4 Simple Ways to Get More Website Traffic

Jun 14, 2022

Every website owner wants their website to draw in as much visitor traffic as possible. Traffic is vital for a website and business’s success, after all; without traffic bringing in potential clients, a website may find itself struggling to have the presence it aims to have. Smart website owners will want to maximize the appeal of their website to bring in more traffic, but they might find that pursuing this goal is easier said than done, and that their options for how to do this are unclear. That’s why I’ll be highlighting some of the more popular methods that website owners can use to get more website traffic and maintain it.

There are many things that website owners can do to increase website traffic, giving you a range of options that you can act on based on what your goals and capabilities for your website are.

SEO Scoring Boosting

The main ways website visitors and potential clients find any website is by using search engines to fulfill their queries. From this, there are ways in which you can improve your website’s search rankings from search engines. This will help you show up more frequently and in better positions on search results, so that more people are likely to click onto your site to see what you have to offer. Understanding what search engines look for and value, then, is key to improving traffic by letting you optimize your website to best suit search engines’ expectations.

Quality and Keywords

The content of your website should fulfill several expectations for search engines to recommend it. Your content should be of good quality and should present you as an authoritative source of trustworthy information. Your site should feature keyword phrases throughout its content, from its page title to its subheadings and everything in between. Keywords tell search engines that your website is relevant to a keyword or keywords that people enter into search engines, so including a sensible amount of keywords without overdoing it is vital to achieving high search engine rankings.

Website Performance

The performance and technical aspect of your website also factors into how search engines rank your website, so they should also be optimized to improve your search engine rankings. Search engines correlate if users remain on and interact with websites to the technical performance of a website, since users will stay on functional and responsive websites for much longer than they will on unstable and unresponsive sites. This aspect is now key to how search engines determine a site’s technical quality, and websites will receive differing amounts of traffic based on if search engines identify them to fulfill this criteria. You can optimize your site’s technical performance by, for example, optimizing your image file sizes, using website caching, or finding an ideal website host that facilitates faster load times.
Website attracting audience
Optimizing your website for search engines is an important step you can take to improve traffic to your website. Increased site traffic not only draws in more potential clients to your website, but also improves your site’s relevance and authority in the perspective of search engines.

Picking the Right Host

Performance of websites can really differ based on which provider you choose to host your website with. Some providers give you great value for what you pay, while others may cut corners even when charging you premium prices. Making a good choice of a provider can be integral to how your website performs and is perceived. A hosting provider I’ve had great experiences with so far is Doteasy. With their 99.9% website uptime, support for GZIP file compression that lets your site load faster, and their really helpful and knowledgeable in-house support team, I’ve overall had a smooth and issue-free time with them. Something that stood out to me about their hosting service was that they allow you to use your own WordPress plugins while they also use server-side PHP caching, so live updates to my blog were quickly pushed to the live site with minimal wait. I’ve had to wait hours with previous hosting services for my blog updates to be cached on my live site, but with Doteasy I’ve never had this issue, which is just one example of the quality that they offer. You’ll find that hosting with a service like Doteasy gives you overall great benefits while keeping downsides to a minimum.

Make Strong User Impressions

A great way to increase website traffic is to make strong user impressions and organically improve visitor engagement. This is because both visitors and search engines are concerned with how users’ first impressions and subsequent interactions with sites go. 

Positive User Impressions

First impressions of websites should be strong, since it only takes between 0.2 to 2.6 seconds for first impressions of websites to be solidified, and first impressions are 94% design related. Website visitors are quick to judge if a website is worth their time and something they can come back to visit again in the future. This will be based upon whether a website appears updated and maintained. If users see a news board or updates blog on your website’s home page that shows consistent weekly posts for the past 3 years, for example, they’ll know that this site is maintained and is worthy of revisiting in the future, perhaps weekly to catch up on the new weekly posts. On the other hand, if your website, for example, has a very outdated layout and references events from several years ago as if they just happened, visitors will get the sense that this website isn’t frequently maintained. This will make them feel less compelled to consume your content or return in the future to catch up on any new content you may or may not have to offer.

