16 Killer Tactics Proven to Boost Quality Website Traffic (Plus 2 Bonus Methods)

We’re all trying to do it.

Get more, quality traffic to our websites.

You can spend days, weeks, and months researching the topic without realizing there are tactics you may be overlooking.

This article is about the proven tactics to get more traffic to your website that will likely convert to leads, sales, opt-ins, and more.

You’ll learn about four main areas:

1. Organic Search.
2. Social Media.
3. Email Marketing.
4. Referral Links.

Plus, you’ll get two bonus strategies to speed up the entire process.

These are proven methods we’ve used to generate millions of dollars’ worth of website traffic for our clients.

Let’s dive in.

Organic Search

Organic search is traffic generated from free search engine results. Anytime someone clicks a non-ad link to your website from a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, it’s categorized as an Organic Search visit in Google Analytics.

Organic Search is usually the most common source of traffic to a website, and most of that traffic comes from Google.

And over half of those searches are conducted on mobile devices.

Organic search is vital to your website.

Here’s how you can get more traffic from searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo:

Create Quality Content

Let’s get this one out of the way first: your content must be quality. Quality content provides immediate value to the reader. And value could mean knowledge, entertainment, or inspiration.

There’s not a set formula for quality content.

You have to provide the value.

Listen to your audience. If they are commenting, sharing, and liking it on social media, you know they find value. If not, keep trying new ideas.

Long-Form Content

While it’s true that your audience likely has a shorter attention span, the best performing content is long-form.

According to Neil Patel, A Moz/BuzzSumo study, HubSpot, and Search Engine Watch, readers want longer content, not shorter content.

The data is clear. Long-form content gets shared more …

… and gets more organic traffic.

Think about the questions your audience has or problems they want to solve for content ideas.

Then, take detailed, deep dives into solving those problems for your audience. Create in-depth blog posts with photos, diagrams, and charts. Shoot for 3,000 words or more.

Formatting Is Imperative

Formatting is important with long-form content.

Your reader will get lost in 3,000 words of 6-sentence paragraphs.

Try these formatting hacks to help guide the reader through the most critical part.

• Subheadings – break content into logical sections identified with subheadings.
• Short sentences – this is where your reader’s distracted mind plays a big part. Keep your reader’s attention with sentences shorter than 10 words when you can.
• Short paragraphs – forget what your English teacher taught you. AP style does not apply online. Whitespace helps your reader’s eye focus and keep place on the screen; 1-2 sentence paragraphs are perfect – 3 works, too.
• Lists – use bulleted or numbered lists as often as it makes sense.
• Bold & italics – use bold and italics to highlight key terms or points to remember. Stay away from underlining words online as it typically signals a link.
• Edit, edit, edit – remove all unnecessary (“fluff”) content. Your readers won’t return if you waste their time.

Apply SEO Best Practices

Another thing you can do to boost search traffic is to apply SEO best practices. SEO can get very technical, very quickly … but don’t worry.

Anyone can easily do basic SEO.

The concept of SEO is to give Google (or any other search engine) confidence in your content.

Google’s confidence comes from two major areas:

1. Relevance of content.
2. Content value.

Google understands what your content is about by automatically “reading” every web page on your site and looking for clues.

Those clues are things like the Title Tag, H1 and H2 tags, the words used in the body content, image tags, and image file names.

This step-by-step guide to increasing your search rankings teaches you how to use those clues to increase Google’s confidence.

The second half of SEO is helping Google know how valuable your content is.

Google uses clues to understand value as well. Value clues include links from other websites called backlinks, click through rates from search results pages, and social sharing.

Backlinks are generally regarded as the strongest value clues for Google. Learn how to get quality backlinks in our article on increasing your search ranking.

Need Help Getting More Organic Traffic?

If you’d like help getting more search traffic to your website, let Strategy help. We’ve used the tactics above to increase clients search traffic over 96%.

Get More Visits from Social Media

Social Media is another great channel to gain traffic for your website. The purpose of social media should always be strategic … don’t just post on social media to “have a presence.”

For many businesses, social media can be a strategic platform to generate blog traffic, business leads, and, ultimately, sales.

The key to social media is to provide value more than asking for things.

Use this general rule: post 4 value-add posts to every sales-related post.

