Regardless of what you do and which niche and market you operate in online – driving traffic to your website should be at the top of your priority list. And I don’t mean just any type of traffic. No, I am referring to quality visits from people who have a high potential of becoming your shoppers, consumers, and loyal supporters.

If you think of your website as a car, then intelligent traffic is basically the fuel that keeps it running. It doesn’t really matter how good-looking, expensive, or well-made your vehicle might be – if you don’t put enough fuel in it, it just won’t start. Without gas, the machine won’t take you places. You will be left with a powerful piece of engineering, that does nothing. It just sits there and goes to rust.

Not a pretty picture, right?

Of course, as you know, you cannot really put any type of gas into your machine. If your car is, for example, a diesel – it won’t work on super. The same goes for your website. The idea here is to give your digital business what it truly needs in order to grow. And the only way you can do that is by regularly refilling it with quality fuel, a.k.a. visits.

But how does one get their hands on such traffic? How does a promising website improve its brand awareness and stimulate various groups or relevant Internet user to visit it, without spending a small fortune on paid ads?

There are many different ways, of course. The trick is to find ones that guarantee the best ROI. In the following segments of this post, I’m going to list some of the best and most effective strategies and practices for getting the right type of people to acknowledge your existence online and visit your site:

1. Invest in SEO, a.k.a. Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is still an extremely lucrative practice, perfect for attracting the right type of visitors to your site and stimulating them to read your content, browse through your web pages, and eventually convert.

As various statistics have shown, SEO is still a much better channel for generating quality traffic than social media. According to a study conducted by Outbrain, SEO beats social media in the traffic generating game by almost 300 percent. That means that investing in SEO today is basically a no-brainer. Thanks to Facebook’s Explore Feed drama, a lot of companies are now allocating bigger and bigger pieces of their social media budgets to search marketing.

As the guys behind the imFORZA brand have found, more than 90 percent of all online experiences start with a simple search. A vast majority of today’s Internet users begin their search by opening their favorite browser and typing in keywords related to the topics they’re searching for. As the same post by imFORZA claims, 70 percent of all searchers are only interested in organic results that appear at the top positions. They don’t want to scroll down, nor visit other pages in search, or click on paid ads. They are only interested in high-ranking results.

SEO is extremely important for everyone who wants to generate the right type of traffic to their site. Even though search optimisation is huge now, most marketing professionals believe it is getting bigger and more effective every day.

There are many different things you can do SEO-wise in order to improve your traffic. You can do a complete audit of your site, improve your site’s structure, learn what your users want and how to give it to them, create and optimise various landing pages, optimise for mobile, create quality internal and external links – the possibilities are limitless.

Even though SEO is of great importance to your success, it’s still a fairly complex game that demands a lot of experience, time, dedication, and manpower. That’s why it’s often handled by professionals that have the necessary knowledge and resources to design, plan, and implement everything that needs to be achieved in order to rank high in Google’s SERP for your relevant keywords and topics.

2. Build Powerful Content

Nothing brings traffic to a website like powerful content. Even though statistics claim that the Internet and its users are drowning in content, there is still enough reason for creating more. Both Google and its users want more content. The world’s most popular search engine is still interested in seeing additional useful material on your site, while the users, especially those who operate in the B2B world, are interested in reading more content from industry leaders.  

As HubSpot has explained in its latest study, an impressive 90 percent of today’s B2B buyers trust content from company blogs and use it to make educated decisions concerning products to buy or services to try. That is probably the main reason why company blogging is still relevant. According to the same study conducted by HubSpot, companies that blog frequently still receive loads more intelligent traffic than those who write occasionally.

Great, but what kind of content actually gets traffic?

One that is useful and promoted right.

In this day and age, where around 2 million new blog posts get published every day, there is no logic behind producing low-quality content. If you want to increase your traffic with your efforts in this department, you need to focus all your energy on creating material that is at least 10 times better than anything else that can currently be found online about the topic you’re pursuing. This particular concept is called “10x content” and, according to various studies, is often generating 6 times more traffic than standard articles.  

Apart from this particular form of content, you should do your best to design well-optimised, evergreen, user-friendly resources that have the potential of earning you some organic links. These content pieces usually come in the form of ultimate lists, infographics, case studies, research, white papers, statistics, etc. Links are the lifeblood of every digital business. They are the ones that drive traffic to your domain and improve your rankings.

3. Pursue Relevant Short and Long Tail Keyword Opportunities

Keywords matter. They are directly related to the topic that leads people to a specific web address through search.