Optimized for Search Engines

That’s right, search engines play a role in making user impressions too! Search engines will take note of content that engages and retains readers more often for longer time periods. You want users to spend as little time as possible waiting for pages to load, but as much time as possible actually consuming the content your site has to offer. Search engines can differentiate between time users spend waiting for pages to load and time spent actually engaged by content.They know to give high rankings to websites with quick load times and high engagement times, and to give low rankings to websites with slow load times and content with high bounce rates. This is why it’s important that your website’s pleasant user experience includes low load times and high engagement times, which appeals to both visitors and search engines.

Search engines will see longer times spent consuming website content as indicators of a site containing quality content worthy of people’s time, and thus rank these websites higher in its search results. When your site ranks higher in search results, users will be more likely to click onto the website out of curiosity since it’ll be one of the first results they see, and because they trust search engines to rank better quality content higher in its search results.

Proactive Online and Social Media Presence

In a time when practically everyone is interconnected in one way or another with the internet and having an online presence, the potential behind online approaches to getting website traffic should never be overlooked. Remember that your website isn’t just a website on its own, but is a collection of content and showcase of expertise that belongs to and represents you. 

Guest Contributions

Oftentimes websites will eventually garner an audience that has found them and continues to follow the site. But how do you reach an audience outside of the set demographic that is already aware of you? The answer to this question is simple: you can be a guest contributor to different outlets, publications, and websites. Writing as a guest contributor on another outlet is a mutually beneficial arrangement between you as the writer and another person’s website as the content publisher. In this arrangement, you provide engaging content to another website, which attracts more readers to that website, while also giving yourself exposure as a likable writer that has their own blog or website that people would want to visit after enjoying the content you’ve contributed to another website.

Being a guest contributor also lets you link build, an SEO technique where visitors are linked to your website through other websites; this builds your site’s authority and can help you rank higher in search results. Being a guest contributor will allow you to gain the attention of demographics that aren’t aware of your content, who will potentially become interested in looking at more of your content after seeing your guest content on someone else’s website. You can attract people to visit your website by, for example, having a link as part of your bio on the guest blog. The primary goal of doing this is to expand your reach and establish yourself as a source of content that people might not have heard of but would be interested in following beyond just the guest writing that’s been published.

Stay tuned for a future post that’ll guide you on how to reach out and request to be a guest blogger/contributer on other outlets! 

Email Marketing

Email marketing and newsletters are a time-honored solution for websites to garner visitors, enticing website visitors who had signed up for emails in the past and receive reminders of doing so on a semi-regular basis to return to your site to see what new content you have to offer. Email newsletters are regular updates regarding your website sent straight to potential clients who had already previously expressed interest in what your website has to offer. It’s no surprise, then, that these emails are proven to be effective and continue to be used by countless websites around the world.

Your email should be enticing from the subject line and body of the email, as many people tend to skim over non-urgent emails that don’t quickly capture their attention. Visually, your email should have an appealing and pleasing layout so that readers don’t have a negative experience opening and looking at your email. Your emails should include some interactive features like links or buttons that prompt and easily allow for further content access, such as directly linking to a new post on your website. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly, as 46% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Include the name of the particular subscriber your emails are sent to to introduce a personalized factor into your appeal to their attention.

Email marketing and newsletter alerts

Social Media Presence

Reaching potential website visitors has never been easier thanks to the advent of widespread social media usage. Beyond their websites, some websites and/or their owners already maintain active online presences on popular social media platforms. Some use online platforms to garner new interested clients through the usage of posts featuring relevant hashtags, or frequently posting on and updating your pages across several social media platforms to establish a clear presence. Others often run promotional campaigns across their different platforms to attract clients looking for good deals. No matter how you use online platforms to your advantage, a social media presence streamlines the process of creating interest in what you have to offer.

