COMPLETE GUIDE TO INCREASE TRAFFIC ON THE SITE

In this article, we will talk about the sources of traffic to the site – almost all of them that are relevant today.

Every website owner wants to increase the number of visitors. Most specialists focus on the application of SEO techniques and contextual advertising. But these are not the only channels. There are other ways to drive traffic to your site and help grow your business. And if you use them all, you can get very far ahead and overtake your competitors.

Classification of traffic sources

There are various channels that generate traffic. These are commonly known as the default channel groups in Google Analytics. Here is how Google itself characterizes them:

We will only talk about 6 of them.

Organic search — organic traffic

This is free traffic from search engines such as Google and Yandex. When people find something in organic search and follow a link to a site, that traffic is marked as organic. Organic traffic grows when you pay due attention to SEO.

Paid Search – paid traffic

For most brands, contextual advertising on Google or Yandex will make up the largest portion of your paid traffic. Social media ads may or may not appear here depending on your Analytics settings.

Direct – direct traffic

Direct traffic, aka Direct, is the traffic you get when users enter your URL directly into their browsers. Autocomplete suggestions and bookmarks also go here.

This is also a generalized, or fallback, channel in Google Analytics. It equates to various unlabeled traffic, such as links in email and instant messengers.

Social – social traffic

This is traffic that comes, oddly enough, from social networks: Vkontakte, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Whenever you share a link to your site on social networks and people click on it, this is considered social traffic.

Referral – referral traffic

Referral traffic comes from other sites. If you click on a link that leads from one site to another, then the analytics will consider such a transition as a referral.

Email – email traffic

Mail traffic is clicks on links from emails that are marked accordingly. If you don’t set UTM tags, then the traffic will be considered as direct.

Two eerily easy ways to increase organic traffic

There are only two proven ways to increase your organic traffic:

• Create new content.
• Update old content.

After doing these two things, the website traffic will grow on its own. The main thing is to produce content regularly and do SEO-optimization of materials for search engines.

What is content and why it helps your organic traffic grow

There are various types of content such as blog posts, videos or infographics, e-books, white papers, landing pages and podcasts – all of this information falls under the definition of “content”.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information in order to make it public and useful. And the content of your site is also such information. So when you do search engine optimization, you are simply helping Google to fulfill its mission better.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of measures that aims to ensure that individual pages on your site (ie, the content itself) rank in search engines. Google uses over 200+ ranking factors to filter and prioritize which pages on the web they should show up first when people google something.

This is why content and SEO go hand in hand. Don’t expect traffic to increase by focusing solely on one tool. It’s a complex story.

What type of content should you create?

Create user-centric content. Help them solve their problems, needs and desires. Search engines care most about the people who use their site to find information. So when you add value to your users and make it easier for them to find information, Google rewards you with quality traffic.

All individual tactics related to SEO and content marketing are aimed at increasing value for users. Keyword selection, competitor research, semantic core building, and content production all end up helping users find what they’re looking for. Therefore, it makes sense to immediately build a business around the interests of your customers.

Four Ways to Increase Website Traffic Using Social Media

There are various ways to increase your social media traffic. The main way to achieve this is to use the great Algorithm to your advantage. Below are the ways you can do this. But first, what do I mean by using the Algorithm?

Have you noticed that the posts in your feed are mostly content from people and brands with whom you are constantly in contact – chatting, liking, commenting, reposting, etc.

This is the social network algorithm in action. Social networks are interested in keeping you on their platform for as long as possible. This is how Vkontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and others work. If they keep showing you posts that are similar to the ones you’ve interacted with before, you’re more likely to stay on the site longer. This can and should be used to your advantage:

Tip #1: Add Links to Your Profile

Tranquil and simple advice – fill out the social profile of the company to the maximum. Feel free to link to your site – without this, people will not come to you. If you don’t post links, how do they visit your site?

Tip #2: Be funny, interesting, educational, or controversial

In social networks, you have a lot of competitors. The algorithm is not your friend. At least until you can prove that people continue to interact with you and your content.

To reduce your budget on paid promotion of posts, try to create really useful and interesting content so that users share it with their friends.

This means you don’t have to constantly put your products and services in every post. Nobody likes this. More often create thematic content that entertains, helps solve a problem, teaches something new.

This way people will interact with you. Your updates will appear more often in other people’s news. Then when you finally post a link or ask them to buy from you, other people will see it.

Tip #3: Make the most of your content

Rotate your content and make the most of it. If you have a large comprehensive guide, break it down into several useful posts. We recorded a new video with an industry expert – transcribe it, give the designer the task of cutting the good shots and mix it all up into some cool and useful posts. Make up a mailing list and make several guest posts in the media and on partner sites. Experiment and make the most of your content!

