4 Simple & Proven Ways To Increase Website Traffic in 2023

Every business stands to benefit from a stronger digital presence, and generating traffic to your website is a crucial step towards achieving that.

The more people that see your brand, the higher the number of those who engage with it and eventually become paying customers.

Increased website traffic also translates to better brand visibility or ranking, which in turn produces more traffic that positively impacts your bottom line.

When you successfully drive traffic to your website, it can help you:

• Analyse how well your marketing strategies are working
• Generate qualified leads
• Gather insights about your audience to satisfy their need better
• Improve the credibility of your brand
• Build relationships with customers
• Boost conversions

These are things that marketers and business owners everywhere desire. Yet, going by a recent study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of professionals struggle with driving traffic to their websites.

If traffic generation seems like a tough nut to crack, you are not alone.

There are some simple and remarkably effective tactics that you can put into play right away to cause a significant increase in the traffic your website generates.

Whether you are brand new or a small/medium-sized business trying to get more people to find and visit your website, these four techniques promise to be worth the shot.

Prepare With Keyword Research

You can’t attract visitors to your page if you don’t know what they are looking for and how to present it to them.

Keyword research is the first step on the road to getting the website traffic you need. It allows you to understand the needs of your users so you can tailor your content to satisfy them.

Tools like Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer are very important resources for keyword research. All you have to do is enter keywords that are related to the core of your business.

For instance, if you are a company that sells canned food, then you can enter “canned foods” or “ready-to-eat food” and your research will display results for all other relevant keywords that people also search for.

You can’t just randomly pick keywords from the list that you think might work. You have to screen them and select the ones that are most popular amongst your target audience.

To filter keywords, you should pay attention to:

• Keyword difficulty: Some keywords are much harder to rank than others, so you need to keep that in mind when making a selection. The more specific the keyword, the lesser the web traffic it might generate.
• Search volume: This is the number of times that people searched for a particular keyword each month in various countries. Keywords that have lower search volumes will be cheaper and easier to rank for, especially if you plan to use them for paid ads. However, they could hurt the quality/relevance “score” of your website because they might be less relevant.
• Competition: Higher search volumes typically translate to more people using those keywords and paying big bucks to rank for them, which might make it difficult for you to set yourself apart and achieve the visibility you’re looking for.

Keep in mind that keywords only give you a narrow picture. To see the complete picture or most of it, consider what the user had in mind when searching for a particular word or phrase — i.e., their search intent.

When you understand the intent behind the search for a certain keyword, you will better know how to formulate a marketing strategy around it and what type of content to create in response to it.

Some keywords require long-form guides, some require step-by-step tutorials, and others work best with reviews and content forms like videos or infographics.

Essentially, there are four types of search intent behind keywords:

Informational

These are searches that are inspired by a desire to learn more about something. The audience is seeking answers to a question or solutions to a problem.

Keywords with this kind of intent will probably not lead to conversion right away, but they give you a chance to engage potential customers by developing content to provide the information they need.

Searches with this intent typically contain modifiers like how to, why, what does, history of, how can, the best way to…

Navigational

When users search for keywords that include brand names, that means they already know what they are looking for. They are familiar with the brand and probably just want to visit the website to perform a specific task.

Use the queries that contain your brand name to improve your rankings and ensure your website is optimised to help them achieve their goals without any hassle.

Commercial

This type of query indicates that a user has a strong intent to act upon the result of their search — to buy, try, join, subscribe, or do something. Keywords with modifiers like coupon, online, buy, free shipping, deals, etc., typically point to commercial intent.

Transactional

This is midway between informational and commercial intent. It shows that the user has a strong interest in the thing they are searching for but is carrying out an investigation before they make up their minds.

By combining keywords with this intent with the right content and products, you can lure these users in and convince them to patronise you. Searches with transactional intent can contain modifiers like top 10, best, vs., reviews, etc.

You can easily figure out the intent behind keywords by analysing the results on search engines or using good old common sense.

Based on your research, select keywords with search intents that you can use your product or service to satisfy.

Always remember that the best keywords for your business should be:

• Relevant to your target audience
• Have a low keyword difficulty, so it’s easier to rank for
• Have a substantial search volume that’s sure to generate decent website traffic
• Able to provide direct or indirect value to your brand

When you find such keywords, make sure you create great content around it and promote it.

Tweak Existing Content

According to a Forrester report, 50% of the content created by businesses goes unused. This shows that consistent and frequent content development means nothing if no one is looking at it.

Instead of creating new content, direct some of that energy into updating the content you already have, and repurposing it for other mediums.

Brands such as Hubspot, Backlinko, and Ahrefs have reported an increase of over 100% in organic search views for their websites after updating and optimising old blog posts and other content to ensure it stays fresh and evergreen.

Keep in mind that old content can refer to anything published a month ago or four years back.

