Increasing site traffic is one of the number one goals of website owners. Why? Because traffic is the first step towards getting more conversions.
Thankfully, there are some tricks you can use to increase website traffic and get more eyes and clicks on your content.
Here’s how to increase website traffic using free and paid methods – including search engine optimization, social media marketing, and more.
Skip ahead here:
- Find your traffic source
- 5 main types of traffic sources
- 3 top tips to increase website traffic
- 49 easy ways to increase website traffic
- Social media
- SEO
- Partnerships
- Paid ads
- Content Marketing
- Extras
- Ready to boost your website traffic?
Find your traffic source
First, if you’re looking to increase website traffic, you need to choose your top traffic sources. No matter how big your business is, it’s inefficient for you to go after every source of website traffic on the internet.
Instead, look at where your target audience hangs out. Try answering these questions to help you find your top traffic sources.
- Who is your target audience, and which platforms do they use the most?
- What types of content do they engage with?
- What methods are your competitors using?
- What methods have been successful for you in the past?
- What story do you want to tell about your product or service?
It’s helpful to have a buyer persona to help you answer these—download our customer avatar workbook to help you make one.
Focusing on your target audience is the best way to get a clear idea of how to increase website traffic.
Related: How To Market Online Courses
5 main types of traffic sources
There are 5 main types of traffic sources that you can utilize to maximize website traffic: SEO, social media, paid traffic, partnerships, and content marketing. Let’s look at each in more detail.
SEO
If you want to increase website traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best methods. SEO uses meta descriptions, backlinking, keyword research, and more to boost your website in search engine results pages. The goal is to get your content in front of more viewers, increasing the amount of people who click through to your website from engines like Google or Bing.
Social Media
Thanks to the rapid growth of social media and the opportunity to include links to websites, social media is now a significant traffic source for many brands. You can dramatically increase your business’ engagement and website traffic with the right social media strategy. There are both free and paid methods to boost your social media profiles and get more traffic to your website.
Paid
While organic traffic is considered free, paid traffic is also an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. Paid methods are primarily based on ads but also include influencer campaigns and paid guest posts. The right ad in the right place can dramatically increase website traffic and help you beat your competition.
Partnerships / Referrals
Another way to increase website traffic is to build partnerships and closer relationships with other brands, publications, and influencers. Partnerships are a great way to introduce more people to your brand and reach new audiences. With this method, you’re effectively borrowing traffic from other sites and directing it to your own.
Content marketing
Last but not least is content marketing, which encompasses a wide variety of methods to increase website traffic. Content marketing can include things like email marketing, ebooks, and blogs. And while there is significant overlap with social media and SEO, content marketing deserves its own category.
Related: 17 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic
3 top tips to increase website traffic
Now, let’s look at three top tips for increasing traffic. Then, we’ll dive into the comprehensive list of methods, which we’ve broken down by the five types of traffic discussed earlier.
Find your niche
When it comes to digital marketing, a targeted approach is usually more effective than a blanket one. That means finding a niche, sticking to it, and building up your authority around that topic.
Regarding SEO, search engines reward sites and voices that appear to have authority in their niche. The more you specialize and build up a bank of quality content on one or two topics, the more likely your site will rank in searches.
Become a thought leader
Once you’ve found your niche, you can also work on establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. That means becoming the face of your brand and putting your name forward for industry events, webinars, and guest posts.
Thought leadership is a great way to build trust in your business and encourage more people to come to you for advice. If you can get a reputation as a thought leader in your industry, you can increase website traffic and ultimately sell more of your products or services.
Build relationships
As with many things in business, building relationships can make a big difference if you want to increase website traffic. By working on growing your network of like-minded companies, influencers, and social media accounts, you can increase your brand exposure organically.
Guest posts, reviews, and social shares can all help to increase website traffic, so don’t underestimate the power of relationships.
49 easy ways to increase website traffic
If you want to increase website traffic and get more visitors to your site, here are 49 easy methods you can use.
