In this blog, I will be sharing with you some of the proven and fool proof ways you (yes, everybody but especially you) can use to increase website traffic.
Let’s dive right in:
Identify What is Working for Your Competitors
If you have ran out of ideas to help drive more traffic to your website, take sometime to identify and research Who are your main competitors & analyze strategies that are currently working for your competitors.
Each company & organization within an industry have unique approach or strategy that is working. It’s the uniqueness in approaches and strategies create and build competitors. Find out what they are? What can you learn from? How can you change your strategy and approach to incorporate what’s working for others.
I remember, while working at BirdEye – this is exactly what I did. We wanted to grow traffic to our blog and improve search keywords ranking. First task we accomplished was reviewing key competitors blogs to identify what is working & how they are driving traffic. figure out how your competitors are setting their traffic acquisition priorities: be it Direct, Referral, Search, Social or Paid Traffic. In the process, we came across keywords that we did not pay attention to. Majority of the competitor’s traffic was driven by the keywords. What did we do?
Using SEMRush Market Explorer, you can find all players within in an industry, including Game Changers, Leaders, Niche Players and Established players (see screenshot). Once the key players are identified, you can use the same SEMRush tool for keyword and landing pages research.
- After completing competitive keywords and landing pages research, we started to curate content for the missing keywords.
- Similarly, thoroughly analyzed backlinks & SEO strategies that were helping rank on Google Page 1, Top 3 results.
- In addition, by comparing where competitors stood against our website in terms of traffic sources, we were quickly able to spot BirdEye’s marketing strategy’s weakest and strongest areas and then fine-tune it accordingly.
Three months in to the project, BirdEye’s Blog traffic increased by 36% and still growing MoM.
Drive Visitors from Direct Traffic
Now I know, it might happen sometimes that you get discouraged because you see that your competitors are getting a huge share of traffic via direct, this does not mean that you’re not good, not at all, this just means and it’s a huge indicator that your competitors are spending big money into customer loyalty campaigns and brand awareness campaigns, so what can you do is to try and understand what can you tweak around so that you increase your direct visitors.
Here’s a couple tips:
1 - The first one is to make easy and memorable URLs.
Now of course, if you have a super cool creative brand name this is going to encourage people to type it in directly and get to your website but if it’s super long that’s going to super discourage them: no one’s going to do it so what you should do is to try, of course to have a creative and cool name, but keep it as short as possible. This is a small thing that can make a really huge difference, just look at BirdEye’s Blog, it’s super easy to type in and very easy to remember and voila you’re already on our blog page.
2 - Invest in Brand Awareness Campaigns
Something else you should do is investing in brand awareness, in fact if people don’t know your brand you can have the best URL in the world but no one’s going to google it, no one is going to look for it, so what you should do is to try and make your brand as known as possible, be it offline or online strategies: you can go from billboards and business cards to YouTube display ads, all these things can help to boost brand recognition and bring in more direct traffic.
Remarketing & Retargeting Setup
Finally, there’s nothing better than a return visitor so you should always try and do whatever you possibly can to make people come back to your website once they have visited it be it the ux of the website, be it campaigns that you have with influencers, or special contests, whatever you can do to bring people back or, better, try and make them want to come back for more and more of what you’re offering.
Referral Traffic
Now let’s move on to the next tip, which is bringing visitors to your website through referral traffic.
What can you do to improve relationships with brands and other websites inside of your niche? This is going to be extremely helpful in building the authority of your website not just to the eyes of all the people that already work in your niche and in your market but especially to the customers because if they see that a lot of important and high authority websites linked to you they will definitely be more inclined to follow you, to look for your services, to buy your products and so on.
In this case basics of old school SEO definitely can work wonders when looking for authority links Good old-fashioned white hat link building, so let’s see how we can do that:
1 - Get Active on Quora
For many search queries, Quora pages appear on the first page of the search results, you can do a bit of research to see how you can get on those Quora results. for example, by using SEMrush’s Domain Overview. In fact, you’ll be able to see which pages rank first and for which keywords, so as you’ve seen it’s easy to see which relevant Quora pages are already ranking high enough so what’s left for you to do is to pitch in in the Quora community with your answer and include a link to a relevant piece of content from your site, That’s it. A backlink created!
2 - Be Part of the Conversations in Forums & Social Media
Another thing you should do is to try and be a part of conversations in forums and social media reddit, Facebook groups, and other platforms that draw large online crowds are great resources of potential traffic. You should just invest in a little bit of community mingling and then share links to high value pieces of content or pages on your website.
But here’s the key to this one: don’t be spammy! Like, don’t like, never like, why? Because people don’t like to be sold in these communities, they just want to go there to get an information, to get value and that’s exactly what you should do: answer to a question, give value, provide people with what they’re looking for and they will come back to your website, but if they see that you’re trying to oversell yourself they will just think: “oh here’s another one” and never come back to you so don’t be spammy, just provide people with value and that’s going to work most of all in the long run.
Create Original & Authentic Content
We’re spammed all day like literally all day with inauthentic and spam content that we’re not interested in but I’m going to tell you that you can ask whoever you want the thing that works the most for all the people that have a lot of success is always creating super original and authentic content that’s what always pays off in the long run.
Increase Website Traffic via Search Engine Optimization or SEO
I’m going to leave you the SEO checklist that we published a month ago which is super useful go and check that out! We’re getting close to the end of the list and next off is:
Increase Visitors via Social Media Channels
Use SEMRush’s Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics to see where your competitors are getting traffic from?
Well, you can go even deeper than that and not just see that they’re driving traffic from social media but from which exact social media and how much traffic, let’s see how to do that too. Many social media managers get bogged in follower counts and likes while it’s way more important to understand if people visited your website from social media and if they did in the end buy your product or sign up for your next event.
Let’s look at this example of Expedia.com and Agoda in the Traffic Analytics tool: Agoda generally wins over Expedia when attracting traffic from social networks despite having WAY fewer followers across all social media accounts. Something that also works wonders with this is to create special contests for the followers of your account but having the registering form to said contests on your website so that they go from the social media exactly where you want them to go which is your website of course. Something else you should do is create teasers for your content be it audio, text, video, it doesn’t really matter, people just love to be teased. Create something small to post on your social media and then direct the audience to your website to read the full content.
Compelling CTA’s
I mean “click here”? It just doesn’t make it anymore “click here” is so passed it’s just I can’t even express it with words! Something like “get 20% off right now!” is better.
Get Smart About Paid Traffic
Now let’s be honest with each other, budgets are a pain, like a huge pain, and most of the times you’re not even choosing a strategy. It’s just what you can do with the budget that you have, but I’m going to outline here a couple of approaches that I think are going to help you make whatever you can of the budget that you have and still target the people that you want to target.
First off, remarket competitor’s audiences on relevant platforms. You should already know, who your key competitors are? so you can assume you have audiences overlap with each other. The Audience Insights report can really help you identify which competitors you share the least similar audiences with and once you have identified this audience you can use it to expand your reach by retargeting them on sites that they visit frequently and then you should locate Google Display Network publishers that have the highest audience match. Audience overlaps are
also, helpful when analyzing which publishers to choose when making GDN placement, if you know that your competitor gets a lot of referral traffic from a particular website don’t immediately divert GDN ad budgets to the platform. First, check whether this publisher shares a significant portion of your audience then make that choice