Where to get traffic to your website

Using an automatic traffic bot or generator is likely to attract the wrong kind of attention from Google which will hurt your reputation with them and thus your ranking. The ultimate purpose of getting more visitors to your website and ranking higher on Google is to increase the number of people who interact with and hopefully become customers of your business. If your website is attracting bot traffic, you run the risk of getting blocked from online advertising platforms or, even worse, getting removed from Google.

Cheap website traffic is not worth it! Take the time to build up high-quality and sustainable traffic to your site. As mentioned above, there is no point in getting more traffic to your website if those visitors are not likely to engage with your pages, convert into leads, or become customers.

Increasing your website traffic does not happen overnight. It takes effort, but the effort you put in will equate to the quality of the traffic you generate. By using Google My Business and the other safe channels listed above, you can get the right visitors coming to your site and more importantly, more of those visitors converting into customers.

Here is a list of the strategies we covered in this post that can help you get more qualified visitors to your website:.

Kristen is the Senior Managing Editor at WordStream where she helps businesses make sense of online marketing and advertising. She specializes in local SEO, copywriting, and conversion optimization, and finds life to be exponentially more delightful on a bicycle.

Other posts by Kristen McCormick. Every great partnership starts with that first email, phone call, or meeting. So what are you waiting for? Simplified local marketing is just a hop, skip and a click away. Traffic generation strategies to avoid. Why More Website Traffic?

It can help you to: See how well your marketing is working. Gather insights about your audience to make decisions. Improve your SEO and search engine credibility.

Generate more leads, increase conversions, and get more customers. Free Traffic vs. Quality Traffic Traffic to your website helps to improve your rank which in turn generates more traffic, but you want to make sure that the increase in traffic is associated with an increase in engagement as well. Optimize Your Free Google Business Profile Did you know that an optimized Google business listing gets 7x more visits than an incomplete one?

Your Google listing: Is free and easy to set up. Allows you to show up for searches relevant to your business and location. Increases your visibility on a platform whose users have the intent to buy. Drives qualified traffic to your site and your store. Affords customers the opportunity to post reviews and even further boost your presence. Also, keep in mind that Google My Business: Enables your business to get found in mobile searches, which have surpassed desktop.

Equips searchers with the ability to interact with your business directly in your listing — increasing the chances of engagement and obtaining new customers. Other Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic Here are 10 additional steps you can take to increase your website traffic. Get Listed in Online Directories Another way to increase traffic to your website is to get listed in free online directories and review sites. Build Backlinks A backlink is a link to your website from another website.

Post to Social Media Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around and plays a role in driving traffic to your website.

Include Hashtags in Your Posts By adding hashtags to posts that promote your website pages and blog posts, you can extend your reach beyond your network and get discovered by users searching for your products and services. Use Landing Pages Landing pages are another free source of traffic to your website. Target Long-Tail Keywords While short-tail keywords are often searched more frequently, it is more difficult to rank for them on search engines.

Start Email Marketing Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Guest Blog Having an industry influencer publish a blog post on your site or turning an interview with them into a blog post can help to drive traffic both through organic search but also via that influencer promoting the content to their audience see the backlinks section above. Learn from Your Analytics Google Analytics is free to use, and the insights gleaned from it can help you to drive further traffic to your website.

Are there any Quora questions that are relevant to your website? If so, you should create a profile and answer accordingly. After all, a blog post is just one medium of content—who knows how many more users you can draw by repackaging it in different forms?

You can do so in a number of ways, such as by creating:. Regardless of what form it takes, a repurposed piece presents an additional opportunity to take old but successful content further. There are round-up articles all across the world wide web, with millions of users consulting them daily for guidance and recommendations. With that in mind, you should identify and contact their webmasters to get your website included.

Note that reaching out to these websites may take some persistence. Some webmasters may even ask for a payment or link back on your site in return for including yours, in which case you should be wary. You can generate traffic while simultaneously ramping up customer engagement by hosting giveaways and contests.

The prize in question must be something of value to users, but it should also be easily recouped in terms of cost. You can draw inspiration from fitness influencer Cassey Ho, who hosts regular giveaways on her website Blogilates. To up the ante and further increase traffic, you may even require that interested participants share your post or tag a friend in order to be eligible to win. By publicly endorsing your products, bloggers and influencers help to make the sale to otherwise skeptical customers.

Though they have less followers than big-name influencers, micro-influencers see more user engagement from their audiences. Image Credit: Takumi.