Social media is a brilliant tool to help you increase website traffic organically. Every platform is designed to keep people engaged, making it the perfect place to get your brand seen, heard, and shared.
To drive traffic to your website from your social media accounts, make sure you’re encouraging users to visit your site via a link in your bio, your story post, or status update. Link in bio tools will also allow you to attach unique links to each social post on Instagram and TikTok.
Video content is becoming an increasingly important method for marketers hoping to catch social media scrollers’ eyes and attention. 91% of companies (an all-time high) use video as an essential part of their marketing.
Video content is especially important if your brand targets younger internet users ages 15-35. TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram, all visual platforms, lead the way in capturing Gen Z’s attention. This demographic is most interested in video content, and the right clip can dramatically increase website traffic for your business.
Your social media bio is your digital elevator pitch, so it’s important to get it right. If you can optimize your bio to tell people exactly what you do and where else they can find you, then you can use this tiny bit of text to increase traffic to your website.
Bear in mind that your bio is searchable, so include relevant keywords. It’s also a good idea to have your brand logo or a friendly, professional headshot to make your social media profiles easily recognizable. And as we mentioned before, use link-in-bio technology if you’d like to drive traffic to more than one primary link.
Understanding how to increase traffic to your website can be enhanced by understanding the power of engaging with your audience on social media. The most effective social media accounts are the ones that connect with their followers and drive engagement by means of comments, shares, saves, and reposts.
All platforms, from YouTube and TikTok to Instagram and Reddit, use algorithms that consider engagement when deciding when and to whom to show your content. High engagement tells platforms your content is interesting and valuable, encouraging them to put it in more places and in front of more accounts.
Additionally, your existing and potential followers want to feel heard. If you can authentically connect with people online, they’ll be more likely to follow you, return for more content, and visit any links you’ve featured in your bio.
Another effective method to increase website traffic is to engage with high-traffic social media accounts. That includes other brands, influencers, or thought leaders. If you can get your content shared by these accounts, that can drive a massive amount of people to your profile and your website.
The best way to do this is to create posts you can tag them in. You might want to share their content, repost a photo, or highlight something they’re doing that’s relevant to your niche. People like to be flattered, so use this method to get high-traffic accounts to engage with you!
Influencer marketing is projected to show an annual growth rate of 11% through 2028 and is already a market valued at more than $30 billion. With no signs of stopping, influencer marketing has become an invaluable resource for marketers learning how to increase traffic to a website.
While this marketing method is usually paid, it doesn’t always have to break the bank. If you can find influencers or micro influencers who are highly aligned with your brand in target audience and niche, you may be able to leverage mutually beneficial partnerships at a lower cost. But regardless of how much it costs, influencer marketing is a tried and true method for growing your audience, driving sales, and driving traffic to your website.
Like reviews, testimonials are a form of social proof and an excellent way to generate more interest in your products and services. Utilize testimonials on your social media channels to drive more traffic to your website.
The best testimonials are really specific. You want to pick out the testimonials that quantify how much your products or services helped the user.
Live streaming is another way to increase your brand’s website traffic via social media. Live streaming is a great way to give your brand a human face and engage with followers in real-time.
Live streams can be a Q&A, demo, tutorial, product-hype session, or anything else—you’re only limited by your creativity. And because live streaming can be so valuable for viewers, social platforms will encourage viewers to join your stream by notifying them anytime you go live.
The important thing is to keep your viewers engaged and remember to direct them to your website after watching.
Stories—what was once a Snapchat-only feature is now a mainstay on almost every platform, especially Facebook and Instagram.
Considering the visual nature of Instagram and today’s emphasis on video content, stories are a great place to leverage and repurpose existing content or share new content. Encourage viewers to click through to your website by sharing a link in your story.
Social media platforms understand the importance of e-commerce. So whether you’re selling physical or digital products, platforms like Instagram and TikTok are equipped to help you market and sell your products directly through the platform.
Leverage on-platform features like storefront customization, product tags, and more to drive traffic to your products and increase web traffic.
SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimizing the front-end and back-end components of your site. These components include your header, meta description, URL, image alt-text, loading speed, redirects, and more.
The primary goal of on-page SEO is to create the fastest, smoothest, and most user-friendly website possible. The secondary goal is to make your website easily understood by search engines when they access your site to assess how relevant and valuable it is for their searchers.
SEO keywords are search terms searchers type into a search engine while surfing the web. These search terms can be a word, a string of words, or entire sentences—and they don’t have to make grammatical sense either.
Take “training golden retrievers,” for example. This phrase is three words, doesn’t function as a sentence, and yields results like the following:
Keywords work to help search engines understand the topic of your content. So even though our example search term is “training golden retrievers,” Google understood that “How to Train a Golden Retriever Puppy” is highly relevant to the original search term.
Craft an SEO strategy to improve your chances of ranking highly in search engine results, ultimately increasing web traffic.
Backlinks are links from another site to your website, and these are one of the best tools for improving your search engine ranking. Further, a high-quality backlink is from a high-quality website with a higher domain authority than yours.
Search engines view these as a form of social credibility. In essence, if another credible website sees you as worthy of linking to, Google will also see you as more trustworthy. And when Google views you as credible, you’re more likely to rank higher in search results than a similar website of lower domain authority.
Unfortunately, increasing your site’s backlinks doesn’t happen overnight. For this method, you need to focus on creating high-quality content.
While you can try reaching out to other sites and offering to exchange backlinks—you add one of their links to your post, and they do the same—earning backlinks is almost always a long game. So, be patient and focus on your content first.
Like backlinks, internal links can also help your SEO. Not only do they direct people to other pages on your site—driving traffic to those pages—they also increase the amount of time someone stays on your site and boost your chance of converting that visitor.
Internal linking is easy to do and can increase your site’s credibility on search engines, making it a valuable tool to increase web traffic. Simply add links to relevant pages on your website, like blog posts or landing pages, that you reference in your text.
Nowadays, SEO is about more than just optimizing your website for a search engine. Search engines are deeply invested in ensuring that the websites they present to searchers are relevant, valuable, and of high quality—after all, they profit from a positive searcher experience.
That’s why making sure your website is easy to navigate is essential. If a user is left wondering where to go or can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, they’ll leave for the next website in the Google results. That will lower your session duration, increase your bounce rate, and more, hurting your ability to increase web traffic.
If you’re struggling to rank for high-volume searches, consider using video content to help your website stand out. In many cases, Google will display YouTube videos in search results, which means investing in video content where appropriate can pay off.
Videos also enable you to keep your audience’s attention, offering information in a way that’s easy to digest and more engaging for everyone.
If you’re producing a lot of content for your website, include social share buttons on every page. This simple step makes it easy for viewers to share your content via their social media and increase the reach of your content. Social share buttons are a quick and easy way to increase your site’s traffic.
Of course, you don’t have to produce all-new content to increase website traffic. To refresh website traffic strategies effectively, consider updating and repurposing old content. This not only improves SEO but can also reinvigorate interest in your site’s existing resources.
SEO best practices change daily, so updating old content often means ensuring that older content is up to par with today’s standards. This often means adding or updating keywords, updating statistics and links, refreshing imagery, and making your content more valuable and impactful.
As people increasingly adopt voice search like Siri and Alexa, voice search optimization will become crucial for brands. As many as 62% of Americans report using voice assistance technology, so to increase website traffic, consider optimizing your website for voice searches.
If you’ve ever had the experience of trying to visit a website that takes ages to load, you’ll understand why website speed is important. When a site takes a long time to load, users become impatient and are more likely to leave searching for a faster site.
When users leave your site immediately after clicking on it, it suggests to search engines that your site doesn’t offer the best user experience, hurting your rankings. We recommend investing in professional help if you’ve noticed a slow load speed and can’t fix it alone—it’s well worth the investment.
