There are two things business owners and marketers love the most – acquiring new clients and driving organic traffic to their websites.
The question is, how do you get people to notice you in a seemingly infinite sea of options? With so much competition working around the clock, the truth is it can be hard to stand out, but it’s far from impossible.
To help you grow into one of the most visited websites in your niche, we’ve selected a number of techniques that are proven to drive traffic to your website effectively and efficiently.
Let’s take a closer look:
1. Overhaul and Revamp “Expired” Content
Updating or rewriting outdated blog posts should be one of your top SEO strategies.
Comb through your content to find any posts that are no longer relevant, at least according to Google. You can either archive these outdated posts or update them and publish them again. Google Analytics is a valuable tool for tracking website visits, and a quick look will show you which content has been losing traffic and why.
A ranking drop can happen when your competitors are aiming for the same target keywords, or it can simply mean that your content is out of date. This may be due to old statistics, broken links, or even having a year or date in the title.
Sometimes, updating the outdated information in a post is enough to improve your search engine ranking. However, in most cases, you will have to rewrite the entire article or combine several articles to make a single one.
2. Concentrate on Topics That Increase Traffic Volumes
Content is king, and when paired with high-grade SEO, it has the power to make any website’s search engine rankings explode.
To get some of that delicious passive organic traffic everyone wants, you will need to write about highly-researched and in-demand topics. Here are some ideas to inspire you:
1. Use a Keyword Research Tool to filter relevant words or phrases by:
- a) Search Volume: a metric showing the number of times a specific keyword or keyphrase has been searched for in Google within the last month, in a particular location.
- b) Keyword Difficulty: a metric that shows the ranking difficulty of a particular keyword or keyphrase on a numerical scale from 0 to 100.
This method will give you a narrowed-down list of low-competition keywords/keyphrases with good search volumes. You can tweak the filters until you get even better results.
2. Use Content Explorer Tools to search for low-hanging content ideas
Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush are some of the most professional SEO toolkits on the market that support advanced operators. Their searchable databases include billions of web pages, and by applying the suitable filters, you can easily find link-building possibilities, low-competition topics, and business opportunities.
To find topics with big search traffic potential, apply these filters:
- Referring domains < 5
- Organic traffic filter > 1,000
The search results will reveal a table of pages relevant to your niche that receive plenty of organic traffic while having few to no backlinks.
3. Get Social
Creating high-quality content and hoping for people to bump into it in the cyber ocean won’t drive traffic to your website. You will need to get serious about promoting your content, and one of the best ways to do it is through social media marketing tools.
These communities are where your audience is ‘socializing’ on the Internet, and you can find them across Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Slack, various message boards or forums, and many other apps and Web platforms.
However, this is not an open invitation for you to target and spam online communities. Instead, focus on building a trusted relationship with group members and admins and creating a stronger community by providing valuable and personal insights. A value-first approach will create space for them to give you the green light when you ask permission to self-promote.
4. Make Quora Your Q&A Hub
Quora has grown into the biggest Q&A platform where people ask and answer questions literally about anything. This means you can turn Quora into a free website traffic generator by answering the right questions in your niche.
However, with millions of inquiries being generated daily, the trick is finding and answering questions that drive traffic to your website.
Your answers also need to be engaging and well-thought-out, or, in other words, you need to be an excellent copywriter to get the upvotes that will push your answer to the top of the page. Some of the critical features of a good reply are a relatable story, useful information, and high-quality, attention-grabbing graphics.
The vast majority of Quora’s answers are dry and uninspiring, so telling a story that will grab readers’ attention while at the same time providing valuable information will inform the moderators that you are not there just to self-promote. This way, they won’t mind when you link elsewhere and drive visits to your website.
5. Get The Hang of Guest Blogging
Landing a guest post on a relevant site in your niche can drive blog traffic to your website, improve your site’s rank in search engines, and boost brand awareness.
The most challenging hurdle to overcome with guest blogging is finding reputable websites that are willing to publish your content. It is also time-consuming and repetitive, so the best way to go around it is to work with Google Search Operators to find sites with pages like “write for us,” “contribute,” or “guest post guidelines.”
But guest posting is a two-way street. As well as writing an article for a website, you can also invite others to publish their articles on your blog. Chances are they will share a link to the guest blog with their audience, which will lead new readers to your website.
One thing is for sure, you should always publish high-quality, well-organized, original content that provides value to your readers. Never use spammy links because Google is very good at limiting traffic to poor-quality guest posts.