With the flexibility and control that a social media presence offers, you can tailor what you put out to best appeal to the audience you want. If you and/or your website are already doing this, then you’re already running your operations effectively to keep up with the contemporary times and its audiences. If you aren’t doing this yet, now is as good a time as ever to start and build up an online presence that’s sure to net your website more interest and attention.

Exponential Exposure

One of the most powerful aspects of social media is exposure’s exponential growth through sharing. On Facebook, for example, an individual sharing a post to their timeline means their friends are likely to see that shared post, and among those friends, several may share the post themselves. When this type of sharing is repeated across several people each time, the reach of a simple post can exponentially attract traffic to your website. The shared post has massive potential to spread to hundreds of new eyes that otherwise wouldn’t have seen that post if the sharing hadn’t happened, which raises the chances of people not only visiting and following your social media page, but also going to visit your website and consume your content. Followers of your page who know of and enjoy the content you make will now be more likely to visit your website again when you share posts in the future. This entire process of exponential growth can mean your website traffic can quickly rise thanks to how easily spread and shared posts and websites are on social media. This is why you should never overlook the power of an online presence that social media gives you and your website.

Social media exponential traffic growth

Word of Mouth and Communication

Getting the word out about your website benefits from the wide reach of, for example, maintaining an active online presence, but these far-reaching solutions aren’t your only option for attracting more traffic to your website. More direct forms of communicating with others to garner website traffic come in a variety of forms, depending on the opportunities and connections that you have available.

In-Person Connections

In-person methods of increasing internet traffic might not be easily thought of by some, but their potential is just as great as that of online methods. When done well, engaging directly with people in person is far more persuasive than simply speaking to them through an impersonal website or social media post. Talk to friends, family, and acquaintances that your website would be relevant to and see if they’re receptive to going to your website, which would contribute to your site traffic. Another approach to encouraging in person website traffic is to participate in in-person conferences and fairs, where people of all backgrounds and sectors gather to network, interact, and have fruitful discussions that can very easily lead to further success. Here, you’ll have opportunities to interact with many new people that might not have heard of you or your website before, but would be interested in what you have to offer.

Direct Online Interaction

Direct connection with potential clients doesn’t just happen in person, but can just as easily take place online too. Not only does maintaining a social media presence contribute to reaching a wide potential audience, but directly communicating and connecting with others through online platforms can give your website healthy boosts in traffic. Many potential clients hold more favorable perceptions of things like websites or businesses if these resources take the time to read and respond to posted thoughts and comments. For example, people leaving comments to ask questions about your website on your Facebook posts should definitely be replied to. This will let you foster a positive impression of your website and those that operate it. If people compliment your services, or maybe a photo you post somewhere, don’t be afraid to reply back and thank them, or even say something a bit humorous, so that your online presence comes across as pleasant and worthy of potential clients’ support.

Direct Online Interaction

Positive and frequent interaction with people online also brings another advantage. The ability of your posts and pages to frequently engage audiences is rewarded by the algorithms that govern social media platforms. On social media platforms like Facebook, even if someone follows your page, it’s up to an algorithm to decide if your posts appear on your followers’ feeds, so it’s often the case that followers of pages don’t see posts from pages they follow. The pages that followers do get shown posts of are ones that the algorithms have deemed to have high engagement rates and succeed in engaging their visitors. Pages that more successfully engage readers to remain on their page and, for example, remain reading and reply to posts, will be more frequently shown to their followers and users in general compared to pages who don’t succeed in these goals. To engage users is to win the favor of the algorithms that decide how often and how likely people are to interact with you and your page. This is why it’s important for you to establish a strong presence on social media that engages users and represents your website in a meaningful way.
Online interaction algorithm engagement
Overall, by establishing direct and positive relations between you and potential clients, your website will benefit in both the short term and long term. People will see what you have to offer in a good light and have more genuine curiosity towards your website and what it does.

Closing Thoughts

In summary, traffic to your website can be increased through a variety of ways. Depending on what you’re more inclined to doing, there’s sure to be a solution that suits you and your website. Website traffic is key to any website’s success, so take one or some of the ideas we’ve discussed today and apply them to your own operations to grow your website’s traffic!