Accelerated mobile pages, or AMPs, are pages that are more easily accessed in search results, especially by mobile devices and tablets. Google initially launched AMP as an open-source framework meant to combat Apple News and Facebook articles, both of which were competing with Google for mobile user’s attention.
Creating an AMP page will allow you to create pages that load incredibly fast, appear in search results, and compete with other top-ranking articles.
With mobile-optimized websites, all elements (like images, text, logos, buttons, etc.) are scaled to fit the smaller screen of mobile devices accordingly.
If you’ve ever visited a website while on your phone and had to scroll to see the full image, or perhaps you had to turn your phone horizontally to read the full line of text, those were not mobile-optimized pages.
In 2021, mobile devices accounted for half of all website traffic globally. This means your website should accommodate mobile devices. While AMPs can help you with that, your regular pages should also be mobile-friendly. When they’re not optimized, mobile users may leave your site for one that is easier to use and more visually appealing.
SSL certificates ensure that the user’s sensitive data is encrypted when they access your site, adding an extra layer of security. As a more technical element, it’s often overlooked by your everyday business owners. Still, not having an SSL certification can significantly impact your site’s ranking.
In addition to user concerns, search engines will view your site as insecure and a risk to searchers, making them less likely to display your page in search results. Even worse, because the lack of an SSL certificate is a security threat, firewalls at schools and work offices may block your site entirely.
If your site doesn’t have its SSL certificate, we recommend contacting the support team at your web hosting company for help. It’s likely a back-end issue they can either resolve for you or help you resolve.
Partnerships
If you’re wondering how to increase website traffic, writing guest posts on reputable sites is a good tool for driving people to your site. Guest posts are a mutually beneficial engagement for you, the writer, and the hosting site.
You get the chance to build your authority on a certain topic while exposing yourself to new audiences. In return, the hosting site receives high-quality content at no cost.
To get started, find a list of sites that share your target audience and get in touch to see if they’re open to collaborating.
As well as writing guest posts on other sites, you can invite others to write a blog post for your website. A high-quality guest post from a thought leader in your industry can give your site more authority.
There’s also a high chance that your guest blogger will share links to your site on their website and social channels—that means more traffic! At the very least, inviting guest posts will allow you to offer a more diverse array of content.
Encouraging reviews of your products or services is a great way to generate interest and credibility for your brand. In fact, 93% of customers claim a review impacts their buying decisions. If searchers or viewers see that others have purchased with you and had a positive experience, they’ll be more likely to give you a chance.
So, where does the partnership come in here? Reviews should be current, and the more you have, the better. If your business is just starting out, or perhaps you’re launching a new product, consider partnering with influencers or incentivizing new users to leave a review in exchange for a discount or free product.
Though often overlooked, comment sections can be another way to increase website traffic. You want to avoid coming across as spammy or doing the hard sell, so focus on writing thoughtful comments and contributing to the discussion on topics relevant to your niche. This works for articles, videos, social media, and more.
As a rule, only link to your website when it’s highly relevant and adds depth to your response.
When considering how to increase traffic to your website, don’t overlook the potential of press releases and media coverage. Getting your product, service, or brand covered in the media can provide a huge boost to your website traffic.
Though only some articles will include backlinks to your website, media coverage introduces your brand to a broader audience and increases your authority. To help improve your chances of being featured, consider getting help from a PR expert.
Websites like HARO can also help, as they aim to match established professionals with journalists and writers. So, if you’re a true thought leader or expert, spending time on a site like HARO may lead to media coverage and quality backlinks.
Like guest blogging and social media posts, finding podcasts to partner with is another fun and effective way to drive more traffic to your site. If you can find podcasters working in your industry or niche, this is an excellent opportunity to increase awareness around your brand and win new followers.
Use the opportunity to promote your brand and tell people how to find out more about you. Ideally, plug a specific lead magnet to help you increase web traffic and generate new leads for your business. Consider using a site like PodMatch, which is similar to HARO, to connect you with podcast hosts looking for guests.
