You can drive traffic to your website by promoting it using several methods of Off-Page SEO. Off-Page SEO is the only way to increase website traffic, whether organic or paid.
You’re a new entrepreneur, you just created a website/ blog, but you’re struggling because you don’t know how to drive traffic to your website, right?
I totally get it, I’ve been there. I struggled long and hard. I’ve read tons of blog posts that gave a lot of great strategies (supposedly) for driving traffic, but most of it is NOT TRUE.
Now I know if some seasoned marketer or guru happens to stumble on this post, I’m not going to be a fan of theirs.
To be clear, I’m not saying all the strategies aren’t GREAT, because they are. What I am saying, however, is that not all of them drive website traffic to your blog or business.
Most of the strategies are for KEEPING the traffic on your site.
Let me explain why Off-Page SEO is the only way to drive massive traffic to your website. I’ll start by defining what Off-Page SEO is according to some of the greatest SEOs on the net.
After reading all their posts, plus a few others I realized that Off-Page SEO is all about RELATIONSHIPS.
My working definition of Off-Page SEO is ‘ spreading the word about your website and building relationships and links, through engagement’. Engagement includes social media, guest posting, forums, and outreach.
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For an online business with a website to be successful, it must incorporate all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO).
What Is Search Engine Optimization
I found two definitions of SEO from two great guys whose work I admire that I’d like to share. I thought they were simple enough for a dummy (like me) to understand.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks. In other words: SEO is all about improving a site’s rankings in the organic (non-paid) section of the search results.
Brian Dean (Backlinko)
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google. To make it a bit simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.
Neil Patel (NP Digital)
One thing that’s missing that I’d like to add is that SEO is not just about optimizing the website or content for Google, but more importantly for the searcher.
While the goal is to rank on search engines, it wouldn’t mean a thing if the searcher is not happy, so focus on your SEARCHER first, instead of search engines.
Aspects Of Search Engine Optimization
To me, SEO can be categorized into 3 parts:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
I’ll briefly explain them.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is making sure that the design and function of a website are well optimized for search engines, so you can organically rank on Google. It has to do with all the technical aspects of a website (my area of struggle).
Some elements of Technical SEO are:
- Design
- Responsiveness
- Speed
- Crawlability and Indexing
- Site Structure
- Javascript
- XML Sitemaps
- URL Structure
- Structured Data
- Thin and Duplicate Content
- CDNs and Browser Caching Tools
- Canonical tags
- 404 pages
- 301 redirects
Now that you know some of the things that technical SEO deals with, let’s check out some on-site SEO elements.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO deals with optimizing the contents of the site to make it easy to read and understand by both search engines and searchers.
On-Site SEO is another name for On-page SEO.
When I hear the term On-Page SEO, I think of content marketing, because it’s all about crafting the content of a web page for users.
It’s dealing with things that you can control on your own site, in order to drive traffic to it so that it ranks on the search engine results page (SERP).
Some On-Page elements are:
- High Quality Content
- URL
- Title
- Headline
- Meta Description
- Headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
- Image Size, Filename, Alt-Text and Description
- Internal and External Links
- Structured Data
- Media
- Content Length
Now we’ll look at the part of SEO that focuses mainly on building relationships.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is about engagement and relationship building. It’s the core of your online business.
It is everything that you do off-site to promote your site’s content, products, or services.
Some Off-Page SEO mediums that you can use to build links and bring traffic to your website are:
- Guest Blogging
- Email Outreach
- Blogging Directories
- Social Media Networking
- Forums
- Q & A Websites (Quora, Reddit)
- Interviews
- Conferences
- Content Aggregators
- List Building
Hopefully, by now you realize that a successful internet business simply cannot do without SEO. It needs all aspects of SEO to survive.
Now I’ll take a deeper dive into SEO, so you can see the role it plays in driving free traffic to a website.
How To Drive Website Traffic Organically
There are several ways to get free traffic to your website, each with different tactics.
However, each strategy and tactic have one thing in common, which is the TARGET AUDIENCE.
Your target audience will be the bread and butter of your online business. Develop a relationship with them, treat them well, and your business will succeed.
To drive traffic to a website you need to:
- Understand your audience
- Create an incentive/ free offer, so that you can build an email list
- Spread the word about your business
- Form relationships and build links
Understanding Your Target Audience
Before you attempt to get traffic to your website, you need to make sure that you have a basic understanding of your target audience.
You should know
- Who your target audience is
- What they want; that is, what problem are they trying to solve
- What you have to offer; how can you help them solve their problems
Once you’ve determined that, your next step is to start building a list.
Build An Email List
An email list is a collection of persons who show interest in your site, products, or services by giving you their email addresses so you can send them updates and promotional information.
Your email list (your audience) is the most valuable asset of your online business. When you build an email list you can refer products and services to them based on their interest and needs.
Building a list is really a 2 step process, but it makes no sense to get leads and not maintain them.
