A website that receives a great deal of traffic is a wonderful asset to any business. It can boost revenue, serve as a source of information to visitors and double up as a channel of communication with consumers. Getting visitors to your site, maintaining and increasing the flow of traffic is a lot of hard work. But the one thing that is sure to work is top class, authoritative content.

Even a newbie website can hope to attract traffic using great content.  Matt Cutts of Google puts it concisely in this video.

Besides, there are a number of small steps that you can try out, to boost traffic to your website. Practiced consistently, many of these steps can increase the mouse-falls on your website.

One thing you should be careful about even before you set up your website is the name by which it will be known. A short, easy-to-remember name that is related to the content that it will present, increases recall value among visitors.

Website viewership can increase with some traditional off site strategies as well – such as advertising in print media or television, sponsoring local events, billboards, souvenirs and magazine inserts. But we’ll keep the discussion here to what you can do online to increase the clicks.

Some practical tips to boost traffic to your website are highlighted here. The first few are really tips to improve website speed and performance. But if you do not pay attention to them, they can turn away visitors, increase bounce rates and eventually lower your Search Engine Ranking.

1. Hosting – The services provided by your hosting service provider makes a big difference to website performance. Reliable service with no downtime, sufficient bandwidth, caching and content delivery networks are all important for site speed. Visitors will not wait for a site to load.

2. Optimize Your Website for better performance – You can do many things like clean up your database, optimize images, minify resources, defer Javascripts and more to keep your website in peak condition. If you’re expecting mobile users to view your website, your webpages must comply with Accelerated Mobile Page requirements.

3. Use Google Search Console and Google Analytics – Google Search Console keeps track of the words used by visitors to land on your site. It helps pinpoint the information that users are looking for. If you submit your pages, the Console will test if Google can understand your content. You can also analyse the clicks and filter the results to know details like origination of the clicks and devices used. Receive alerts for critical errors.

Google Analytics helps to analyse visitor behavior on your website – which pages or posts receive the maximum clicks, conversions, bounce rate and time spent on each page. This helps to match your content with the visitors’ expectations.

4. Top Class Content – Google stresses on relevance and quality of content above all else. If you’re serious about being found by search engines, this is one area towards which you’ll want to direct most of your attention.

To interest readers and keep them returning to your site, use videos, infographics, detailed analyses, brief news, expert opinions and interviews. List posts, tutorials, memes, guest blogging, case studies, comprehensive guides and reviews in your niche fields can all catch the attention of users.

A catchy title will help attract attention of readers more easily, but take care that the content and the title are not a mismatch. Intersperse the post with headline tags for better readability, and with helpful internal links to keep them longer on your website. Keyword must be appropriate and present in the content with reasonable consistency.

And once you’ve created great content, you can reuse it after refurbishing it to suit a different purpose or after updating it for relevancy. Republish top class content on popular web blogging platforms such as Medium, Tumblr, and LinkedIn Pulse. Tie-up with other sites to link back to yours.

Analyse the content using Google Analytics, a high bounce rate may indicate that all is not right with your content.

5. Leverage Social Media – Start posting content on LinkedIn and Quora with a reference to your website, to reach decision makers in various fields. Reach out to consumers on Instagram or Pinterest.

Don’t forget old favorites Facebook and Twitter. Install a tracking feature on your site to be able to market to customers who have visited your site. Also, take part in discussions relevant to your website and say your piece on appropriate Twitter hashtags.

Twitter Cards too are a fine aid to gather visitors. These are larger tweets that incorporate images and allow you to have buttons built into the tweet. To know how to use Twitter effectively, look into this infographic from Kissmetrics.

Pick a right time to post to social media channels. And to manage multiple social accounts, fall back on Buffer or HootSuite.

6. YouTube – Convert your posts into videos and post them on YouTube. Ask all the questions users will want answers to about your business and make a video of the answers. Address negative feedback and post links to all your YouTube content on social media. YouTube is the second most visited website globally, so use it to your advantage.

7. Blogging – Regularly post fresh and topical content on your blogs. Engage with readers and reply to their comments on your blog. Visit other blogs on related subjects and enter into discussion with readers. Try to convert comments on the blog into conversations or into a discussion forum to forge a sense of community among readers.

8. Be visible – Host webinars, quiz, podcasts, submit content to referral sites like Reddit.

9. Optimize for SEO – The dominant search engine on the internet is Google with more than 75% of the market share. Most internet users depend on Google to find what they’re looking for. Google searches for content, and ranks the webpages in the search engine results page (SERP). So make sure that your website is search engine friendly.

Sites like SEMrush analyse the composition of clicks that your domain receives and presents the results on a dashboard for easy understanding. They help develop a sound content and advertising strategy based on actual competitor data. Organic searches are good to bring in traffic in the long term, but a newbie website can give paid advertising and paid searches a shot.

Alexa too gives a rather detailed traffic analysis and helps to increase traffic by comparative analysis with competitor sites. You can do a quick search for free, but for a detailed analysis, you may have to pay for premium services. Install the Yoast Plugin to see if your SEO is up to the mark.

11. Advertise Online – Paying for a slot among the top in SERP or using Google Adwords can get the first trickle of visitors. Identify the most appropriate keywords that is likely to be used by users. Words that convey an intent closer to conversion, are more likely to be searched by persons who are ready to buy. These keywords are more expensive in paid searches.

12. Use Emails To Gather Leads – Collect emails not only of people who visited your site, but also of those who comment on other websites. This list will enable you to target communication to the most relevant group. List building is one of the most important ways to boost traffic to your website.

13. Research Competition and Trends – Research is one way to stay current with industry events. BuzzSumo will help you to determine what content is best for any topic or competitor.

14. Freebies And Free Trials – These offers are most likely to attract click throughs. Even if there is no tangible benefit at the start, you gain a lead that you can possibly convert later.

15. Reach Out – Reach out to industry experts or influencers to feature your product. Do a review and generally spread the word. Feedly and JustReachOut are some of the agencies that can promote your site or product.

And Finally

It’s possible that not every website can do all these things to boost website traffic. Authoritative content is the area you need to devote maximum effort. And, you need to promote the content as well. Each step can contribute to bringing in visitors to your website. So pick what you can implement and carry it through.

Check out our Beginner’s Handbook!

About Vishnu Supreet

Freelance writer about all things WP | A mechanical engineer who creates awesome content for my clients to drive traffic to their business