There are definitely techniques to increase traffic to one’s website.

Here are the 4 main traffic channels and a few tips on how to use them:

Paid Ads

Today with a relatively low marketing budget, you can increase the traffic to your site with paid ads. These could be Google Adwords ads, Facebook ads, Bing ads or ads on different directories such Yelp.

Depending on the type of business you have, when starting to pay for ads and assuming that they are well managed, traffic to the site should increase. For a national company it can be quite drastic of an increase and for a local dentist in a suburb you should get those extra visits that could make a difference at the end of the month.

Recommendation: Budget for paid ads. Monthly!

Please, work on your organic but always budget for paid ads. Here are a few top reasons why:

  • Harvesting tons of industry data. You pay but you also collect. With that data, you then analyze and work an even better campaign and better traffic.
  • Paying for ads gives you a chance to explore new keywords and new audiences rapidly and those could develop into new traffic channels.
  • Have a presence on p.1 for keywords you would like to rank for organically. In search engines, being toward the top of p.1 for a keyword gives you the best chance for traffic. Paying for that traffic is often worth it.
  • And even if you organically rank on p.1 for certain keywords, running ads for those same keywords increases your presence and could result in increase traffic.

For those who are starting to run ads, I recommend to run ads for at least 3 months before saying it doesn’t work.

Organic Traffic

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Youtube and Pinterest thrive on offering organized results when we search for anything. That is their main service. Their reputation for those advanced, lightening fast search results is what gets them constant traffic (and the main reason why they can even justify selling ads in the first place). The cool thing about those organic results is the price: free!

But how to increase traffic through search engines when the algorithms are not published? There are so many opinions and myths about SEO, right? When faced with these questions, we have to look at what survived the algorithm updates (search engine getting brighter).

Here are a few ways that have continued to work really well in generating organic traffic over time:

  • Publishing original content. Not copying content from other sites and changing it around a little. Real, new content that you wrote or videoed. That original content has a better chance of ranking higher and increasing our odds for more visits.
  • Publish regularly. This could mean once per month for a smaller enterprise and could mean several times per week for a large organization. The practice of publishing regularly has a lot of positive repercussions on a website. Experience shows me that it usually helps the overall health of the site and opens the door to new traffic routes.
  • Staying far away from being spammy or trying to stuff keywords in your content, title and page descriptions. This is a sure way to decreasing your traffic over time.
  • Publish content of a high quality. Writing poor content for your site usually doesn’t result in the increased health of your website and would eventually result in a decrease of organic traffic (I’ve seen that so many times). Instead, turn this energy into creating something better for you site and your audience. Content that you can use and proud of showing around. And over and over, the latter has shown me an increase of traffic.
  • Have a clear website structure of menus, categories and URLs (page addresses). This will help the search engines to understand your site, hence a better chance for a good rank.
  • Diversifying the type of content your create on your site, e.g. videos and images. Youtube is all about videos and Pinterest is all about images and people will use those sites to search for all sort of things. And that is also organic and can increase your traffic!
  • Staying relevant to the essence of your business. This means if your business only sells bird cages, I wouldn’t recommend starting to blog about ebikes (supposing it’s one of your new ventures) on the same site. It may actually confuse the search engines on what your website entity really is all about. In that case, I would probably create a new website for those ebikes. Amazon, Sears and Targets will sell bird cages and ebikes and could rank for all those terms but that is totally different in essence. Another example to illustrate content relevancy could be a website specializing in selling vitamins. Their content creation should be about nutrition, how to improve your health, and how to better understand how your body works. I have observed that staying relevant helps with the overall health of the site and give you a better chance to maintain and increase your organic traffic.
  • Linking should be done in a way that looks and feels non-abusive and relevant. Great links that actually drive more traffic to your site are the best by far. Aim for those.

I have noticed that working with the above points has not only helped many websites survive algorithm updates but also increased their rankings over time, hence increasing traffic. One key point to remember about search engines is to play the organic game following the general rules they have laid out for us. You are on their turf after all. Do that and you should be fine.

Social Media

Aside from paying from ads or boosting your post on Facebook, which would fall under the paid ads section above, it is certainly possible to increase your organic traffic through social media websites. Noticed that I say organic here. From one industry to the other, the use of social media will differ. Some will create teaser posts for something coming up soon, some will promote coupons while others will create interest through groups. All organic (meaning not paid).

If you have made up your mind that social media doesn’t really generate any visits to your site then I would recommend to minimally post on your business page a few times per month. It could influence some potential customers to pursue their interest in your company who would otherwise look somewhere else if they had not seen any activity on your Facebook business page. Over time that could turn into traffic to your site. Something that to keep in mind.

It doesn’t have to be complex: share testimonials, give tips, show pictures of the team. Minimally do this a few times every month. Over time this should turn curious people into visits to your site!

Email Lists

Here’s how you increase traffic to your site using email lists:

  1. Build lists
    • from your own customers’ email addresses
    • by placing a form on the site
    • or offering giveaways in exchange for an email address
    • asking for an email address when someone calls you asking about your products/services.
  2. Then create content that will interest your audience and email it to them. Doing so will remind them that you exist and they may even pay you visit at some point!
  3. Repeat and continue.

Do not abuse your lists because you’ll probably create the opposite effect. People could turn you off completely or asked to be removed and that means no visits.

Using email lists is a great way to increase visits to the site. If you converted minimally 2% of those visits into sales it would usually be totally worth it.

Closing Thoughts

In the real world, if you’ve got a store at a popular intersection you highly increase your chance of traffic. In the virtual world you have to find those intersections. They are usually located at the top of the search engine results pages (either paid or organic), they are usually located in your own social media account and they are usually located into your very own, personal email account!

Let me know if you have any questions.

🙂
Patrick

Related Article:

Traffic Optimization Guide