6. Build Brand Collaborations To Gain Access to Different Audiences
From celebrities to top-tier brands, it feels like everyone is cross-promoting these days, and with good reason. Collaborating with non-competing brands that you share similar audiences with allows you to tap into a completely new user base.
How to do this?
Look for brands that solve different issues and problems for the same or similar audiences. This way, you won’t steal each other’s potential customers.
7. Improve your YouTube Ranking
Targeting a specific keyword is an essential part of YouTube SEO, but there is one thing this video platform prefers over anything else, and that’s high engagement.
The more time viewers spend on YouTube, the more the platform can cash in, so, logically, they want people to stick around for as long as possible.
Follow these five steps to creating videos that rank well:
- Keyword research. Organic traffic doesn’t happen if you don’t target high research volume topics. To find the best keywords in your niche, combine a YouTube Keyword Tool and Google Trends.
- Determine search intent. Behind search intent lies the reason why someone is researching a specific topic. To figure it out, enter a keyword of interest in the YouTube search bar, and the first five results will give you your answer.
- Create a video that matches the search intent. Not many people can improvise on camera, so the best way to go about it is to first decide on the stories you want to share and then turn them into a highly engaging script. Editing a video is also a challenging part of the production, and an experienced editor will help you grab the attention of your target audience.
- Optimize the video. Yes, YouTube also encourages on-page optimization. From eye-catching thumbnails to including the best keyword in the title and description, mastering video optimization will help you rank better in the website’s search function.
- Upload and promote. Look at your analytics to determine when is the best time to share your video. The first 24-48 hours usually determine the success of a video. Remember to reply to comments, share your video across social media, and announce it via an email campaign or newsletter. The more visitors to your channel, the more traffic to your website.
8. Merge Similar Content
If you have posts with similar content and none of them get the traffic they once used to, it’s time to merge those posts into one congruent article that is easy to understand and flows better. By streamlining the content, chances are you will also improve your Search Engine Ranking.
This is called the Cocktail Technique, where you merge the ‘authority’ of two or more articles into one and provide overall better content.
9. Implement Good SEO
The SEO rules have changed a great deal in the last few years. Competitors are getting savvier when it comes to persuading Google to rank them higher on the SERPs and drive more traffic to their websites.
However, this doesn’t mean SEO is dead, as many would have you believe. It’s still an indisputable fact that the highest-converting traffic that brings the highest revenues is the Organic Search.
If you are not showing up in Google searches when potential clients/customers are looking for your product or service, you may as well not even exist. That’s why optimization is everything, and it doesn’t have to take ages.
Professionally implemented SEO techniques can skyrocket your business.
10. Reach new channels by repurposing content
Do you have an excellent article that brought many visits to your website or even helped you land some sales? Why not turn it into a YouTube video? And that’s just one example.
With so many different platforms at your disposal, you need to get creative with the content you already have. Share your infographics on Twitter and Instagram, or include part of your video in your next email burst.
Work hard, but also work smart. Repurposing your content, especially content that’s already proven to be successful, will save you time and boost your presence across various platforms.
11. Create Free Online Courses and Webinars
Nothing says “thank you” like a freebie.
Free online courses and webinars are a great way to provide value that you can later capitalize on. People always want to learn something new and useful. Creating a strategy to leverage this ever-present demand, coupled with an effective promotion strategy, is a great way to drive traffic to your website.
Remember to let your audience know about important dates. Nudge your subscribers with a weekly email, or slip a ‘last chance to participate’ message into their inbox the day before you launch your webinar or course.
Recording and archiving your material is necessary for later viewing and repurposing for other social media channels.
12. Be the Next Level Podcats Guest
Podcasts are all the rage at the moment, and for a good reason. This media channel is becoming one of the top-trending marketing strategies that businesses use to reach new audiences.
However, creating a podcast is time-consuming and requires a lot of highly technical background work and professional equipment. Not everyone will have the money, time, or experience needed to effectively manage such an elaborate production. Therefore a convenient workaround is to appear as a guest on podcasts that are relevant to your customer base.
With podcasts growing in popularity, it’s evident that everyone will want a piece of the pie, and that means one thing is sure – they will all need guests. Take the time to scan for the best podcasts in your niche and offer your knowledge and insights for free.
Building trust and giving your target audience the feeling that you share a personal connection will later translate into revenue, and sharing valuable content is the right way to do it.
It’s a win-win situation – they get high-quality guests, and you get more traffic to your website.