In this way, referral marketing begets both traffic and conversions by virtue of customers reaching out to their respective networks. To create an effective referral program , your incentive, or reward, needs to be sufficiently enticing.

That could be a discount, an upgrade, free sample, or store credit—something that motivates customers to actively share your website. Since it was founded in , Reddit has climbed the ranks of internet popularity to become a major hub for news, entertainment, and networking.

Now the third most popular website in the U. That is, you should avoid being overly promotional. Look for relevant subreddits that it would be appropriate to post in, and get to know the users there. Submitted links that are labeled with misleading titles will be considered spam and may get you banned from the platform. How do you know this is sponsored content?

In this way, sponsored content helps to drive traffic from another website by more subtle means. Got a decent marketing budget? For immediate results in traffic, you can pay for digital advertising. That includes strategies like pay-per-click PPC advertising.

They then pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad. It involves things like search engine optimization, setting up a blog , social media marketing and so on and so forth. The other way is paid. Everyone knows that paid ads can drive traffic to a website, but it can also get costly. If you don't understand things like conversion rates and tracking of clicks to see how much a sale costs you, then you'll surely fail with paid traffic.

Either way you slice it, there are some great ways to drive traffic to your website that fall into both of these categories. However, the more organized you are, and the better you've presented your offer at the outset, the more likely you'll be to succeed with any one of these traffic methods or strategies. So, how do you track all of your efforts to ensure that you're doing the best to understand where your visitors are coming from when it comes driving traffic to your website?

The most basic and straightforward way is to use Google Analytics. And I'm not just talking about installing Google Analytics. I'm talking about using the UTM short for Urchin Tracking Module, which relates to the old Urchin analytics system that Google acquired to create its tracking tool variables that exist in Google's Analytics to ensure that you know where they're coming from.

In fact, Google has a great tool that you can use to build your URLs if you're not too tech savvy. You can find the tool located here. Two fields are required, which are the 1 URL itself, and 2 campaign source. The campaign source can be anything like email or cost-per-click or any other source you're leveraging to place ads and drive traffic. Be sure to separate the spaces with underscores. This way, when you do drive traffic, you know where that traffic is coming from.

Otherwise, you're left in the dark. For example, if you do some content marketing on Quora. Get the picture? Then, you'll see all the beautiful results directly in Google Analytics and you'll know specifically where your traffic came from.

Okay, so that gives you a sense of the general areas that your traffic will come from and how you should go about tracking your traffic. Remember, if you're not tracking the traffic that's coming to your website, you're wasting your time marketing online. When you drive traffic to any site, blog or wherever, you need to understand where it's coming from so that you can scale your efforts. The other important thing about tracking is to utilize conversion pixels so that you can effectively determine, specifically, down to the cent, how much each sale cost you.

Lets just say that out of the clicks, you received 3 sales, which were tracked with a Facebook conversion pixel. Now, this is simply a generic example , but when you know how to track your ads or other marketing efforts, then you'll know what's paying off and what's not.

Use this knowledge to understand your conversion rates per ad spend. Use meticulous tracking to discover the efforts that are leading to the biggest results. Simple as that. Want the skinny on how you can drive traffic to your website? The following traffic-driving strategies are organic in nature. You won't have to pay a single dollar for traffic that falls under this bucket. But you will have to trade your time. And since time is more valuable than money, in that it can only be used once then it's gone forever, there's still a significant cost involved depending on your skill level.

Today, if you don't understand SEO, you're doing yourself a disservice. Discover the nuances about SEO so that you're engaging in the right type of traffic delivery strategies. You don't want to bend or break the rules. Plus, by really having an understanding of SEO, you could quite literally supercharge your results.

Find a good course or audiobook about SEO and learn like the wind. Content is king. As long as you create insatiable content on your site or blog, you'll keep the visitors coming back for more and more. Also, the better your content is, the more engaged your visitors will be. They will share your content for you, helping to promote your site on autopilot. Quora is a great medium for driving traffic to your site. Answer questions on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content on your site or blog.

However, don't use this platform to spam. Ensure that your answers are detailed and that you know what you're talking about. YouTube is a great resource for driving free organic traffic to your website. Maybe it's because Google loves YouTube, and considering that it's the second most popular search engine in the world, gaining exposure on YouTube could be huge. Create useful tutorials and videos that add an immense amount of value and be sure to link to your content through the description.

Everyone knows that Instagram is a wildly-popular platform for sharing photos and connecting with others from around the world.