Increase Website Traffic with Less Marketing

Want to know how to increase website traffic? Having a high volume of traffic coming to your blog is one of the signs of success in blogging. You write content because you want people to visit your website to read it and more visitors means more benefits for you. One obvious way to increase website traffic is by advertising but not everyone has that money.

I am going to show you the 10 measures you can adopt to increase website traffic but before we get started we need to first know the four types of website traffic.

• Organic Traffic
• Social Traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Referral Traffic

Of the four types above, Organic Traffic is the most important. Organic traffic comes direct from search engines, brings in more targeted visitors and is valued more than any other kind of traffic. Coming second is referral traffic but it all depends on the kind of website that is referring you website traffic. Referrals from popular sites usually bring in quality traffic compared to traffic from low quality sites. Direct traffic comes from a user visiting a web page’s URL directly from a browser then social traffic comes from social networks. If you want to increase your organic traffic, you have to know how to optimize your posts for search engine.

How do we increase Website Traffic?

For the points am about to mention below, make sure you keep your actions and endeavors repetitive then with time you will begin noticing an increase in your traffic volume. You are not going to increase your traffic in one day or one month unless you buy traffic or advertise, which is not our main point here. I will first cite out the Don’ts then after cite out the Do’s to increase website traffic.

Don’t do the following

Don’t do what i have listed below if you are trying to increase traffic for your blog. These actions will hurt your website’s value and ranking, hence decrease your traffic too.

1 – Buy Traffic: Buying traffic is not bad but for how long are going to keep on doing it? And besides, bought traffic usually brings in non-targeted visitors who might not be relevant for your blog. Some companies send you targeted traffic when you buy traffic from them but not all of their traffic is targeted. Another drawback is if the traffic coming in is mainly coming from low quality websites then your website ranking is likely to be affected too. My thoughts about this is if you are trying to maintain a high quality website, don’t buy web traffic.

2 – Spam: You shouldn’t spam forums, social networks and other websites with links intending to drive traffic to your blog. It might work for you for a short time but believe me, when readers become aware of your acts they won’t click on your links or even visit your website which means less traffic for you.

3 – Post bad content: I have seen bloggers writing catchy posts and sharing them on social media. Such posts usually get high click-through rates but it tarnishes your blog’s image. Never lose direction even if you are getting low traffic on your blog. Try to maintain a good reputation and traffic will come with time.

Do the following

So now that you know what you should not do when trying to increase website traffic, you can try using the strategies below and your traffic will increase with time.

1 – Get Social. Social network traffic is very vital and is not hard to get compared to organic traffic. Get active on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and Instagram but just like i said above, don’t spam. Let readers click on your links willingly. Make sure your web pages are shareable too. If they are not then you might think of adding some social plugins on your blog to enable readers easily share your posts on social networking websites.

2 – Build an email list. Make sure you work on building an email list from day one of starting your blog but don’t force visitors to subscribe. Let them subscribe willingly and this way you will be able to send them posts directly to their email. Alternatively, you can link your list to the RSS feeds on your blog so that your readers are notified whenever you publish a new post.

3 – Optimize your Posts for SEO. Posts that are well optimized for SEO will rank high on search engines and drive you traffic. If you have 50 posts that are ranking high on search engine and each gets 10,000 clicks, that means 500,000 monthly clicks and millions of page views for your blog which is a good deal. You should know how to optimize your posts for search engine.

4 – Build Backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks from a web page to a website. If you know the importance of Backlinks then you should be knowing that they are not only vital when it comes to SEO but web traffic too. Backlinks will get your blog referral traffic and will improve your Page Rank and Domain Authority which are both key aspects in getting organic traffic.

Read: Best ways to build backlinks for a blog

5 – Upload Videos on YouTube. YouTube is currently the second most viewed website in the whole world coming in second from Google. At the time of writing this article, statistics prove YouTube is more viewed than Facebook but most bloggers forget about this video streaming website. Upload good quality videos on YouTube and add a link back to your website. The more views you get, the more traffic you will get and perhaps if a video goes viral on YouTube then you are likely to receive millions of referral traffic on your blog. One other good thing is such videos will remain online forever in case they don’t violate any Terms of Service implicating they will keep driving traffic to your website.

6 – Use Catchy Headlines. When a user keys in a Keyword in a search engine, several results on the same topic are returned but how do you influence a visitor to click on your post and leave out the rest? This is where catchy headlines come in. A headline like “Best Hosting providers you should try” will often get more clicks than one like “Web Hosting providers you should try”. Most SEO experts encourage 70% of your time to be spent on article’s title. Make sure it’s catchy and can attract a visitors attention more.

7 – Target Long Tail Keywords. Long Tail Keywords are a few words longer than specific target keywords. The long tail strategy has been proven to work and many professional bloggers have testified to it. One of the ways of finding Long Tail Keywords is by checking the related Google searches below the search results. Long Tail Keywords drive in specific traffic to your blog and are less competitive. Targeting them will boost your organic traffic by over 50%.

Read: How to Find Long Tail Keywords

8 – Emphasize on Internal Linking. One other way of increasing website traffic is through internal linking. Imagine every visitor that visits your website views over 10 articles, that is not bad traffic from a single users’s visit. One mistake people make is adding too many links on their web pages which is not ideal for SEO reasons. Make sure the number of links doesn’t out-weigh your content. Through internal linking you will be able to generate more traffic for your blog.

9 – Improve Page Rank. While you to increase website traffic then you ought to think of improving your page rank. Websites with high Page Rank usually rank well on search engine and receive a lot of organic and referral traffic. Page Rank also shows how relevant your pages to search engine bots implicating your web pages are likely to receive more priority if their page ranks score high on the scale.

Learn: How to improve Google Page Rank

10 – Build a Brand. I have saved the very best for the last. If you wan’t to increase website traffic then you have to put all your efforts on building a brand. When it comes to building a brand, you are more focused on write quality content for your website than you are to monetizing it though to some extent you might have to monetize it. You don’t need to make money at the expense of your readers, provide them with relevant information and make money out of their satisfaction. A website with a strong brand will not only have dedicated readers who always bounce back but will build their trust in you as well. Your readers will follow you and will trust whatever information is coming from your source and recommend it to others.

The 10 techniques above should help you increase website traffic after a few months of implementation. If you put all this into work and don’t see any results then you might think of reviewing the kind of content you are writing on your blog or perhaps check to see if you have been hit by the Google Panda effect.