9 Effective Ways to Increase Website Traffic.

 When you don't have much website traffic, it can feel like you're shouting into the void. There are nearly two billion websites online at the time of writing. That means nearly one for every three people alive today.

So given the stiff competition, how can you increase website traffic? Thankfully, there are a lot of strategies that you can employ to build your traffic numbers.

In this guide, we're going to give you a list of some of the best ways you can improve your website to get better visitor figures. More visitors means more business, which means more revenue, so increasing traffic can be a huge boost.

Ready to find out more? Read on!

1. Create More Content

One of the best ways to increase website traffic is to start creating more content for your site. This could be a blog, podcast, or video series. You can let your imagination run wild when it comes to content!

So how does creating more content help your website traffic? Every page of content on your website is another page that Google can index, which means you'll have more pages that can end up in people's search results.

More pages mean more clicks but this isn't the only way that creating content helps you. You can carry out keyword research before you start creating content and use high search volume keywords in your content. As a result, your content will start to rank better in search results, which also means more clicks.

There's no reason not to have a blog on your site. It's an easy and cheap way to increase website traffic!

2. Use Dedicated Hosting

If your website is slow, visitors are going to get frustrated with your website and leave without navigating to another page on your site. This is called bounce and you want to keep your bounce rate as low as you can.

When you have a high bounce rate, Google will class your website as less helpful and you'll rank worse in search results.

One way to improve your bounce rate is to avoid shared hosting. This is where your website shares a server with several other websites and if they're busy, your speed will suffer.

Dedicated hosting is the answer. When you use dedicated hosting, you have a whole server that is dedicated to your site. This boosts your speed and keeps your website fast and responsive, lessening visitor frustration.

3. Pay for Advertising

A sure-fire way to jump to the top of search results is to buy pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You target PPC ads for certain keywords, with more competitive keywords costing you more.

When someone searches for a said keyword, your website will appear at the very top of the search results. This is a fantastic solution if you're looking to increase website traffic fast but it has its downsides too. For one, it's not a cheap solution.

Every time someone clicks on your advert, you have to pay for it. This can add up fast and could end up eating up a lot of your marketing budget.

4. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Your business should be active on social media. If it isn't, you're missing out on a great variety of ways to bring more traffic to your site.

For instance, when you create new content, you should post it to your social media page. This counts as a backlink (more on that later) and may get more eyes on your content. If you've created informative or relatable content, you may get a good number of shares too, which helps spread your message even further.

You can also use the "stories" feature of various social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, to bring more eyes to your site. This approach is particularly popular with young people.

If you're interested in using social media to increase website traffic, ensure that you're targeting the right market. For instance, if you're targeting young people, Instagram and Snapchat are both superb. If you want to target a more mature audience, Facebook and LinkedIn can help you a great deal.

5. Capture Email Addresses

Email marketing isn't often seen as a way to get more website traffic but it can help you a lot. When someone comes to one of your landing pages, try to capture their email.

It's best if you offer something in exchange such as a free ebook, a newsletter, or entry into a prize draw. When you've captured email addresses, you can put your email marketing expertise to great use and target them with specific emails based on the landing page that they came to (you should have dedicated landing pages for a variety of niches to help this process).

Even if only 10 percent of these people click on the links in your email, that's still more website traffic than you had before, for very little investment.

6. Build Backlinks

For Google to find your webpages, it needs to be able to access them via a link. The more links back to your website, or backlinks, that you have, the better your search ranking will be.

So how can you get more backlinks? Webmasters know the power of backlinks so they're often hesitant to hand them out for free.

You should start by requesting a backlink when someone mentions your business in a positive light, such as in a review for their blog. You should also ask any company that uses you or that you use if they could feature you as a partner/client on their website, complete with a backlink.

You should also start reaching out to blogs that are in your niche, asking if they would be happy for you to write a guest post. A guest post is a bit of content about your industry or niche that another site hosts. As a part of this deal, you're normally allowed a backlink, which can bring in more traffic on its own, as well as boosting your ranking.

7. Keep Your Content Updated

Is your website full of old content that's stopped drawing in visitors? If so, you might be able to revitalize this content by updating it for the current year!

SEO is constantly changing and if your site only has old content, you're not going to draw in the hits. The following changes can massively boost a page's search ranking in no time at all:

1. Updating the year in the page's title, e.g., changing "hottest trends of 2019" to "hottest trends of 2020"
2. Fixing any broken links in the content
3. Updating outdated screenshots
4. Using stats for the current year
5. Fixing broken images

Make sure that your content stays fresh. It doesn't take a great deal of time and it can make a big difference to your site!

8. Start Optimizing for Voice Search

Voice search is becoming a big part of SEO. More of us are using Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa to search for us. To improve your website traffic with regard to voice search, you need to start optimizing your site for it.

One of the biggest changes you'll need to make will be incorporating longer keywords, known as long-tail keywords, into your site. Long-tail voice search keywords include naturalistic questions: most of us don't bark keywords at our digital assistants in the same way we might search for them on our computers.

You'll need to answer these questions, too. Voice search aims to find the answers to questions fast: if you beat around the bush, you won't rank. You should be concise too, as digital assistants like to find snippets of information that they can relay to the user.

9. Use Local SEO

You might know all there is to know about optimizing your website for Google's main search but what about optimizing for Google Maps? Every day, millions of people use Google Maps with a sizeable proportion of these people searching for businesses near them.

You can take advantage of this to increase website traffic. Use local SEO techniques such as claiming your Google My Business listing and providing information and screenshots about your business.

This can both get more visitors to your brick-and-mortar location and more visitors to your website. It's a win-win and something you need to be doing in 2020.

How We Can Help You Increase Website Traffic

We've shown you a lot of different ways to increase website traffic but there's another way: joining a traffic exchange network like ours. A traffic exchange system collects a list of websites, with each website's owners browsing each other's sites. This means that everyone in the network gets increased traffic fast.

Sign up today and get ready to increase your website traffic!