Tip #4: Post multiple times

The last tip you can use to increase social media traffic is to post multiple times. No, this does not mean spamming the same thing 10 times a day. It is enough to sometimes repeat the publications that you made some time ago. If you post regularly and alternate between educational, selling, and entertaining content, people will love it. After all, it is impossible to keep track of all the new posts – there are too many of them in the feed.

There is an opinion that only 5% of your audience will see your posts on Facebook. And the coverage on the pages of large brands is lower in total. Therefore, if you publish a post once, most likely the majority of the audience will simply not see it – it will be lost in their feed. That’s why there’s nothing wrong with repeating your posts multiple times.

Do you think it’s difficult? Therefore, each of the channels should be handled by a separate specialist or a team of specialists. We have such guys, we offer services in all major areas of marketing, as well as complex marketing.

Top 5 easy tips to increase referral traffic to your site

Referral traffic is traffic from sites other than Google’s own search engine. Here are some ways to increase your referral traffic.

Tip #1: Joint Marketing Activities

The main purpose of referral traffic is to get traffic from other websites to yours. Hosting online events or partnering with other sites or brands will help you get referral traffic as they will create content on their platform and link to yours.

This is often practiced in various online marketing marathons. When each of the companies says on their pages “we will be at the conference.” In this way they promote the platform, but also each of the speakers shares their audience with others.

Something similar is done today by TikTok bloggers when they come together for a while to the so-called TikTok House. For several days they live together and shoot their tiktok with each other, increasing their reach at the expense of the audience of another blogger.

Tip #2: Guest blog

Another way to get referral traffic is through guest blogging or posting on other sites. Here you are already preparing the content that will be posted on a third-party site. Typically, such a guest is packaged in a column format, where you, in the role of an expert, reveal the intricacies of your profession. Guest posts are a great way to increase your potential audience’s reach and awareness of your brand.

By the way, you can write your own column on the Exiterra blog. To do this, write to [email protected] , our editor will answer all your questions.

Tip #3: Create Link Content

The easiest way to get referral traffic is to get other people to constantly talk about you or what you have done or are doing. But this can not always be done quickly and easily. Therefore, optimizers resort to the use of crowd marketing and placement on various sites.

Crowding means going to different forums, creating the appearance of communication there and, as if by chance, leaving a link to your site. The process is long, tedious and the effect of it is not that very tangible. But in the battle for traffic, every user matters.

Blogs on popular platforms and media

If we talk about placement on sites, this means preparing useful materials and publishing them on various platforms, media, blog systems. Among the most popular sites today are the sites of the Komitet publishing house:

In addition to these, there are many media in which you can publish. The easiest way is to search Pressfeed for interesting offers and requests.

Tip #4: Do some old-fashioned PR

Press releases are typically used by large companies or teams with a full marketing team. They send out PRs to the media and news outlets in advance so that on a certain day all these sites talk about them, which greatly increases your reach.

PR is used at all stages of the company – from financing, launching a new product to re-launch. The downside is that since the majority comes from the media, the referral traffic spikes suddenly disappear. However, coverage can be worth it.

Tip #5: Do something controversial

What’s a good way to get people talking about you? Is there anything debatable? And it doesn’t have to be something displayed in a negative color.

The main thing is that the message should be inherently good. Unpopular, perhaps, but generally positive. Raise the salary of everyone in the company? Okay, cool, positive. How to play on it to cause conversations in society? Publish salaries of all employees. So that there is no guesswork whether employees earn enough or not. A controversial move that can create a lot of noise and talk inside and outside the company, but is based on good intentions.

You can make some unpopular and questionable move, but can it be a great way to get other sites talking about you? Remember how everyone was talking about “Reebok” and his “switch off the approval needle”? Can you imagine how much traffic they got?

How to increase email marketing traffic in 7 easy steps

Increasing traffic from email marketing is one of the most underrated strategies. Most sites don’t use it to their advantage. Below are some tips to increase your email traffic. Although this list is not exhaustive, it should be enough to get you started.

Constantly update your mailing list

The list of mailing addresses for mailing naturally becomes outdated by about 20-25% per year. This means that a contact on your mailing list will be practically useless in four years. This happens for a number of reasons:

• People are changing jobs, and with it, their email addresses.
• You have been added to the blacklist or spam list.
• Your content may become inappropriate for them through no fault of yours.
• Eventually, people die…

Make sure you’re constantly generating new leads to add to your email list.

No one needs to subscribe to your company news

Subscribing to company news is the worst tactic you can use on your site to get addresses for a mailing list. Why? Because it doesn’t add value to your readers. No one is interested in your company until there is no additional benefit.

Instead, create a special marketing offer – a lead magnet. This might be a useful PDF file:

• walkthrough;
• case study;
• training course;
• white paper
• money bonus to personal account, etc.

