How to increase website traffic across 5 key channels
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So you’ve started to get visitors to your site and you want to know how to increase website traffic. That’s where this simple guide comes in – Embryo is here to lend a hand.
As an established digital agency chock full of expert marketers, we’re well-positioned to give helpful advice on the key things you can do to increase 5 of the core sources of traffic to your website. Ready to build your traffic even further? Let’s get started.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic website traffic refers to visitors who find your site through unpaid search engine results. This type of traffic is the ultimate goal of the content you create and publish on your website. Dan McCartney, Embryo’s Head of Organic, gives his thoughts on how to build a strong funnel of organic traffic to your site:
‘The key to increasing organic traffic is understanding what search engines expect from your website.
You must understand the technical elements of the website, if the on-site content is sufficient in quantity and quality, and whether improvements need to be made to the website’s backlink profile to give the perception of authority and credibility in the search results.
There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach and every website will have different requirements, based on their current setup and what their competitors are doing to rank well. SEO is a game of relative metrics, so if your competitor websites are outperforming you on technical, content and authority elements, we need to ensure a strategy is put in place to close any gaps.’
Three ways to increase organic website traffic
Let’s dive into some ways you can work towards closing the gaps in your SEO traffic strategy.
Perform competitor keyword research
Lots of the best keyword rank tracking tools include extra features for performing competitor keyword gap analysis. This allows you to quickly identify which keywords your competitors rank highly for, but your website doesn’t. This is a simple way to start building out logical new topics to cover that will appeal to your target reader and broaden your keyword reach.
Take a look at Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool below.
Take a topic clustering approach
Topic clustering is an effective SEO strategy to grow organic website traffic that involves creating a network of related content around core topical themes that are relevant to your business.
This approach helps search engines understand the breadth and depth of your expertise on a particular subject. By organising your content into clusters, you create a clear hierarchy that both search engines and users can easily navigate.
Create pillar pages that focus on the core of your topics, with your ‘clusters’ linking into that key page using keywords that you want it to rank for as anchor text. This approach will strengthen your pillar page, demonstrating your topical authority.
Perform metadata optimisations
Another tip on how to increase website traffic is to take time to optimise your site’s metadata. Claire Wilder, SEO Account Manager at Embryo, gives her opinion on what makes it such a vital action:
‘Metadata optimisation is one of the most important on-page elements of SEO. It is vital to let search engines know the intent of your page so they know what page to rank for what term. Metadata optimisation is the first stage in this journey and almost always my first go-to on a new website.’
Essentially, metadata (including meta title tags and meta descriptions)helps search engines understand who you are and what your pages should rank for. Not only can it more effectively signpost a user onto your site, it also indicates what your site wants to rank for better to search engine algorithms. This gives a double whammy of website traffic optimisation.
2. Direct Traffic
If you’re achieving direct traffic give yourself a massive pat on the back. This means you’re successfully building brand equity. In other words, people remember your brand and reach you by directly searching for you.
How to increase direct website traffic: Three of the most important ways
Learning how to increase website traffic from direct searches means building brand awareness. Once you’re known and remembered, you’ll be more readily considered by your target audience when they come to need your services or make a purchase. Embryo’s Head of Brand, Hannah Matthewman, gives us an insight into how to go about this:
‘To build brand awareness effectively you have to be memorable. Therefore your brand activity should be authentic and in keeping with your brand guidelines and tone of voice, ensuring your audience will clearly identify your brand and engage.
Another great way to build brand awareness and loyalty is through creating brand ambassadors and partnering with influencers who can amplify your business to new audiences in a positive authentic way.’
Here are some other key ways to build your brand awareness.
Out-of-home advertising
Don’t forget the value of offline advertising. This doesn’t just mean billboards, it encompasses all kinds of irl brand activations from experiential events to direct mail. Get creative with the ways you get in front of your target audience and you could reap the rewards in the form of branded searches and increased website traffic.
Offer value before purchase
Build goodwill with your potential customers by thinking carefully about what value you can offer them for free. This might take the form of a white paper, educational content, useful statistics from research or even free samples or demos. When they come to make a purchase, you’ll be a top choice – having already given them something helpful.
A clever way to do this is by leveraging your industry knowledge into informational resources. Not only does this build trust in the services you provide but it also helps you stand out in a crowded marketplace, making your brand more memorable.
At Embryo we love sharing our wealth of insider agency knowledge to help businesses who are chasing growth to scale up. This has paid off for us, as we’ve been approached by clients for expert marketing services who have accelerated their growth by using our extensive free resources, including our ever-popular, free-to-download SEO A-Z. Consider what you could offer.
Run email campaigns
The old rule of 7 states that people have to see an ad at least 7 times before they purchase.
While it’s difficult to quantify this exact number, it makes a good general point – the more you can remind a reader you exist, the more likely it is that they’ll think to search for you when they come to purchase.
In an advertising-saturated world, a newsletter is an incredible opportunity to get in front of your potential customers’ eyes on a daily basis. If they’re receiving your email marketing on a regular basis, there’s a better chance your name will be the one they think of when the time is right.
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Deeper insights
3. Paid Traffic
While organic traffic is important, paid strategies also play a vital role in how to increase website traffic quickly. Being able to segment your target ad audience means that you can get in front of the exact people you think will connect best with your brand. When optimised using manual and algorithmic refinements, paid ads can become an enormously fruitful source of website traffic.
Landing pages and programmatic, two ways to increase paid website traffic
Like any channel, paid ads require some finessing to make them work for your goals. These are some of the top things to try to get more from your ad budget and increase traffic to your website.
