How To Drive Traffic To Your Website: 15 Proven Tips

The more traffic you can drive to your website, the better.

More visitors means more people looking at your content and interacting with your site, in turn making it possible to convert more customers, grow your online community, promote a product, or establish your brand’s expertise in the market.

The sheer number of sites and searches, however, makes this challenging for businesses. How do you stand out from the crowd to capture customer interest? How do you move your site up search engine rankings, and how do you keep users coming back?

We’ve got 15 proven tips to help you drive traffic to your website and shift it into high gear.

Best Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

What drives traffic to a website? There’s no single answer. Instead, it’s a combination of factors and functions that convince users to click through and see what your site is all about. 

Here are 15 of the best ways to drive traffic to your website.

1. Create Content That Users Need/Want

Fast, functional websites won’t bring in consistent traffic if they don’t have content that users need or want. From clear and concise information about your products or services to in-depth articles about your area of expertise, valuable content keeps visitors coming back.

2. Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy

Capturing customer attention doesn’t just happen. Instead, you need a digital marketing strategy that helps you target the right audience segment and effectively promote your product or service. The first step? Understanding your ideal customer. What do they want? What are they looking to spend? What’s most important to them? Answering these questions sets the stage for effective digital marketing efforts.

3. Determine a Target Keyword Strategy

Keywords are one of the most common ways for visitors to find your site. For example, a customer looking to have their windows cleaned might type “window cleaning” into their favorite search engine and see what comes up. Based on both their location and the effective use of keywords on search results, users get a list of potential options.

As a result, effective keyword use is critical to increase search rankings and drive visitors to your site. But which keywords make the most sense for your business? To find your best fit, options include software solutions capable of analyzing content and making keyword recommendations, or the use of professional SEO firms. 

4. Implement Basic SEO Optimizations

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about making your website more search engine friendly. This process includes finding and using the right keywords, ensuring metadata on all pages is complete and follows SEO best practices, and rewriting headlines to be more concise and compelling. 

If you can improve your website SEO, you’re in a better position to rank higher on search engines and increase your share of organic traffic. Depending on your preference and budget, you’ve got options: There are a host of free and for-pay tools for SEO, or you can enlist the help of professional search optimization firms.

5. Engage With Users on Social Media

Social media is scary, but it’s also a powerful force in driving traffic to your website. By engaging with users on the platform of their choice, you can create organic connections that help drive more traffic and increase brand awareness.

6. Email Marketing

Despite the rise of social media and text-based marketing, emails remain a consistent source of website traffic. Here, it’s all about crafting email campaigns that speak to user preferences — and ensuring you only send emails to users who want them. Get this right, and you’ll enjoy a bump in direct traffic.

7. Use Tracking Tools to Analyze Engagement

To increase website traffic over time, you need to know what’s changing. While static sites may drive an initial rush of traffic, customer preferences change over time, meaning you need ways to measure and analyze engagement with your site. For example, if session times remain steady but the number of new visitors is dropping off, you may need to create fresh content.

8. Utilize Traditional/Offline Marketing

Traditional or “offline” marketing such as physical ads in well-populated areas can help drive traffic to your site. It makes sense: While digital purchasing is closing in on physical retail, potential customers still experience the vast majority of their world in person, making well-placed ads a sound investment.

9. Build Links to Your Website

Link building can also help generate more traffic. This could take the form of reciprocal linking — you link to a brand on your website and they link to your site in return — or backlinks from content written for informational sites that accept guest blog posts.

10. Create Informational Content

It’s also worth creating informational content for visitors to your site. Consider the window cleaning site example above. In addition to details about your services and prices, you can increase user interest with blog posts about tips on keeping windows clean, preventing window damage, and knowing when it’s time to call in a professional.

11. Outreach to Potential Users

As your business expands, your market may expand as well. In this case, it’s worth running targeted outreach campaigns to potential users. For example, if your window cleaning business is expanding into window repair and replacement, this opens up an entirely new market subsection.

12. Utilize Influencers and Affiliate Programs

Another way to increase website traffic is by using influencers or affiliate programs. Influencers are popular social media personalities — for a fee, they will promote your service or product and help drive site traffic. Affiliate programs, meanwhile, see other sites sending traffic your way in exchange for a commission on the purchase of products or services. At Name.com, for example, our affiliate program offers highly competitive commission rates that let you earn cash on new customer purchases across a library of products and services.

13. Be Active in Online Communities

Online communities such as forums and specialized social interest groups are a great way to connect with your target audience and drive more traffic to your website. The caveat? This activity can’t be sales focused; instead, it’s about generating organic interest through authentic interactions. Be yourself!

14. Paid Digital Advertising (Pay Per Click PPC)

Paid digital advertising can also help in driving traffic to your website. The premise here is simple: You pay for digital ads to be placed on high-traffic websites and pay each time a potential customer clicks on your link.

15. Improve Technical Functionality

Finally, make sure you don’t ignore the technical functionality of your website. From page loading speed to design elements and the layout of your user interface (UI), sites that function well encourage customers to stick around — poorly constructed sites have the opposite effect.

Building your Traffic Roadmap

The right traffic roadmap can help generate more site views and increase customer conversions. Along with the tips mentioned above, however, it’s also worth thinking outside your site to potentially parallel sources of traffic. 

Consider a customer that misspells your domain name by one letter, or adds an extra word, leading them to a 404 not found page. If you purchase these common domains and redirect them to your site, you can increase your traffic reach with minimal effort. If you’re looking to buy several domains and boost your traffic, Name.com can help.

Ready to get more website traffic? Start with these 15 tips and see how Name.com can help extend your reach with additional domain ownership.