[6-Step Guide] How To Get Traffic To Your Website in 2023?

Once you publish a functional website, you must attract online visitors. We have already posted 10 ways to achieve this without doing any SEO on our blog.

With this new article, we will show you how to get traffic to your website with no restrictions. Read this as a step-by-step process including 6 main milestones.

#1. Fix Your Website

If you manage to bring online users to your website, you must keep them engaged. To achieve this, you need a responsive & fast website.

Imagine you open a web page that takes forever to load. Most people leave after 2 seconds of waiting. If you force them to wait longer, they will simply disappear for good.

Besides, if the website doesn’t display properly on mobile devices, you offer a bad user experience that negatively affects the online platform’s performance. Get this right!

Core Web Vitals

The Google Search Console (GSC) is a staple tool to monitor your website’s technical health.

First, you want to check if the search engine indexes your web pages. You cannot have a sustainable number of website visitors if Google doesn’t notice you.

Visit the coverage & sitemaps tabs to review this. Ideally, you should have 0 errors & only valid pages. You must also submit the most updated .xml sitemap file.

In the “Experience” section, you can evaluate your web page experience & core web vitals. If not everything is in the green, you will certainly need the help of a professional website developer to fix things up.

Other free tools can help you check your website’s core web vitals. Give a try to the following ones:

• Page Speed Insights

• Yellow Lab Tools

• Key CDN Tools

• Pingdom

• Web Page Test

Make sure that nothing prevents search engine bots from crawling your website & keep an eye on the loading speed.

Website Responsiveness

On average, online users visit websites on mobile more than on desktop. In 2019, Google applied mobile-first indexing to follow the trend. You must ensure your web pages are responsive & functional on multiple devices.

There are thousands of different screen sizes & device specs. If you do not optimize your website, you will likely face critical compatibility issues. Some of them can block users or prevent them from navigating your domain.

Take time to check on several browsers like Chrome or Safari. A website can work well on Android phones but badly on iOS devices.

If you build a new website, you must consider mobile responsiveness when crafting your mockups. If you have an old existing domain, you may be willing to refresh its design.

The Google Search Console or software listed in the previous section of this article will help you monitor this crucial aspect of your website.

#2. Select Relevant Keywords

To get traffic to your website, you must publish content that online users are looking for. In other words, you will write & publish information that answers the market demand.

In the digital era, the internet is saturated. There are tons of content available everywhere. It became challenging to stand out from the crowd.

Fortunately, there are many ways to check what people are interested in across the internet. This data is available for free. You only need to know how to proceed.

Keyword Research

To identify the most popular online topics, you must perform keyword research. Businesses should do this work for every country & every language they want to get traffic from.

Keep in mind that, for the same country, you may need to produce content in different languages and about different topics.

One of the best ways to get started with your organic keyword research is to use the Google tools. Most people browse the internet by beginning with a Google search. Check the platform database to know what internet users are looking for:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Auto-Suggest
• Google Featured Snippets
• Google People Also Ask

Besides, you can cross-check those topic interests with other tools that are not sourced by the same database. Our top picks for keyword research are:

• Ahrefs

• SEMrush

From this analysis, you could populate a list of keywords & key phrases that will help you create your content. Before that, you must filter this preliminary list.

Keyword Selection Criteria

At this point, you should have a long list of keyword candidates. Now, it is time to choose the right ones.

Remember that the purpose of doing keyword research is to identify the most desired topics that online users want to read. Consequently, you should focus your keyword selection on the following criteria:

• keyword relevance
• search volume
• user intent
• keyword competition

Relevancy is one of the most important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) factors. You cannot write & publish content about tee-shirts if you sell smartphones. Make sure you choose popular keywords & topics that match your business field.

The keyword search volumes indicate how many people look for those terms monthly. You must pick topics having enough interest as there is no point in writing content no one cares about. High search volumes often imply generic keywords, while lower search volumes are linked to more specific ones. A good practice is to find the right balance.

The online user intent makes the difference between keywords that are informational and key phrases that are at the bottom of the sales funnel. It relates to the monthly search volume. In most cases, a higher purchase intent generates fewer searches.

You must perform a competitor benchmark before defining a final list of keywords. Even if the topic seems great, if the competition is too harsh, it may be too challenging to rank for this term. Choose reasonable keywords for which you can realistically compete.

Once you have your keywords, you will optimize your content for them. Check the next section to understand how to proceed.