Online events hold a lot of advantages for business owners, from networking opportunities to promoting your brand. If you can secure a place to speak as a guest at an online event—that’s even better. Hello, free advertising! While attending online events won’t immediately increase website traffic, they’re a good tool for boosting brand awareness in your industry.
In addition to attending events, you might also try hosting your own! Events like webinars, conferences, and tutorials are perfect for building a community around your brand. You can also encourage people to share your event on social media and drive more traffic to your website.
If you’re a course creator, remember that you can also tap into the Thinkific community to find and build partnerships with other educators. Search out like-minded entrepreneurs looking for people and brands to partner with and see how you can help each other out. Remember, guest posts are a great way to increase website traffic!
Social media takeovers function like guest posts—they get your face in front of other social media users. With a takeover, you partner with another social account to host someone or “takeover” their social media for the day. These work best when there is a face to a brand.
Again, you benefit from exposure to new audiences and increasing your authority, while they benefit from fresh and engaging social media content. While these can be one-sided, they’re also often reciprocated—meaning you take over your partner’s account, and they’ll take over yours.
Paid ads
If you have a marketing budget, you might consider using pay-per-click (PPC) ads to increase website traffic. While this can be an expensive option, it can also provide a huge boost of visitors to your site.
Options for PPC ads include:
- Search ads
- Display ads
- Remarketing ads
- Google shopping
- Gmail sponsored promotions
PPC ads can effectively drive traffic to your website by helping you reach your target audience faster. However, the costs of PPC advertising can quickly rack up, so do your research first.
Make the most of the social media buzz with paid social media ads. If you’re struggling to grow your social media audience organically, you might consider investing in paid advertising to get your posts seen by more people. It can be a game-changer for some brands and dramatically increase website traffic—but it can also be a flop.
If you’re a solo entrepreneur or subject matter expert, enter into paid social media advertising with your eyes open and ensure you’re strict about what you can afford.
If you’re looking to increase web traffic, consider influencer marketing. This form of paid advertising uses influencers to promote your brand or products.
You can drive tons of traffic to your site with the right influencers. The best campaigns are authentic and genuine, so choose influencers who’ll make your investment worth it.
Related: How Do Social Media Influencers Make Money?
Affiliate marketing can boost your brand by borrowing from the existing audiences of other content creators. You can increase site traffic and raise conversion rates with the right affiliate scheme. You also benefit from affiliate reviews and backlinks.
Content Marketing
Using newsletters to promote your business is nothing new, but sometimes the old ways are still the best! When learning how to increase website traffic, a newsletter is a great way to generate interest in your new content and increase traffic. It also helps to keep your brand in the front of your audience’s minds with a weekly or monthly update.
If you’ve started to gather a following, whether on your website or social media, it’s a good idea to start building an email list. This is a list of people who’ve shared their emails with you. You can then send marketing and promotional material to those emails, along with valuable and exclusive content.
Start building your email list by including a sign-up form on your website. Feature your form in multiple places, like blog posts, the home page, your contact page, the footer, and even as a pop-up.
Once you’re ready to really start building that list, you can even begin to create gated content, which encourages users to share their email with you in exchange for things like ebooks, webinars, toolkits, or other high-value content. For more tips on using lead magnets in your marketing, check out this list of lead magnet ideas with examples.
As your email list grows, your email marketing strategy will need to increase in complexity to match it.
One such way in which you can strengthen your email marketing strategy is by adding segmented email campaigns. These campaigns are only sent out to a subsection of your overall subscribers based on their unique interests.
Take PetSmart, for example. They sell supplies for pets, from fish and gerbils to cats and dogs. Once PetSmart has a pet owner’s email, they’ll be separated and placed in a segment based on their interests and previous purchases—someone who’s previously purchased dog toys will receive emails about a new promotion for dog toys, not fish supplies.
Segmentation ensures subscribers receive relevant content, making them more likely to open and click through to the website, ultimately driving more website traffic and sales.
