15 ways to drive traffic to your website

Having a stylish website is one thing, but it’s not very helpful in terms of driving conversions and sales if nobody ever visits it. It’s like opening a café with swish coffee machines and delicious sweets and treats, but without any customers to try them out.

While it’s true that word of mouth can go a long way in terms of driving traffic to your brand, relying on that isn’t always enough to help you achieve your business goals. That’s where tried and tested inbound marketing and SEO traffic acquisition techniques come into play.

How to improve website traffic

There are lots and lots of different tactics you can try out to attract traffic to your website, but that doesn’t mean every single one will be right for you. It all depends on your budget, what resources (including members of your team) you have available to you and how much time you can spare for your marketing efforts.

Below, we outline our top 15 highest priority techniques to try if you’re looking to boost your inbound traffic.

1. Create quality content

Quality content is one way that you can reach out from within your website to attract new visitors who are searching for related topics. If someone is researching a product or service that you offer, for example, then having the best content that helps you to place high in search results increases the likelihood of the user clicking through to your website.

But you don’t have to restrict yourself solely to great product and service descriptions. You can also attempt to attract visitors who aren’t already looking for what you sell, but who are searching for questions that are relevant to your brand. For instance, if you sell lawnmowers, then writing clear, helpful blogs about lawn care can help to drive traffic from people who aren’t necessarily looking to buy – so that when they do need to purchase their next lawnmower, you’re already in their mind as a trusted authority.

2. Improve your website (tech)

Driving traffic from organic search isn’t just about content. When Google decides who to rank highest (and therefore who to give the best chance of attracting traffic), it looks at a number of factors, including the technical functionality of the website. Improving this can help to provide a better user experience (which we’ll discuss a little later), but it can also make it easier for Google to crawl and index your site. In some cases, technical SEO issues can even prevent your site from showing in search results at all, let alone ranking well.

Here are some changes that could help:

Ensure your site architecture uses a logical hierarchy so that pages can easily be found by search engines
Check your pages for missing or misplaced noindex tags
Make sure users can only access one version of your website (e.g. yourname.co.uk versus www.yourname.co.uk)
Improve page speed so that your website and its pages load as quickly as possible
Assess your robots.txt file to make sure Google bots are allowed to crawl your website
Find and fix broken pages that return 4XX status codes.

There are many more technical SEO tasks that can make a difference when it comes to driving traffic, but those listed above are a good place to start.

3. Build quality backlinks

Backlinks can drive traffic to your site in two ways. First of all, a link from a different website to yours can send referral traffic over to your website to learn more about a given topic. If your website is linked to by an authority within an industry, then people are more likely to trust that you are the real deal and can be trusted.

The second way backlinks help is by convincing Google as well. A backlink from an industry leader is a bit like a stamp of approval, and some of their authority gets passed onto you. Google then sees that you’re producing high quality, authoritative content, which can result in ranking improvements and organic traffic increases.

The key here is that backlinks need to be relevant to have a real impact. If you’re a medical website for a pharmacy, for example, backlinks from a website that sells guitars aren’t likely to be very helpful.

4. Create a PPC strategy

So far we’ve focused mostly on improving traffic via organic search and referrals, but you could also look at a paid media strategy. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to bid for premium positions in searches relating to your brand. You simply:

• Choose which keywords you’d like to target
• Create compelling ads to match
• Select a landing page on your website to send users to
• Set your ads live!

The best part about PPC is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, making it a cost-effective way to attract relevant traffic to your website.

5. Improve your internal linking structure

We mentioned earlier that your site should have a simple architecture that ensures all pages can easily be found by search engines and users alike. In fact, it’s so important we’ve given it a section of its own.

Improving internal linking structure makes it easier for users and search engines to navigate your site. This can often mean they spend more time on your site, visit more pages and may even be more likely to convert.

A great way to improve your site’s internal linking structure is to include internal links within blog content. That way, when you write a blog about a certain topic, you can link to other blogs on similar topics as well as your own products and services that relate to the subject matter.

6. Improve media coverage (PR)

Getting your brand mentioned by news outlets or popular editorials can be an excellent way to boost brand awareness and drive traffic back to your site – even if the host domain doesn’t give you a backlink. This can be particularly effective if you’re launching a new product or service, but you can also attract media interest about your company culture, your brand’s ethos or even an article or asset you’ve created to help users of your site.

7. Optimise CTR

Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of how many people used a given link to visit your site out of the total number who viewed the link. This applies to email campaigns, social media links and ads as well as organic search listings.

In all these formats, the higher the percentage of people who click through to your website the better. Improving this rate is all about crafting high quality content to draw users in – compelling email campaigns, snappy social media posts, intriguing meta descriptions and titles. While you shouldn’t promise more than you provide within the landing page, this is a good place to really sell yourself.