#3. Optimize Your Content

The keyword list narrows down the scope of work related to content production. Brands need to write blogs, articles, products or services descriptions, headlines, and titles that include those key phrases.

At the same time, the keyword insertion must remain natural. Never do keyword stuffing. Google penalizes this kind of strategy. The purpose is to share valuable information with online users, not try to cheat the search engine algorithms.

Content Production

Creating new content is not a simple task. The internet is full of duplicate & low-quality web pages. If you want to bring traffic to your website, you must produce useful & unique content. Quality beats quantity.

Use your selected keywords to identify what are the online users’ pain points. Write web pages that answer their demand. Make sure you share valuable information.

Overall, the more you write, the better, because it is a sign of expertise & authoritativeness. However, be careful: fluffy content does not perform well. Besides, there is no need to write a 3,000-word product description on your e-commerce website.

Proofread your content before any live publication. Do not forget to check for plagiarism. There are plenty of free tools available online.

Content Optimization & Update

Writing good content based on popular topics is one part of the SEO job. To get traffic to their websites, businesses should also optimize their web pages.

It starts with the page title. From the Content Management System (CMS), you can edit this info with a clear & short description of what the page is about. Keep your page title under 60 characters at max, including spaces.

Write an engaging meta description (150 characters including spaces). On the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), good meta descriptions boost the Click-Through Rates (CTRs). It means more people will visit your website.

Structure your page content with clear & organized subheads. They are extremely useful for web page scanners which represent most of your website traffic. Besides, they help the search engines understand your content better.

A good article should be “evergreen” when applicable. Evergreen content is timeless, which means you won’t need to update it every single month.

Don’t forget to keep your content fresh. After 2 years of publishing, search engines like Google tend to let them disappear far away in their index.

Last content tip: submit your new web pages to search engine indexing. For Google, you just need to do it from the GSC. It is crucial to increase the traffic volume of your domain.

Free Resources

People love free stuff.

Most popular domains propose a service free of charge, or an insightful newsletter, or a simple & useful tool.

To bring traffic to your website, make it shareable & desirable by adding a free resource. It can be anything related to your industry, as long as it brings significant value to online users.

For example, the digital marketer Neil Patel gets most of his traffic from his tool Ubersuggest. People love to use it because it is convenient & free. Think about that when developing your content strategy aiming at boosting the number of your website visitors.

#4 Analyze Your Market

To increase your website traffic, you cannot stay locked inside your bubble. Get out of your comfort zone & do your market research.

Your brand must follow the latest industry trends. What is your target audience interested in? What are the other business players doing? What are the opportunities to get noticed & convert those people into website visitors?

Benchmark Your Competitors

Sometimes, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Monitoring your competitor’s online activity is a solid strategy to understand where they get their website visitors from.

To analyze their best-performing pages, you need to use tools like:

• Ahrefs

• SEMrush

• Similarweb

Here is the information you should care about & review in priority on your competitor websites:

• page traffic
• traffic source
• backlinks & referral domains
• keywords
• page content
• broken links

Look for the competitor web pages that attract the most visitors. They are your gold mine. If they interest online users, you should understand the reason why. Is that because of outstanding content? Or a promotional page? Is that because this topic is trendy? Or useful?

Knowing where the traffic comes from is a precious source of information. Visitors can come from social media platforms, other websites, paid ads, organic search, or email marketing.

Backlinks & referral domains indicate websites that are contextually close to your competitor’s, and so potentially to yours. Besides, if those web owners are interested in linking out to your competition, they may be willing to link to your website.

Keywords are, of course, essential in building the right content strategy that will bring visitors to your website. Check for which keyphrases your top competitors are ranking. You will need to beat them for the most performing ones.

It is always a good thing to benchmark what kind of content other websites in your industry produce. It generates great ideas & allows you to identify what works & what doesn’t… without spending a dime. Let your competitors do that for you & only focus on content that performs.

Broken links are one of the best outreach opportunities. If a source points at your competitor domain having a 404 status code, it is bad for them. You should reach those sources & ask them to link to your existing page instead. They will likely agree as it provides great value to them. On your side, you benefit from an easy backlink that will contribute to boosting your website traffic.

Once you know where your competitors stand, build your content strategy & make sure you produce better content than anyone else across the internet.

Develop An Outreach Strategy

An outreach strategy is a process of “reaching out” off-site media to cooperate for mutual benefits. It is searching for shootouts of your brand.