With that broad guideline in mind, here are four ways to generate traffic from your social media platforms.

Share Your Blog Posts

If you’re following this guide, you’re creating some amazing content for your audience. You need to share that content to get eyeballs on it.

Don’t just share your content once, either.

Your content won’t be time-sensitive, so share your new posts 3–5 times in the week after you publish. Come back and share it again a few weeks later, too.

Share your most popular content regularly. We call this type of content “evergreen content” because you can keep sharing it and providing value indefinitely.

Sharing your content on social media is also a great way to learn what your audience likes.

Which leads us to the next point …

Respond to Comments and Shares

Make sure to acknowledge comments and shares online. Respond to as many comments as you can with thoughtful responses.

A thoughtful response to a comment or gratitude for a share goes a long way to building trust with your readers.

Post Regularly

Don’t stop. Keep publishing content on a regular basis to keep your brand top of mind with your readers and to build trust.

If you’re infrequent with your posts, your readers will wonder if you’re committed and question your authority.

You’ll find the right frequency for your bandwidth but shoot for at least once a week to build an audience. Some experts will even argue for publishing new content 5+ times a week.

Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar is the best way to publish content consistently.

To create a content calendar:

1. Brainstorm ideas (including keyword research).
2. Make a list of topics.
3. Assign a writer for each.
4. Assign a date for each.
5. Start writing.

The best content calendar I’ve used is called Co-Schedule. It’s a paid service, but it is well worth it for serious content creators.

Co-Schedule integrates with WordPress, every major social media platform (even Instagram and Pinterest), Evernote, Google Docs, and has a litany of slick productivity features.

Or if you want to save money, use a free option like Google Sheets.

Want Help Getting More Social Media Traffic?

If you’d like help getting more social media traffic to your website, let Strategy help. We’ve used the tactics above to generate over $500,000 in social media traffic in the past year.

Boost Your Website Traffic Using Email

The third way you can get more traffic to your website is with email marketing.

Email marketing has some of the strongest cases for ROI among online marketing strategies.

According to a study by Smart Insights, 72% of companies said email created a profitable and enduring customer relationship.

67% of companies said email provided the best ROI, according to the same study.

Here’s how to generate more traffic to your website using email:

Create a Tripwire/Lead Magnet Offer

A tripwire or lead magnet offer is an offer your audience can’t refuse.

You want to offer something of value to your audience in exchange for an email address and permission to contact them.

A good lead magnet:

• Solves a specific problem or answers a specific question.
• Provides immediate value.
• Quick to consume (not a 4-week e-course).
• Delivered immediately and automatically.

Once a user opts-in for your lead magnet, you can begin to tell your brand’s story via email.

Use a Welcome Sequence to Tell Your Story

A welcome sequence is a series of emails automatically delivered to a new subscriber.

This email series is great because you can immediately connect with a new prospect while they’re still in a euphoric state from your incredibly valuable lead magnet.

A welcome email series also provides the best platform (other than a live conversation) to introduce your company and value proposition.

Here’s an example of an email welcome sequence:

• Email 1: Deliver lead magnet and intro brand.
• Email 2: Highlight a specific tip in the lead magnet.
• Email 3: Share content of value from your blog.
• Email 4: Sales offer with time limit.
• Email 5: Survey to find interests and segment (PS – sales offer).

Consider Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing automation is like a welcome sequence on steroids. Instead of triggering emails only when someone subscribes for the first time, automation triggers email sequences based on behaviors users take on your website.

Let’s look at some examples to explain:

• Cart Abandonment – a series of emails automatically sent to users who add an item to their shopping cart, but don’t check out.
• Birthdays – automatically send a birthday discount to your customers.
• Refills/Reorders – send emails based on time from purchase to reorder food, beauty, or any other consumable product.
• Interest – send emails to subscribers based on products or blog posts they view or based on interest they’ve shown via survey responses.
• Reengagement – send emails to users who haven’t visited your website in a while.
• Survey – create segments of subscribers based on survey responses.

My favorite tool for email marketing automation is called Drip. It offers the best balance of simplicity and features. You can do all of the use cases listed above and more.

It’s also very affordable.

Another automation tool is MailChimp. It’s an excellent email service provider as well. Although it cannot do all of the automation described above, you can do basic automation.

