Growing the traffic you receive for your website is absolutely essential for just about any ambitious online business. But in a hyper-competitive digital ecosystem, earning those all-important leads against your rivals is easier said than done.
There’s no doubt that search engines hold the key to growing your reputation online. Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second. It’s this intense volume of traffic that your business needs to tap into.
However, coming up with intelligent and innovative ways of increasing website traffic can be difficult for businesses–especially those in densely populated industries.
With many different brands seeking to win customers through the same well-trodden approaches, true innovators in the SEO landscape can be rewarded with greater online visibility, but how can businesses secure greater volumes of traffic?
Let’s explore three ingenious ways to increase traffic to your website in a way that ensures you’ll grow your reputation and become more visible to your target audience:
1. Guest Post, Guest Post, Guest Post
Many brands and marketers alike have woken up to the potential of on-site content, but the power of guest posting is still largely undervalued by businesses.
Why is guest posting such a good way of boosting your website traffic? It’s simple: organic traffic.
The beauty of guest posting is that you create quality content that contains strategic backlinks back to your landing pages, home page, or blog posts, and then publish it on a highly reputable external website that’s relevant to your target audience and capable of showcasing your brand to a significantly larger audience.
It may seem counterintuitive to create content that isn’t going to be published on your own pages, but guest posting helps you to showcase your industry knowledge and USP to a massive audience that simply wouldn’t otherwise have seen your content.
Furthermore, creating backlinks to your website from more reputable domains is an excellent means of improving your site’s SEO credentials. Generally speaking, websites that rank in first place on Google’s SERPs have 3.8 times more backlinks than the rest of the other sites populating the top 10.
But just like any SEO practice, it’s important to get your guest posting right. You could create a backlink to your website on a domain with an excellent domain rating (DR), but its impact would be undermined if you’re not reaching the right audience.
With this in mind, take the time to research your target websites. Let’s say you’re a stationery store and want to use guest posting to improve your organic traffic. To discover guest posting opportunities, it can be a great idea to use a tool like Ahrefs to explore existing backlinks from reputable industry-specific competitors.
To expand on this example, let’s say you’ve highlighted Ryman as a reputable presence in the world of stationery. Using Ahrefs, it’s possible to look at www.ryman.co.uk’s backlinks and sort them by Domain Rating to provide an extensive list of websites that have already generated content with industry-specific links.
While it can be tricky to target high DR websites with guest post content, it’s possible to use Ahrefs to discover opportunities to publish on smaller, reputable websites that still gain plenty of traffic and are evidently publishing industry-relevant backlinks.
So, how do you publish your guest post content? Different host websites have different approaches to guest posting. While some actively encourage users to create and publish content online, others require authors to get in touch with editors to pitch their topics.
Getting in touch with an editor doesn’t have to be an arduous task, and simply suggesting a range of topics along with a brief reasoning behind why you’re making your pitch can be a great way of offering up content.
While it can be tricky to get regular responses, you may find yourself building a positive relationship with an editor that can help you to continually publish guest posts to generate a steady stream of traffic to your pages.
While guest posting had been a largely manual process, it’s worthwhile hiring an agency that specialises in guest blogging services to do the hard work for you.
Solvid is a great option.
They specialise in premium guest posting services for businesses, agencies and marketers alike. What differentiates Solvid from others is that they’re the only guest posting provider to offer placements on DA20 to DA80+, DR30 to DR90+ and Traffic 10K to 1M+ publishers.
There’s no other provider on the market that offers this level of placements.
All placements can be ordered and managed online using their intuitive dashboard.
Although using an agency does come at a cost, it’s a great way to scale your link-building efforts and grow quicker.
2. Supercharge Your Keywords
The chances are that you’re aware that keywords are essential for both SEO and generating traffic to your website, but are you getting the most out of your strategy?
Effective keyword research is needed to understand the terms your target audience is using to discover your website. While certain terms may be uniquely yours like your brand or produce name, others can be more universally used, like ‘free delivery’, ‘special offer’, or ‘100% organic’.
Discovering which keywords are best to compete for against your rivals is a vital means of earning the exposure you deserve online.
By understanding how your existing traffic is finding you, it provides an opportunity for you to optimise your website content to feature more of the same keyword, or subtle variations to maximise your traffic potential.
Stuck on which keywords you should optimise on-site? Once again, Ahrefs can be a great asset in helping you to discover where opportunities lie.
Let’s revisit our online stationery store. As we can see, the term ‘stationery’ has been awarded a difficulty rating of 27 by Ahrefs, making it ‘okay’ to rank for. We can also see data surrounding the search volume of the keyword and in which nations it’s most prominent.
Crucially, we can also see more long-tail keyword suggestions and questions that can generate better difficulty ratings.
In clicking Ahrefs’ ‘matching terms’ we can see a grouped colour-coded list of terms that can help you to rank better, and suggestions and their difficulty based on traffic volumes.
These suggestions can be great inspiration for on-site content, and by creating topics surrounding low-difficulty, high-volume keywords, it’s possible to generate far greater traffic back to your pages.
3. Never Neglect Social Media
We’re very much living in the age of social media, and utilising it in an effective way for your website is essential in building your organic traffic sources.
There are a great many reasons why social media works for just about every business in every sector imaginable. Firstly, your target audience is almost certainly active on social media in some form. Secondly, it’s possible to hone in on your customer profile by exploring the demographics attached to different social networks.
As they grow, the different features of social networks become a draw for different users, and in discovering which platforms are more closely aligned to your target audience, your business can maximise its impact in choosing the right networks to build a presence.
Your industry is also likely to be a key factor in which social networks to optimise. Taking our stationery firm into account, with many physical products available to showcase, visually stimulating networks like Instagram can be a great place to showcase new offers and relevant items to users.
As we can see from UK stationery retailer WHSmith, social media content can work well when acting as a social proof that highlights your seasonal offers, which in this case are back-to-school items.
Working with an influencer, WHSmith has captured the essence of this annual activity for parents in a relatable way–which has sparked many positive comments from parents who find themselves in a similar situation.
As Paperstone shows, your content doesn’t necessarily have to involve influencers to act as a social proof. Sharing a positive Trustpilot review can be a great way of letting others know that you’re doing a good job without necessarily blowing your own trumpet.
It’s also worth conducting social listening to look out for the topics that your target audience is discussing most frequently. This can be a great way of newsjacking trending topics and driving more social media traffic to your website.
Building a Sustainable Stream of Traffic
The reason that these traffic-growing methods are so effective is that they offer a sustainable way of building your presence and reputation online. They’re wholly organic SEO tactics that simply help search engines allocate more value to your website and list it higher among its SERPs.
This means that you’ll not only receive traffic for each guest post you publish, keyworded articles you upload, or social media posts you write, but you’ll also build your reputation in a way that will help your business become more discoverable on a long-term basis.
Although these measures can be tricky to set up, automated processes are making it more accessible than ever for businesses to bolster their SEO credentials. With this in mind, there’s never been a better time to begin your pursuit of greater traffic.