It doesn’t really matter what you’re trying to achieve, it’s always best to do research first and look for easy-win keywords or topics that are currently trending. Once you locate your opportunities, do your best to utilise them as intelligently as you can. Create something genuinely useful/educational, evergreen and unique, that will give users what they have set to learn or find out via their search.

One of the best ways to generate quality traffic for your site is to look for those easy wins online. Searching the Web for relevant long tail keywords will definitely help you get the right type of audience to visit your domain.

Long tail keywords are four or more word-long phrases that are very specific to your topic. They are extremely important for brands, because they are used by people who are looking for very specific things. If you, for example, successfully optimise your page for “Hong Kong-based SEO agency”, you can rest assured that people who find you via this specific search string will be more likely to convert than those who come to your site through more general or generic phrases.

Makes sense, right?

And the best thing of all? – Since they are so specific, these search strings don’t generate a lot of competition or traffic. But, even though they don’t bring in a big number of searchers to your domain, the traffic that comes through them is often 20 times easier to convert than the traffic that comes through shorter or more generic keywords.

Figuring out which long tail keywords to pursue is not really a complicated job, but it demands a lot of time and persistence. All you basically need to do is open your Keyword Planner and start spinning ideas and variations of keywords until you find long-tailed ones that suit your criteria.

 

4. Optimise and Repurpose Your Existing Pages, Get Extra Mileage on What You’ve Currently Got

Like anyone else who has an active website, I’m willing to bet that you have more than a couple of pages that aren’t really performing great. Whatever the case might be – it’s important to know that you can still get some extra mileage out of them.

Everything is fixable. With just a little time, patience, and creativity, you can figure out a way to turn your problem pages into your best traffic-generating resources.

The trick is simple. All you have to do is open up your Google Analytics dashboard, track and analyse all of your pages until you locate ones that target mid- to high-competitive keywords or just offer outdated content and bad UX.

Once you do that, once you find your problematic pages and determine the cause of their ineffectiveness, you can start working on a game plan to turn those fails into wins. You can repurpose pages, transform them into different formats, edit, rewrite, expand them, merge together different pages into big, powerful resources – it all depends on what you feel will work best for you and your site.

5. Collaborate with Influencers

If you want to create a name for yourself and generate some real traffic to your site, you need to create solid relationships with authority figures in your niche.

For example, if you work in an industry such as SEO, it’s advisable to locate top bloggers in your niche and write a guest post for them. Getting your content published on a popular industry blog won’t just get you fresh traffic, it will also increase your brand awareness and authority, which will automatically transform you into a relevant figure that is worth following.

Of course, there are many different ways to collaborate with influencers in your niche. Guest blogging is just one of them. You can conduct big research and studies together, run specific campaigns, sponsor webinars or just organise industry-related events. The possibilities are endless.

6. Create Interesting Visuals

In case you didn’t know, visual content is hot now. The demand for quality illustrated material has been steadily growing over the last couple of years. Top social media networks are becoming more and more image-oriented, and articles that have more original images are getting better results.

Infographics are still great for generating traffic, and for most marketers, they are one of the best tools for creating extra traffic from their already-existent content.

Video content is also big today. It’s an extremely powerful method for companies to communicate their brand’s story, explain the value of their proposition, and connect with fans and potential users/shoppers/consumers.

According to statistics, YouTube alone now has over a billion users (which is basically half of the Internet). Believe it or not, an insane 500 million hours of video are watched each day on this platform alone. Thanks to these statistics, a vast majority of marketers invest in video content today. They believe video is now the form of content that brings the best ROI.

Even though video is hot now, there are no bulletproof recipes for achieving success with video marketing. The only thing that can be said for sure is that the overall quality of production doesn’t necessarily affect the success rate of your videos. Why? – Because expensive production can’t compensate for bad content.

The idea is to center your videos on the story, not the sale. You should focus on being entertaining, above everything else. Make sure the first 10 seconds of your videos are as attractive as they can possibly be. Even though content runs the show here, optimisation also has a lot of influence on how well you will perform. Always make sure your video material is optimised right, and that all the tags are there.

Over to You

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I hope it has provided everything you need in order to understand what kind of traffic you should be trying to attract to your site and how. Regardless of what you do or sell online, all of the practices mentioned are definitely a good fit for your website. If you do your best to read up on them more and invest more than just time and money into doing it right – your competition will always be behind you.