Develop a Publishing Calendar

As with blog content, we recommend creating a publishing calendar for email. An email publishing calendar will help you:

• Send emails consistently.
• Strategically time emails.
• Coordinate email with blog content.
• Coordinate email with social media.

Want Help Getting More Email Traffic?

If you’d like help getting more email traffic to your website, let Strategy help. We’ve used the tactics above to help generate over $2.5M in website traffic in the past year.

Use Referrals to Get More Website Traffic

Referral traffic is any click from another website to a page on your website (that’s not from search or social media).

Referral links are commonly called “backlinks,” and they are generally known to be the most important factor in Google search rankings.

We have a full list of strategies to get backlinks in our article on Improving Your Website Ranking, but here are some highlights to focus on for boosting traffic:

Write Guest Posts

Guest posting is another great method to gain referral traffic.

A guest post is a blog post that you write for someone else’s website. As part of your content, you include links to your website.

As a result, you get readers of a different blog to your website, increasing your audience. This is especially exciting because those new readers may not find your site any other way.

Find opportunities to guest post by searching Google for something like “guest post [your industry]” and look for sites that openly accept guest posts.

Connect with Influencers

Influencers are maybe the fastest free way to explode traffic numbers for your site. It’s a long-term, time-intensive effort, though.

The idea is to build a relationship over time with people who hold influence in your industry.

Here are some ways to build those relationships:

• Follow on all social media platforms, subscribe to their email list.
• Share their content.
• Tag them in your content.
• Comment on their posts.

You may find they follow you back and even share your content without you needing to ask. However, when the time is right, i.e. a natural opportunity presents itself, you can engage them directly via email or a direct message.

Perhaps you use a quote from them or credit them with a concept you write about on your blog.

Send the influencers a message and ask them to review for accuracy.

Often times, you’ll get a response and he or she will share your content as a way of thanking you for the exposure.

Build Relationships with Content Creators

Similar to the industry influencers, you can build relationships with other content creators in your industry. Your goal with content creators is to secure guest posts, cross promotions, backlinks, or other marketing opportunities as it makes sense.

PR and Free Media

Appeal to local or regional media outlets for free media coverage.

Media loves human interest stories, so play off that as it relates to your business. Maybe you helped a customer make a dramatic life change or played a role in keeping jobs in your city.

Try these tactics:

• Follow the media’s social media profiles to see what stories they cover.
• Follow the reporter(s) who cover stories related to your business.
• Comment and share on stories as it makes sense.
• Pitch the media outlet or reporter directly using a press release.

Every media outlet has a website now. When you get your story covered, they will often link to your website on the online article.

There are unlimited ways to get referral links to your site. Try some different ones (we have more listed here) to see what works in your industry.

Want Help Getting More Referral Traffic?

If you’d like help getting more referral traffic to your website, let Strategy help. We’ve used the tactics above to help generate over $2.5M in website traffic in the past year.

Bonus: Paid Search and Social Media

All of the strategies above are 100% proven to work. However, most take months before you’ll see a noticeable impact on your website traffic.

The short-term answer is to gain traffic through paid search.

Paid ads on Facebook and Google AdWords have proven to give our clients an immediate, profitable boost in traffic.

Here’s why we love paid traffic as a solution to boosting website traffic, fast:

• It’s immediate – paid ads start running in a matter of minutes and will show results in a matter of days, instead of months.
• You only pay for clicks – unlike traditional advertising, you only pay for clicks with online ads. You don’t have to pay unless you get traffic to your site.
• Incredible targeting – online ads let you target your ideal customer with incredible accuracy based on search terms, interests, demographics, and even buying behavior.
• You can measure ROI – we tie our ad campaigns to ROI using conversion metrics and goal values so you know your return on ad spend.

Conclusion

More website traffic is the goal of any online marketer (and more leads, sales, etc. by extension). This guide has consolidated the best strategies from our years of client experience.

So, when revisiting your tactics to increase website traffic, keep these 4 areas in mind:

1. Organic Search.
2. Social Media.
3. Email Marketing.
4. Referral Links.

All areas are ripe with potential traffic growth for almost any website.

Additionally, consider paid traffic using Facebook or Google AdWords ads to see a boost in traffic fast.

If you’re ready for help getting traffic to your website, contact Strategy today. We’d love to chat about options to help boost your traffic … and your business!