You should understand that successful list building is a 3 step process.
- Lead Magnet: A lead magnet is a free offer/gift that you give to your subscribers in order for them to give you their email address (omg, this sounds like a bribe). But you need to give them a reason to sign up. That is why it is important that you understand your audience, so you can attract them with the right magnet.
- Email Service Provider (ESP): An ESP is a platform that has tools to help you easily collect and store email addresses and send out individual, or bulk emails to your list with minimal effort.
- Nurturing: As you grow your email list, you have to continue building the relationship with them. Don’t just email them when you want to sell something. Show them you care by regularly checking up on them, engaging with them on social platforms, sending informational updates, and free gifts.
Now that you know the process for building an email list, let’s talk about some of the different ways to build one.
Ways To Build An Email List
There are a number of ways that you can build a list of subscribers.
Using a lead magnet just happens to be the most effective way. However, there are other things that you can implement on-site, as well as, off-site to help grow your list.
Allow me to share a few of them with you.
Lead Magnet
Lead magnets are free offers (trial, ebook, webinars, consulting, etc.) that you give in exchange for an email address. Using lead magnets is a very powerful and effective method for boosting your website’s traffic.
The key to winning with a lead magnet is knowing your target audience and what they want. This will help you craft the perfect free offer for them.
Website Sign-Up Forms
These are great for capturing the email addresses of visitors to your site.
Just make sure you have a good reason for them to sign-up.
Place sign-up forms all over your site; there are a number of places on your website where you can add sign-up forms (sidebar, in content, slide-in, pop-up, exit intent) to quickly boost your traffic.
Engage On Social Platforms
One of the fastest ways to drive traffic to a new website is by joining social media platforms and being active.
Join groups and leave comments, feedback, and offer genuine help whenever possible.
Avoid dropping links every time you leave a comment.
Do lots of give-ways on social media, that will definitely put a rise in your web traffic. Offer free webinars, ebooks, worksheets, etc.
Ask Your Followers For Help
Once you start getting leads on your list or on your social platforms, ask them to share your content.
It could be as simple as a retweet, tag, or just a mention of your content to their friends.
It doesn’t hurt to ask. Not everyone will share, but not everyone will say no either. Don’t feel bad when they don’t share either.
Post On Platforms That Are Not Popular
There are many social platforms that are losing popularity but still have a good amount of traction, so instead of just joining the trending bandwagon, go ahead and make use of the ones that are being left behind as well.
Also, pay attention to the newer platforms that have not yet gained popularity, but have a good flow of traffic.
Join Forums And Q & A Platforms
Join platforms like Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers and answer questions and comments. This will help to build your brand.
Participating on these platforms helps to show your expertise in your niche.
Invite Guest Bloggers
Inviting others to leave a post on your blog is another free way to boost your web traffic.
Along with asking other bloggers to let you write for them, invite other bloggers to write for you as well.
It’s not talked about much but it’s a strategy that I think you should try. Just create your own post requirements.
Submit To Content Aggregators And Directories
There are lots of places that get a good amount of daily visitors where you can submit your content and get exposed to their audience.
Getting your content on a platform with a couple of thousand visitors per day is a great way to increase traffic to your website.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is writing content for other bloggers in exchange for a link back to you. This is a great way to build links and increase website traffic organically.
You should try to find reputable sites with good domain rank (DR) to guest blog on.
Google trusts sites with high authority and if Google sees them linking to you, they will consider showing your content to searchers.
Email Outreach
Reach out to blogs related to yours and tell them about your content. Let them know why they should check it out, how it will benefit their readers, and ask them if they’ll link out to you after checking your content.
Reaching out to influencers is also another way to get traffic to your blog.
Interviews & Conferences
Conducting interviews and attending conferences in your niche whenever possible are also great free ways to drive traffic to your website.
You’ll get the opportunity to meet and engage with other entrepreneurs, and tell them all about your brand.
Ok so now that you’ve got a long list of easy ways to drive organic traffic to your website, let’s now talk about how to keep that traffic on your site.
How To Keep Traffic On Your Site
After going through the trouble of creating content and promoting, you finally start to see an increase in traffic to your site, but what happens when they finally get there?
Do they spend a few minutes or do they just leave without even clicking a tab on the navigation?
There are many things that determine if that traffic will stay on your site or just bounce off.
Earlier we had a brief chat about Technical and On-Page SEO, now we’re gonna go a little deeper into them because those are the aspects that will keep all that free traffic on your site.
Let’s kick this section off with Technical SEO.
Keep Traffic With Technical SEO
Since you already know what Technical SEO is I’ll jump right into how to use it to keep web traffic on your site.
Web Design Site Structure
A good design is needed for your site.
You’ll want a good layout, colors, fonts, and other design elements that are easy on the eyes.
You gotta have a responsive design. This means your site should be able to show on all smart mobiles and tablets.