At this point, email marketing probably sounds like a massive undertaking. Spoiler alert, it is. But thankfully, some features help make it less time-intensive.
Most email marketing platforms allow you to automate email sequences. This means a specific email campaign is automatically triggered once someone signs up to receive an ebook, buys a product, or simply joins your newsletter.
You write and design every email in the campaign and can determine the day, time, and amount of emails subscribers receive. Ultimately, this means you can drive clicks and traffic to your site for as long as your campaign is active without worrying about sending out emails every day.
If you want to take your content game to the next level, consider producing an e-book or series of downloadable guides. These are often used as gated content, meaning someone has to share their email with you to gain access to the content.
And because e-books are often high-value, they can help build authority in your niche. If your e-book is full of good stuff, it may be shared or earn reviews, which can also increase website traffic over time.
In addition to existing social media or email marketing strategies, starting a podcast is a great way to drive traffic to your website. By creating audio content, you can tap into a market segment that spends time listening to thought leaders rather than reading about them.
Podcasts can help you:
- Expand your reach by reaching listeners who engage with content during activities that don’t allow for reading—think cleaning, running, or driving.
- Position yourself as an expert. Like blog posts, guest posting, and distributing valuable content, creating a podcast allows you to establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
- Drive web traffic by directing listeners from your podcast to relevant resources on your website or your email list.
- Network with other professionals. Invite other experts and guests to appear on your show. Like guest posting, this will allow you to deliver high-quality content and build connections.
Creating learning challenges for followers and customers, sometimes called gamification, is a great way to increase website traffic. Choose a topic, promote the challenge via your social media or newsletter, and let people engage with the content on their own time.
You’ll get more visits to your page while giving people a taste of what they can expect from future courses and content.
To take your challenge one step further, provide certificates for successful participants who finish the whole challenge. Encourage people to share their certificates online and benefit from the extra publicity boost!
Giving site visitors something they can use and share is another effective way to increase web traffic. Downloadable tools, templates, worksheets, and more can increase your brand awareness and encourage people to return to your site for more helpful content. Templates and tools make terrific lead magnets, allowing you to capture the email addresses of new site visitors.
Want some examples of what templates and resources can look like? Here are a few of our favorites:
- How To Write a Podcast Script
- 9 Simple Ebook Marketing Strategies (+Guide)
- The Ultimate Guide to Creating and Selling Digital Products
- 6 Step Lead Magnet Funnel To Capture & Convert Prospects
Extras
A powerful way to boost your brand presence and increase website traffic is to create an online community around your product or services. A community allows you to foster a closer connection with your customers while fostering brand loyalty and trust.
Thinkific includes built-in tools to simplify creating a private community, including customizable user interfaces, community memberships, and more.
When you’re creating content for your website or social media, try to keep in mind the power of shareable content. The beauty of digital media is that you can be seen by thousands of people in a single day with the right campaign. The viral nature of digital content means it can transform your website traffic overnight.
Generating viral content is easier said than done, but the more you can focus on shareable content like videos, infographics, and audio clips, the more you can increase your chances of success.
If you want to go old school, why not try making up some merchandise for your brand? Stickers, pens, and other merchandise are a fun way to increase your brand awareness.
Add a QR code to any packaging or promotional material to increase website traffic too. Even better if you can do a brand collaboration with a well-known company and get extra publicity from them.
A/B testing, also called split testing, allows you to distribute two versions of an email campaign, an ad, or some other collateral and assess which version performs better. The test is designed to help you understand what your audience responds to, helping you to fine-tune your marketing and focus on key metrics.
By using A/B testing, you can make sure that you are using the most effective version of your marketing campaign to increase web traffic and boost conversions.
Ready to boost your website traffic?
We’ve looked at over 40 easy ideas to increase website traffic and generate more leads. For more expert tips on marketing your course, create a free account on thinkific, then take our Free Webinar Sales Funnel course featuring Neil Patel.
This blog was originally published in November 2021, it has since been updated in January 2024 with the most relevant information.