Monitor your website analytics to discover the pages where web traffic has reduced, compare them to the search results that are ranking at the top for related content, and use that as a guideline to optimise your own pages.

Content may not rank at all and can get demoted for a number of reasons, including missing or outdated stats, year in the title, screenshots, and links.

An easy way to restore the evergreen status of your content is to simply refresh the dated sections. Add new images or screenshots, replace broken links, change certain dates, replace old stats, and publish it again.

In some cases, you might have to overhaul the entire content and redo it from scratch, so it’s good as new.

Tweaking content also includes improving the look and feel of your website to enhance user experience. The layout of your site should be easy to skim and navigate.

It should not have too many distracting features, take too long to load, or contain large-sized images. The font should be legible, the lines should not be too wide, and it should be mobile-friendly.

When all these things are done right, your website’s ranking will improve, driving more users to your pages, and ensuring that they have a positive experience of your brand, which will, in turn, drive them further down the conversion channel.

Content should also be easy to share. When you create strong content and users promote it on other platforms, their social currency goes up, and you get an increase in website traffic.

You can incentivise your readers to circulate your content by adding social share buttons, a “click to tweet” feature, and including quotable snippets they can quickly share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., without having to type out the message themselves.

Keep testing and improving upon your content and website because there is always a way they can be revitalised and made more appealing and functional.

Promote Your Content to Drive More Web Traffic

This is the part where many fail. People think that publishing content is all it takes. The truth is that the “create it and they will come” strategy simply does not suffice anymore.

You need to be intentional about creating visibility for your brand by promoting strategic content using the resources at your disposal.

Collaborating with bloggers and professionals in your niche could be one way to promote content either through guest blogging or by hosting them on your blog. The guest will, in turn, share the content with their audience.

Find a business complementary to yours that’s a good fit for your brand, create a blog post that fills a gap in their content, then write to the content editor of that brand and pitch it.

If your website doesn’t already have a blog, you need to set up one right away. The benefits your business stands to gain from blogging include:

• Increased lead generation and retention
• Improved search engine optimisation
• Stronger relationships with your customers
• Better website ranking through backlink acquisition
• Established brand authority and credibility

Partnering with industry experts, bloggers, and other businesses with audiences that are relevant to your brand is an effective way to drive organic traffic to your site and boost the overall standing of your business.

Stay Focused

There are various marketing strategies out there, but not all of them are going to work for your brand.

Rather than changing strategies every other month or applying too many at a time, it would serve you better to focus your time, effort, and resources on pursuing a single strategy.

This way, you’re able to properly manage all the aspects of your chosen marketing tactic, monitor the results, and create targeted solutions to scale up successful efforts or improve upon areas that are not doing so well in helping you to generate quality website traffic.

For instance, if your marketing budget is £1,000 per month, and you invest all of it in one strategy – like content marketing – you will see tangible results in a short while.

However, if you invest £200 in pay-per-click ads, another £200 in SEO, £400 in influencer marketing, and the last £200 in sponsored posts on Instagram and Facebook, you will be spreading yourself thin.

You will probably not see meaningful ROI on any of them.

When people say they tried everything and nothing worked, this is the reason why. They were trying to win trophies with multiple marketing tactics without giving any plan a proper shot.

Leo Widrich from Buffer – a super successful SaaS company that develops scheduling tools – revealed that the company practised the “bullseye marketing strategy”.

This approach prioritises the quickest and most affordable techniques for attracting new leads and boosting sales.

For their first year of business, Buffer employed a single marketing strategy, choosing to focus on content marketing alone – and it’s been one of their best decisions to date.

Content marketing and SEO lend themselves perfectly to businesses that are introducing innovative or disruptive ideas to the market.

It’s only logical that no one can search for your company or product name if they don’t even know you exist.

The chances are that your clientele will search for solutions to their problems. In other words, they will use informational keywords.

If your product is that solution, and you create high-quality blog content around those keywords, you stand a great chance of attracting some new leads.

You can take a similar approach by making content marketing and SEO the core of your marketing operations for an extended period before diversifying your efforts.

Figure out a strategy that is most aligned with the results you want to achieve.

Then dedicate your resources towards doing it as excellently as possible for a few months, after which you can reevaluate to see if it’s worth continuing. You can also decide to change tactics or add a different strategy to maximise your growth potential.

It’s better to generate a decent inflow of website traffic through a concentrated marketing effort, than little to no traffic from various avenues.

How to Increase Website Traffic – Final Words

How do you get people to notice your brand in this ever-crowding digital space?

The answer is not as overwhelming as you might think, although it will require some effort, practice and patience on your part.

Implementing some basic principles can build authority, drive traffic to your website, and contribute to your bottom line.

Getting users to find and visit your website doesn’t happen overnight, but you’re bound to see a significant increase in your traffic stream by incorporating these simple tactics into your overall business strategy.