Have you ever been on a site and the color and fonts chase you away before you even settle in? If so, don’t let that happen to you.
Site Structure
The structure of your site plays an important role in keeping traffic on your site. Site structure is how the pages on your site are organized.
They should be organized in a way that makes it easy to navigate to other parts of your site.
Good URL Structure
Having a good and consistent URL structure helps your readers to know and understand exactly where on your site they are.
You set your URL structure in the WordPress dashboard under Permalinks.
Site Speed
Slow loading sites drive visitors away, so make sure that your site loads fast.
There are a number of things that can reduce the speed of your site, for example, having too many plugins, hosting videos, large image files, etc.
The bottom line is the faster your site loads the more traffic you’ll be able to generate.
Google Search Console
I use the heading Google Search Console (GSC) because there are a number of technical things you can check within the GSC dashboard.
You can use it to get a report of crawlable issues your site may be experiencing, so you can find those pages and fix them.
Use GSC to check your XML sitemap and find out which URLs Google is seeing for your site. You can also submit individual URLs for indexing in GSC.
Screaming Frog is also a great tool for crawling websites and finding any issues that need fixing.
Honestly, whenever I get a technical report from the big G or any other tool, I never understand half of it, it’s like a strange language to me.
Thin And Duplicate Content
You want to make sure that the word count of your content is not too low. Having a low word count will not help to drive organic traffic to your website.
Having the same content on different URLs will be a problem as well, so you need to avoid this issue as best as possible.
Canonical Tags
If you have pages with duplicate content then use canonical tags to point out the different pages with similar content.
Those are just a few elements of Technical SEO and how you can use them to impact your site’s traffic.
Now let’s take a deeper look at some On-Page SEO elements.
On-Page SEO For Web Traffic
You should know by now that on-site SEO is the next big thing to keep visitors on your site. So I won’t waste your time going over what it is, I’ll just jump right into explaining the different elements.
Content Writing
The first and most important thing is to write good, valuable content that will help the reader. Your content should be easy to read and understand.
Here are some tips for content writing:
- Use a good, catching headline
- Write short paragraphs
- Give adequate space between sentences
- Use numbers and bullet points
- Use bold and italics to emphasize points
- Write long-form posts instead of short
URL, Title, Headline, And Meta Description
Use keywords in your title and URL. Write meta descriptions with keywords or synonyms of it.
Remember that your meta tag will be seen on the search engine results page (SERP), so make it compelling enough that they’ll want to click through.
The same principle applies to the headline of your content. Aim to grab their interest at the start so that they will keep reading.
The longer they stay on your page the more Google will be inclined to show your content to other searchers.
Research
Keyword research helps you to write content that targets a specific audience. Once you have keywords you can incorporate them or synonyms of them into your content.
Research your competition to see what’s working for them and how you can do a better job. Learn from your competition and use what you’ve learned, along with your own uniqueness to write better content.
Media
When you’re adding images to your content, give the file a proper name, add alt-text in case the image doesn’t show, and include a detailed description of the image, including keywords or synonyms.
The same thing applies when adding other media formats to your content.
Internal And External Linking
As you write your content, do your best to link to other posts/pages on your website. Make sure the pages you’re linking to are related to the one you’re linking from.
Linking out to other pages from your content can help to increase traffic to your website as well.
Those are some of the most important aspects of Technical and On-Page SEO that will help with keeping web traffic on your site.
You’ve done the hardest parts and now you have to find a way to keep those visitors coming back. How do you do that? Read below!
How To Get Repeat Visitors
The first thing I recommend you do to keep subscribers coming back is to track and measure your results to see what they like, so you can keep replicating it.
Check your website traffic with Google Analytics or some other free traffic checker tool. Tracking tools are a great way of finding out what’s working for your site, so you can make adjustments.
Look at your top pages and produce more content like it.
Carefully analyze your data and adjust to get repeated traffic to your website.
Second, use email marketing to nurture your visitors. Notice, I did not say sell, I said nurture them. You do this by simply sending an email just to say hello and an inspirational quote.
Send them updates and information on trending news, etc. Become their friend first and they will, in turn, become loyal customers of yours.
The Wrap On How To Increase Website Traffic
Driving a massive amount of traffic to a website or blog is every marketer’s goal, and there are lots of ways to do so.
You can use all aspects of SEO to drive free targeted and non-targeted traffic to your website, keep them on it, and have them return again.
All parts of SEO work together to help with search engine ranking, you can’t have one without the other.
SEO is not hard to do, you just have to keep practicing and eventually, you’ll get better.
Wow, that was a lot, wasn’t it? I’m exhausted after all that, but I’m super glad I wrote it for you.
I hope you got a ton of value from this.
If you did, I ask one thing in return, please don’t keep it to yourself, share it please. I’ve made it super easy for you to share by adding the social buttons below, so go ahead and hit the button.
Btw, drop your thoughts in the comments below.
