. Create, Create, Create
Let’s face it: There’s a lot of sub-par content out there, and you don’t want to contribute to that. However, research from our 2023 BRICK Report on the top content creators in SaaS does show that website traffic is strongly correlated with the number of blog posts a brand creates.
HubSpot, Toast, and Cloudflare are great examples of brands that create a high volume of quality content and are able to build out substantial SEO moats.
8. Invest in Dynamic Content
Your customers are looking for more than just text-based content pitching and explaining your products. People, particularly the younger generations, consume information through dynamic media formats.
That doesn’t mean deprioritizing written content—these assets are indispensable, especially when you repurpose and distribute them. What it does mean is that you need to support text with assets like custom visuals, infographics, web tools, and video.
The latter is by far one of the most important to invest in: In a recent survey of marketers by Wyzowl, 91% of respondents reported that video content helps increase website traffic.
9. Write Long-Form Content
According to a study by Semrush, long-form content typically ranks higher in search results and tends to get more shares and backlinks than short-form content, thus driving more traffic.
As a general rule of thumb, the company suggests that posts be somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 words. However, depending on the volume and keyword difficulty, you may need to create even longer content.
10. Update Old Content
One big mistake that brands make is thinking that they always need to create new content to bring in more traffic. Sometimes, all you need to do is tweak the content you already have.
A 2023 Semrush report found that 42% of marketers see an increase in marketing value from updating existing content.
Updating old content with new information, images, or insights can improve its relevance and ranking, leading to increased traffic.
Chapter III: SEO Strategies
Once you have a solid understanding of your audience, you need to turn your attention to the search engines. This will help you identify the keywords you should target to bring in traffic through Google, YouTube, and any other platform that relies on search engine algorithms.
This chapter will discuss six top SEO strategies that can significantly improve your website’s visibility and traffic.
11. Keyword Research
This strategy is non-negotiable. Without identifying the right keywords for your content and ads, you won’t be able to bring in website traffic. You need to identify the phrases and queries your specific audience is searching for content.
These keywords can be divided into three categories: short-tail, mid-tail, and long-tail. Here’s a table encapsulating the keyword types you’ll be exploring:
12. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO means optimizing individual pages to rank higher in search engines and attract more relevant traffic. Tools like Semrush, Moz, Yoast, and Frase.io can help optimize your content for on-page SEO.
Here’s a checklist of some of the most important on-page SEO factors:
✔ Relevant keywords throughout website content
✔ Optimized title tags and meta descriptions
✔ High-quality content
✔ Internal links
✔ Optimized images
✔ Mobile-friendly website
✔Secure website
13. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your own website to impact your rankings within SERPs. This is primarily achieved through a few key avenues:
- Receiving backlinks from other websites
- Driving traffic to your page through social media
- Leveraging influencer marketing
- Guest posting on prominent websites
14. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve its ranking in SERPs. This includes factors such as page loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and security.
According to Search Engine Journal, some of the most important technical SEO factors to enhance site performance, increase your chances of ranking, and bring in more web traffic include:
- Using a sitemap
- URL format and structure
- Increasing page loading speed
- Mobile-friendliness and optimization
Web tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights can help you identify areas for technical improvement.
15. Image and Video SEO
Image SEO is the process of optimizing your images for search engines. This can help to improve the visibility of your images in search results and drive more traffic to your website.
There are many things you can do to optimize your images for SEO. Some of the most important things include:
- Using relevant keywords in your image alt tags and file names
- Optimizing your images for size and loading speed
- Adding captions to your images
Video SEO involves optimizing your videos to be indexed and ranked on the video search results page for relevant keyword searches. Apart from YouTube, videos on your website should also be optimized for better visibility.
16. Voice Search Optimization
With the increasing usage of voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, optimizing for voice search has become crucial.
It also helps you get ahead of your competitors and increase your website traffic strategically, as most of your competitors likely don’t have this on their SEO checklist yet.
If you need any more convincing, voice searches account for more than 1 billion searches per month. So, make sure you’re doing something extra that will signal Google to help you outrank your competitors.
Chapter IV: Content Distribution
Brands are now embracing the impact of omnichannel marketing. That means spreading your marketing content across as many channels as you can—from social media and email to paid and even physical advertisements.
With how competitive the digital landscape has become, it’s critical that every brand has a distribution playbook to follow. In this chapter, we will explore five strategies that leverage distribution to increase website traffic.
17. Leverage Social Media Platforms
According to DataReportal, the average amount of time people spend on social media each day has steadily climbed over the past decade—current usage rates sit at two and a half hours every day. In many cases, that’s likely a conservative estimate.
You can take advantage of this trend by creating enticing, easy-to-share social content that brings the right traffic to your blog or website. Platforms like X, LinkedIn, and Facebook are great for sharing links to web content because they preview the content with summaries and images.
18. Amplify Through Native Channels
Native advertising occurs when the form of a paid ad or piece of content matches the media format. The benefit of this tactic is that your messaging isn’t automatically identified as promotional.
Platforms like Medium and LinkedIn have publishing options that let you create content that’s native to the platform—specifically, Medium Posts and LinkedIn Articles. Lots of brands use these avenues as a way to get content in front of their audience and then funnel traffic to their site through links.
19. Use the Power of Community
Community-driven platforms like Slack, Reddit, Discord, and GitHub are also great for content distribution. These platforms allow for discussions in a format that’s more in-depth than other social platforms.
The trick is to find a topic-based community, whether it’s a subreddit, Slack channel, or Discord server, that’s related to your industry and where your product or service can act as a solution. From there, you can address specific issues and queries from users with content from your site. Just make sure it’s high-value content.
Brands like Stripe are even seeing results by hosting their own subreddits for users!
20. Use Newsletter and Email Campaigns
Whether you use Google, Microsoft, or another email platform, there are a few tactics you can use to increase website traffic through this channel. Mainly: newsletters and email campaigns.
Building up a high-quality newsletter not only helps establish your brand as an authority but it’s also a great way to get repeat visitors to your site by placing links to top content.
If you want to drive more traffic to high-value landing pages, you can also send out email campaigns to key audiences. According to a study by Campaign Monitor, the average open rate for email campaigns is around 21.5%, while the click-through rate is about 2%. So, if you’re sending 2,000 emails a month, you will be able to get around 40 visitors to your key pages using email marketing.
21. Invest in Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses social media influencers to promote your products or services. Here are some tips for influencer marketing:
- Find the right influencers: When choosing influencers, be sure to find people who have a large and engaged following that is relevant to your target audience.
- Work with the influencers: Once you’ve found the right influencers, be sure to work with them to create content that is relevant to their audience and that will promote your products or services.
- Track your results: Remember, you need to track influencer marketing results to see what’s working with your campaign and what’s not. This will help you improve your campaigns over time.
Learn How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Like the SaaS Pros
So, there you have it—21 ways you can improve your website traffic and start to develop qualified leads for your sales or product teams.
If you want to learn how some of the biggest SaaS brands funnel thousands upon thousands of monthly visitors to their websites, check out our world-class case studies!