It could also be a webinar, an email series, exclusive video content, or a podcast. A book, after all!

Segment your audience

Segmentation is what separates successful email marketers from annoying ones. By breaking your email list into segments, you can then personalize your messages. That is, send letters only to those who are really interested in it, without wasting the budget.

Segmentation can be done in any modern mailing service, such as Sendpulse, E-Sputnik or Mailchimp.

Send only relevant emails

This is based on the sharding strategy above. Let’s say you’re an online store that sells products to dog and cat owners.

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If someone identifies as a dog owner, would an email about new cat houses work for them? Chances are they won’t even read your email. Or worse, they may unsubscribe from your mailing list altogether. This is the reason why segmentation and sending relevant emails is the key to increasing your email traffic.

Create ad campaigns for each segment

The next step after segmenting your list is to create ad campaigns for each segment.

When someone fills out the form, an email is sent to them with a thank you for the subscription and questions for segmentation. If a subscriber identifies as a cat lover, they will be enrolled in a campaign that focuses on cats; works the same with dogs. The email sequence might look something like this:

Letter #1: Your most popular cat parenting e-book.

Letter #2: A PDF of photos of your clients’ cats (which you made with their permission, of course).

Letter #3: Video about common cat behavior problems and how to deal with them (scratches, litter box, etc.).

Letter #4: Most Popular Cat Products

Notice how the emails are set up – you provide useful and interesting content first to build rapport and gain trust. And only after that you start mentioning your products.

Don’t forget to add UTM tags

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Don’t forget to add the correct UTM tags to the links in your email. Otherwise, when people click on links to them, they won’t be tracked by email traffic. If your email service provider has an integration with Google Analytics or Yandex Metrica, make sure that you have done this integration correctly. Then the links will be tagged automatically.

Add some links to your email

Although it may seem obvious and trivial, adding a few links to your email is one way to improve your email traffic. Whether you’re sending a simple newsletter or a summary of blog articles, there are usually two things in that email: text and an image. For example, here is a digest of Mind Cafe magazine articles on Medium.

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How to get the most out of your ads

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Paid traffic is traffic that comes from ads. But not all ads fall under this definition. For example, if you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, traffic from these sources may be referred to as referral or direct traffic. For correct analytics, use UTM tags for each individual advertising channel.

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You don’t need to sell directly

The reason advertising is too expensive is because marketers keep trying to convert cold traffic into paying customers. Instead of stupidly trying to sell to everyone, you should build relationships with potential customers.

Describe what problems your products and services can solve. Show this with an example. To warm up the interest of a potential client with content that is interesting to him. And only then sell. How to do it? Let’s figure it out.

Step 1: Get to Know Your Audience

The first thing you need to do is add a snippet of code to help you track the performance of your ads.

• Add a global Google Ads tag if you are using Google Ads.
• Add the Facebook pixel if you advertise on Facebook and Instagram.

This is to collect more data about your visitors. Instead of ads for a cold audience, a list of demographics or bids for certain keywords, you will immediately “target” a warmer audience.

Step 2: Promote your blog posts first

Cold traffic is people who haven’t heard of you. If you’re a small business, chances are you’ve been advertising cold traffic all your life. Usually the results are so-so. If you want to get the most out of your advertising budget, promote content first. This allows you to get cheap clicks to your site.

The audience, especially the business audience, knows when they’re being sold. They try not to click or pay any attention to sponsored posts in their newsfeeds, especially if they are from a brand they have never seen or heard of before.

Step 3: Catch up with remarketing

Now that you’ve gotten some cheap traffic from your site, it’s time to convert regular visitors into leads and buyers. This is where remarketing comes in handy.

You are targeting people who have visited your site from advertisements and read your posts. This is the so-called “warming up the audience”, when cold traffic becomes warm. That is, people already know who you are and what you are. A warm audience converts better. Plus, remarketing ads are cheap too.

Search ads in super competitive industries can cost a few dollars or more per click, and this is just an average (some keywords cost over $50 per click). In contrast, social media ads and remarketing clicks can cost 2x to 100x less.

Grow direct traffic

Direct traffic is a sign of brand awareness or repeat visits. It is also a generic or fallback channel in Google Analytics. If GA does not know where the visitor came to the site from, the traffic will fall under the Direct label.

• Writing content.
• Social media sharing.
• Sending emails to your list.
• Advertising

All of this contributes to building your brand. There is no other way to increase your direct traffic other than building brand awareness.

Increasing website traffic is a big complex job that is not limited to SEO or contextual advertising. Focusing solely on SEO is a bad strategy. There are other channels that can bring you a quick win and boost your business growth.

Exiterra specialists are always ready to help you with the comprehensive promotion of your website. Just leave a request in the contact section or write to the chat on the right.