8. Create video content

The way we search is changing, and these days video content is hugely popular. While it’s most commonly found on social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram, video content is also great on YouTube and embedded onto your website.

Video content can often be an excellent auxiliary to the written word. Say you’ve written a guide on how to use your product. By adding a video to show your audience the process, you can cover all bases and be as helpful as possible to help people understand the correct usage instructions.

It’s also true that video content can attract high engagement on social media. A good video content strategy can help your brand to stand out from the crowd and attract traffic where you need it most.

9. Build a list of email subscribers

In the age of social media, it can be easy to overlook the opportunities email marketing presents. Having an engaged email list means an almost guaranteed audience of people who are already interested in relevant topics to your brand. When you publish a new blog or launch a new product, you can let them know ASAP and kickstart an uplift in traffic as they check it out.

There are three easy ways to attract people to your email list:

Offer assets or content that can only be accessed once they input their email address
Produce a regular newsletter with information that is relevant and interesting within your industry – not just sales pushes all the time!
Give customers the chance to sign up to your email list when they make a purchase or create an account.

10. Demonstrate your expertise with author pages

Over the last few years, the importance of E-E-A-T signals in search rankings has skyrocketed. Both Google and its users want to know that you have some authority within the industry you operate so they know how much weight they can give to what you have to say. This is even more important in Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) industries, where your products, services and advice could have a significant impact on a person’s finances or health.

Author pages are a good way to demonstrate why you should be trusted. You can highlight your qualifications, any awards or achievements you might have won and your experience within your field.

11. Partner and collaborate with influencers

In some industries, authority doesn’t only come in the form of big businesses and news outlets. It can also be the case that individuals who’ve built up a following on various social media platforms can be a great source of referral traffic.

Although social media stars are probably what comes to mind when we talk about influencers, don’t overlook the opportunities that other industry leaders provide. These may be the founders of start-ups, well-known innovators or those who have achieved particular successes within your industry – and remember, a person doesn’t need to be a universal household name to be considered a well-respected authority in a given field.

12. Undertake SEO

We discussed technical SEO earlier on in the article, but it’s important not to underestimate the impact of having a solid content SEO strategy in place as well. Beyond simply writing about your brand’s specialist topic, you should be aiming to implement keyword optimisation to give your articles the best chance of ranking on relevant searches.

That means performing keyword research to find out what your target audience is actually searching for, then adjusting your content strategy to fulfil those queries. This can often help you to identify gaps in your content and avenues through which to expand your hub of information. It also gives you the power to compare and contrast different choices to find the optimal way to present your expertise.

13. Build a social media audience

Social media is everywhere these days, and that’s not looking set to change anytime soon. If you haven’t done any social media marketing before, it might seem like a daunting task – but don’t let yourself be put off. Think about how often you use social media every day, and then multiply that by the millions of people who do just the same. It’s a big potential market to tap.

The most important thing to remember with social media marketing is that trying to do everything at once will likely lead to burnout. Do some market research to identify the most-used social media for your target audience and start there. In time, you may choose to branch out to other platforms as you grow more confident.

14. Optimise for mobile

In the same way that social media’s popularity has exploded, so has the prevalence of the mobile device. Phones and tablets are used now more than ever to complete purchases and search online, which means that if your website looks clunky or crowded when viewed on mobile, you could be missing out.

This isn’t just a question of the user experience. Google and some other search engines take a mobile-first approach, meaning that they crawl the site as if they were a mobile user. So, if there are problems with your site on mobile, they’re going to be factored into Google’s decision of where to rank your pages in search results.

15. Improve UX

Last but certainly not least, the user experience (UX) of people accessing your website is key. Google is forever advising site owners to optimise for the user and not just for search engines, and there is a very good reason for that. User signals are taken into account when it comes to rankings, so if lots of users seem to enjoy your site, that will be taken positively. However, if the majority of users leave your site quickly, that will indicate to Google that they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Some things that can negatively impact UX include:

• Slow page speeds
• Faulty images, widgets or interactive assets
• Poor design choices (such as low colour contrasts, small fonts, illegible typography or misleading icons)
• Broken links or misleading anchor text
• Content that is difficult to read and understand.

Fixing these issues can help to ensure users have a more pleasant experience when using your website, encouraging them to return and to recommend your brand to their friends and loved ones.

Learning how to drive traffic to your website doesn’t guarantee immediate and astonishing success, but it will give you a better chance of seeing improvements in your traffic metrics over time. The best strategy for boosting traffic tackles a number of angles, including organic search (SEO), paid search (PPC), social media and content marketing, all of which can build up to show impressive results for your business.