Many businesses struggle to come up with new and innovative ways to increase website traffic. There’s a lot of misinformation online about how to attract more visitors, which can lead to using the same tired strategies over and over and not seeing positive results.

If you’re looking to increase website traffic with both organic and paid ways, here are 10 methods that are proven to yield results.

1. Perform Keyword Research

Always include relevant keywords in your content. Keywords should be used naturally, not stuffed into the content so much that they detract from the main idea or distract the reader. It’s important to use keywords throughout the content, like the meta description, the page title, the URL, headers and a few times throughout the piece.

To conduct keyword research, you can use tools like Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush. These sites show what keywords competitors are using, how often people search for keywords, how expensive the keyword is for pay-per-click ads, related keywords and much more valuable information to guide keyword strategy. Hiring an SEO agency is always an option, as well, as they can offer valuable insights and perform audits to identify issues that may be keeping your site from being shown in search engines.

2. Create Memorable Content

It’s not enough just to post content; you need to create content that’s memorable and cuts through the noise. In fact, useful and memorable content is one of the top ways to increase website traffic.

People use Google to find specific, thorough and accurate answers for their questions, and your content should be there to provide those answers. In fact, websites featuring blog content generate 434% more search engine-indexed pages than those without it. In addition, sites that release more than 16 posts per month receive nearly 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish zero to four articles.

The bottom line is that when you care about the content you produce, post regularly and research what your audience wants to see, web traffic should improve.

3. Write Guest Posts

Guest posting for other websites is an effective way to generate backlinks, boost referral traffic, and increase search engine results page (SERP) rankings. You should always thoroughly research websites within your industry to pitch.

First, look at a website’s content and make sure it’s high quality, check its domain authority and study their guest posting guidelines. Also, ask the publication if they’ll promote the post on social media and if they’ll tag you.

4. Keep Active Social Media Pages

Social media is huge for attracting visitors. Here are some ways it should be used to increase website traffic:

• Post content (blogs, e-books, white papers, infographics, videos, etc.) across your social media platforms
• Interact with followers by replying to them, reposting their content and tagging them
• Use relevant hashtags
• Update the link in your bio to promote new content when it comes out
• Change a cover photo to promote new content
• Tag influencers who may be interested in the content
• Include enticing information from the content to encourage people to click the link to it
• Reply to other people looking for answers with links to your content

5. Use Advertising to Increase Website Traffic

Advertising through paid search, social media and display ads can be an efficient way to increase website traffic. Each option comes with its upsides and downsides — for instance, users can block display ads and the average cost per click for Google Ads on the search network is between $1 and $2 per click — so it’s important to set budgets and goals before investing a ton of money into it.

For instance, when doing pay per click (PPC) ads, it’s critical to start with one campaign and a few different ad groups containing the keywords you want to target most. Once campaigns begin, see how audiences behave with various keywords. Maybe one keyword only resulted in impressions, which didn’t increase website traffic, while another resulted in clicks and conversions.

6. Send Email Newsletters

Promoting content through email newsletters is an effective way to increase website traffic. Here are a few email marketing best practices:

• Include enticing information from the content in the subject line and in the body of the email.
• Insert a link or button that subscribers can click to read more of the content.
• Make sure emails are mobile-friendly. Links should be easy to see, since 46% of all email opens are done on mobile devices.
• Employ personalization tactics by including the name of the subscriber.
• Make the email visually appealing with the use of well-designed templates.
• Conduct A/B testing to see which versions of emails receive more opens and clicks.

7. Influencer Outreach

Industry influencers are eager to share content that their followers will love. Businesses can connect with influencers in a few ways, including:

• Tag the influencer in a social media post if your piece references their content or research.
• Ask the influencer for an interview/Q&A, then tag or email the influencer when the content is posted. They’ll likely share your content with their audience.
• Do a round-up with multiple influencers (i.e. “10 Experts Predict Small Business Trends for 2020”) and tag each of the participants when promoting the post on social media.
• Pay influencers to run sponsored posts on their social media pages.

If you’re not sure where to start, try using tools like HypeAuditor and BuzzSumo to find the right influencers in your industry, or reach out to a digital marketing agency who can do influencer outreach for you.

8. Create a Helpful Industry Tool or Content

Giving prospects something of use is a great way to drive more traffic. For example, we created an editorial calendar template here at our content marketing agency that was free for anyone to download. We wanted to give marketers a tool to make creating and posting content easier.

Create various tools and content that would help out others in your industry, then offer them for free on their websites. By posting gated content/tools (offering the content and tools in exchange for the user’s contact information), you can maximize your returns and find new leads. Another way to increase website traffic is to promote the content/tools on relevant LinkedIn Groups or forums where people in the industry interact.

9. Submit Press Releases to Influential Publications

When businesses create press releases to promote themselves or their clients, they shouldn’t just place them on a press release syndication website and wait to see what happens. They need to actively push the release and send it to influential websites and publications in their industries.

When we want to announce our client’s good news, we send it to industry blogs and publications that their audience reads. As a result, we can collect dozens of new leads and boost referral traffic for the client.

10. Exchange Backlinks

With so many businesses trying to increase website traffic, there are many opportunities for backlink exchanges. Reach out to relevant sites and offer your content as an additional resource to include in one of the site’s posts. To add an extra incentive, you can offer a mutually-beneficial backlink exchange, offering to add one of their links to a post of yours as well.

That’s exactly what we did for one of our clients, Rainbow Muffler & Brake. We created a blog post for them called, “The Essential Road Trip Checklist for Your Car.” We then found relevant websites through Pitchbox and reached out to those sites to see if they wanted to promote our post.

The website WheelScene agreed to a backlink and social media post exchange, which led to a 23,245% increase in views! If businesses find the right partner for their backlink exchange, they can score big.

Increasing Website Traffic Today

By taking these steps, businesses can expect to see an increase in website traffic over time. While many of these tactics can provide instant gratification, others will take more time and patience. Keep pushing forward by trying a variety of methods and analyzing the results.