Here are 5 proven outreach techniques that every digital marketer should consider when looking for great ways to increase traffic on their websites:

• blog posts
• influencers & KOLs
• press release
• communities, journalists, forums in your industry
• digital events & webinars

Blog posts are an excellent technique to mention your website and they are SEO-friendly. They consist in publishing content that you wrote yourself on a relevant domain that will link back to yours. It is a kind of “vote” for your website, and it comes along with some qualified traffic.

We will never recommend enough businesses selling popular B2C items to work with influencers. Those famous people promote your products & redirect potential customers to your website. We have seen domains getting thousands of daily visitors from influencers alone.

Press Releases (PRs) are often expensive. However, we cannot deny their impact on website traffic’s evolution. Choose the right domains that are relevant to your website and check the PR conditions before getting started.

It takes time to build a strong community or get trust from forum members. If you manage to maintain this long-term strategy, the benefits for your websites are huge. Those people will be the advocate of your brand & share it with their relatives.

Finally, online conferences are perfect to showcase your expertise & mention your brand. Proactively attend events related to your business. The Q&A sections are another gold mine for website owners looking for online visitors.

#5 Develop Your Social Media

Social media channels do not represent brands as well as websites or mobile applications because businesses do not own those platforms. However, they remain a powerful way to increase organic traffic.

People tend to trust companies having a social media profile. Depending on your industry, you may be willing to create your LinkedIn or your Instagram business page.

Get Started With Social Media

Most brands underestimate the most important step of launching a new social fan page: choosing the right one. The purpose is not to “create a new Facebook account because everybody is on Facebook.” Businesses must be present on the social media channel because it makes sense for them strategically speaking.

Do some research. Check where your target audience & potential online customers are. There is no obvious answer to this question. It depends on many factors, including your industry, your products or services, or your persona’s age.

If you are looking for networking with professionals or recruiting new team members, then LinkedIn could be for you. If you sell clothes or travel packages, you should be on Instagram.

Understanding your audience is the best way to be successful with your social media. However, choosing the most suitable channel is not the end of the journey.

You must identify your future followers’ expectations. Audit the market & know what they are looking for. Do they want beautiful pictures? Do they need answers to their questions?

Anticipate your target audience’s expectations so your brand could supply them.

Social Media Content Marketing

Once you are done with the previous step, the next one will be to craft your content strategy.

Start with your general brand orientation & plan for at least one year. Segment your calendar into different phases depending on the objectives you must reach.

For example, if you launch a new brand, you will likely need some awareness to start with. You cannot begin right away with a consideration phase. People do not trust what they do not know.

From your high-level strategy, you will create a content calendar. It is a document in which you plan all the topics & posts that you will cover during the year. No need to write them yet. The calendar must include a draft headline and maybe some guidance for the visual creatives.

Finalize then implement this plan! After you publish your organic posts (including text & image or video), your brand must engage its followers & interact with them.

Monitor your social page performance. Answer your online users’ questions. Notice what works well & adapt your plan accordingly.

Of course, do not forget to add links to your website. A popular business fan page can redirect a significant amount of traffic to your web pages.

#6 Run Paid Ad Campaigns

An effective -and costly- option to bring lots of traffic to your website is to run digital advertising.

As businesses must consider a media budget for this, they should ensure they will achieve a positive Return On Investment (ROI).

There is no point in bringing website traffic just for having website traffic. Forget about vanity metrics. Check how you could convert this traffic into paying customers.

For example, if you want people to visit your website so they can register for an event you organize, do not run ads to bring them to your homepage! Lead the traffic directly to your subscription page.

There are lots of paid ad platforms available out there. To understand in detail about each of them, go read our comprehensive blogs:

• Google Ads Complete Guideline

• Google Shopping

• LinkedIn Ads Costs

• Instagram Ads Costs

Same as for social media, you need to choose the right ad channel before getting started. Only run ads where your target audience is & where it is expected to engage the most.

Measure & optimize your ad performance to ensure you bring a decent amount of traffic to your website, that you could convert afterward.

Boosting Website Traffic

There are several effective solutions to bringing online visitors to your web pages. Except for the last option (running paid ad campaigns) that you should implement only if you can monetize your website, we strongly recommend considering all first 5 ways by default.

You can handle most of this work even if you do not have technical skills. For the rest, do not hesitate to fill the form below & contact us for conducting a website traffic campaign.