Design purpose-built landing pages
Landing pages are the web pages that visitors end up on when they click an ad. Some marketers don’t realise that you don’t just have to use an existing site web page as your landing page. Each ad or ad group can link to purpose-built landing pages tailored to the segmented audience you’re targeting with your approach.
Tailoring your landing page to your ad group with compelling visuals and an engaging copy will not only enhance your visitor’s experience but also potentially maximise conversions and enhance Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Opt for programmatic advertising
Consider programmatic advertising to take your paid traffic strategy to the next level. This style of paid advertising operates by using AI-driven platforms to purchase and optimise ad placements in real time. Taking this approach enables you to run hyper-targeted campaigns across a wide network of websites, reaching your ideal audience at the right moment.
Using these data management platforms gives you the distinct advantage of being able to create detailed audience segments, ensuring your ads are shown to the most relevant potential customers, potentially lowering your cost per acquisition while boosting conversion rates.
Enhance your bidding strategies
While setting up a basic ad account is simple, the real value comes from implementing a well-thought-through bidding strategy. Expert PPC management involves using more advanced techniques to optimise budget allocation. The aim is not only to drive more paid traffic to your site but to ensure the quality of the traffic is high and the cost to acquire this traffic is controlled as much as possible.
Take a look at Embryo’s comprehensive guide to PPC bidding strategies to fine-tune your tactics to drive sustainable paid website traffic growth.
4. Referral Traffic
Another salient stream of website traffic to pursue is referral traffic. These users find their way to your website through links that aren’t from your own website or search results. Instead, they come from other websites, blogs, social media platforms, or online directories.
Referral traffic is valuable because it often brings in users who are already interested in your niche or industry. This makes them more likely to lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
How to increase referral website traffic with digital PR and backlinks
From investing in digital PR activities to starting link exchanges, creating a stream of traffic from other reputable websites to your own is a worthwhile use of time.
Not only will you likely build more traffic to your website, but you’re also likely to increase your site’s authority and domain rating (DR). In turn, this can significantly boost your organic rankings and traffic.
Invest in digital PR
Whether you plan your own creative digital PR campaign or offer expert commentary on trending topics, digital PR activities all add up to getting your business mentioned and linked online.
If you’re just starting digital PR you can access specialist online PR platforms like Connectively to get in touch with journalists who have requests to gain links. This coverage will bring in website traffic as well as expose more people to your brand, creating increased brand awareness.
Build high-quality backlinks
Think outside of the box to create high-quality backlinks which are crucial for increasing referral traffic. Some link-building examples include guest posting on reputable sites within your industry and creating linkable assets such as infographics or informational guides. Any chance you have to prompt a link from a reputable site to your own, take it.
5. Social Traffic
Social traffic can come from any social media platform that you use to promote your brand. The staple platforms include Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Pinterest. Users might find their way to your site from one of your own posts, but it’s also possible that they might have followed a link to your site from another user on the platform. This democratisation of influence is the real power of social media.
In such a digitally connected world, the fruits of reaching so many people right on their personal smart devices can be huge. So if you’re wondering how to increase website traffic from your business socials, here are some simple methods that break down how our own paid social experts do it.
Posting quality content that’s tailored to connect with your target audience is the best way to get more quality website traffic from socials over time.
However, if you have the budget to do so, paid social media ads can be an excellent way to boost your traffic if executed well.
Essentially, platforms can use your ad budget to promote your selected ads to far more people than they would ordinarily get shown to as a standard post. This increased visibility increases the likelihood of it reaching interested viewers.
However, this isn’t just a magic ‘on-switch’ that instantly pushes traffic to your site. The ad post has to be compelling enough to persuade the individuals who see it to take action and click on your site. Do this with these tips:
- Reading our guide to copywriting for social media to ensure the content on your posts is engaging
- Creating clear calls to action (CTAs) that prompt a next step
- Using eye-catching visuals that stop users from scrolling past your ad
Tip – A bonus of using paid social ads is the data you glean about who clicks on your ads. These demographic metrics can help you to pinpoint exactly who your ads are resonating with to better understand your target customer persona and in turn allow you to strengthen the relevancy of your posts to them.
Optimise your post-timing
Did you know that optimising the time you post on social media can increase reach? This is because users tend to be more active at certain times of the day.
The initial reception to a social media post can determine how much visibility the algorithm determines it deserves. For instance, if you post at 5 am when people are mostly asleep you’re unlikely to get the traction that a post will get when people are awake before work between 7 am and 9 am.
Try including user-generated content
User-generated content is, you guessed it, made by your platform users. An issue that businesses can come up against is that their product photography looks too polished. The fact that you’ve probably developed a visual identity for your posts can in fact count against you by making your feed look a little flat.
Incorporating user-generated content can really help to fight this effect. The more organic look of (mostly) amateur product photography in organic settings, styled with personality can inject a much-needed X-factor onto your feed. Simply ask the original poster’s permission and you’ll likely be able to repost it, including for use on paid ads.
The other effect is that it builds trust. Seeing the ‘social proof’ of real people using and enjoying your products gives authenticity to your brand. Studies find that this is rewarded with higher traffic, from a click-through rate that’s reportedly up to 4 times higher than non-ugc posts, to a 50% reduction in cost-per-click.
Check out an example of user-generated Instagram content by jewellers Taylor & Hart.
Expert help, ready to boost your website traffic
By implementing these strategies across all five key channels, you’ll have a comprehensive approach for how to increase website traffic for your business.
As you can see, the interplay of channel strategies can get complex, so if you need expert assistance Embryo is always here to help. Just reach out to our team to discuss your traffic goals.
