How to get traffic to your website

Learning how to get traffic to your website is probably the most important piece of the puzzle for running a successful online business or blog. After all, if no one is coming to your site, you’re not going to be able to achieve your goals!

If you want proven advice on how to increase website traffic or how to get your blog noticed, you’ve come to the right place!

Over the last seven years, I’ve helped my clients use my tactics to grow website traffic and get pretty insane results. I helped Paul Jarvis to get nearly 1,000% more traffic to his website in 8 months!

And that’s not to brag—it’s important to know what advice you can trust online when you’re learning how to get traffic to your blog. Paul is a well-respected online expert in his own right and my tactics worked even for him.

How to get traffic to your website - Case Study Paul Jarvis

There are countless articles and websites about how to get traffic to your website but I wanted to give you an ultimate guide on all the tactics I use to cultivate website traffic and achieve my goals for my own websites and my clients.

It’s not a step-by-step tutorial on how to grow your traffic but will point you in the right direction to get started and to other content on my website that can help you start to build your audience, get more traffic, improve your SEO, and promote your content.

In this guide on how to grow your website traffic, you’ll find four parts that are essential to building an audience online and traffic building tactics to help you get over that traffic hurdle to success.

  1. Identify your audience and get to know them
  2. Build a traffic-generating website
  3. Promote your content for maximum traffic
  4. Convert your traffic to achieve your goals

how to drive traffic to your website

Get More Traffic with Audience Building Techniques

Want to know the main strategy behind 1,000% more traffic to Paul’s website in 8 months? We created a lot of great content his audience was looking for and made his website an authority in his niche. But to do that, we first had to really understand his audience.

Have you ever been to a website there it felt like the content was reading your mind and so in sync with how you were thinking that you instantly knew you were in the right place? I bet you spent a lot of time on that website, signed up for their email, and even followed on social media. Maybe it was so effective, you were ready to buy that second!

Talk about audience building! That’s what we all want from growing our traffic, right? We want to get the right kind of traffic to our sites, not only as many visits as we can get.

Sites that effectively gain lots of traffic have one thing in common: they really know their audience. If you want to grow your traffic and cultivate an audience, audience research is the place to start.

Related: The secret to make your audience love you

By doing audience research you will grow your traffic because you:

  • Know what your audience wants
  • Know where you should focus marketing time and money
  • Know what messaging will work best
  • Know what products or services your audience will buy

You can get lucky and guess these things. But doing audience research assures that you’ll know your audience on a deeper level so you can create content that grows your traffic and builds your audience.

Marketers who do audience research at least once per year are 303% more likely to achieve their marketing goals. I don’t know about you, but anything I can do to increase my chances of reaching my goals is top of my list! But only 32% of marketers do audience research.

If you want to stand out online and get boatloads of traffic, do audience research. Doing audience research is the first thing I do to grow a website’s traffic, without exception, because it works.

Audience Research Tips to Boost Your Traffic

It’s clear that doing audience research will help you get more traffic to your website and give you the additional benefits of getting the right traffic to your site that’s ready to buy.

But how do you actually do audience research? These are some of the things I do to learn more about my audience to grow the right kind of traffic:

  • Do an audience survey
  • Do interviews with individuals in your audience
  • Spy on your audience on social media
  • Look at Google Analytics’ Demographics and Interests reports
  • Read comments, posts on forums, and other user-generated content
  • Do keyword research
  • Analyze the most successful content on competitor websites

Once I’ve done that research, I use all the information I’ve gathered together to develop an audience persona.

how to increase website traffic with a traffic generating website

When I worked with Paul to get 1,000% more traffic to his site, we focused the most on taking care of on-page SEO to build a traffic-generating website. On-page SEO helps you get higher rankings in search engines and drive traffic to your website from Google by building a website that works well, talks to Google correctly, and is filled with really great content.

The best part? Pretty much everything that helps on-page SEO also helps your marketing across the board, although indirectly.

Related: What is on-page SEO?

You can build a traffic-generating website with great on-page SEO by doing three things:

  • Create cornerstone and evergreen content
  • Show off your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness
  • Take care of technical SEO

It’s hard to build website traffic without content, though it is possible. Content is the main driver of traffic overall, whether that traffic is from social media, search engines, or even your email list. Without great content, your website is nothing more than a couple of sales pages—and those kinds of pages aren’t great at driving traffic to your website.

Using your audience persona, you’ll have all kinds of great ideas for content your audience will love.

Beyond having great content, building trust and showing off your expertise and authority in your niche helps you rank higher in Google. Google calls this E-A-T and uses it as a way to understand and rank websites.

The hardest part of on-page SEO is taking care of technical things that impact how your website rankings, like how your content is organized, how your website talks to Google, how fast your website loads, and other similar things. I recommend hiring an SEO consultant to handle your technical SEO instead of doing it yourself.

Overall, if you do these three things, you’re well on your way to building a traffic-generating website!

If you want to really get the most out of my SEO resources, be sure to check out the SEO section of my site. I have a lot more of articles on SEO!

how to get your blog noticed by using content promotion

Promotion to Build Traffic to your Website

With a great website and even better content that your audience wants, the next step is to promote your website to get the maximum traffic you can from it. Letting Google direct traffic to your website based on your on-page SEO is great—but it’s even better to really market your website to get the most out of it.

Paul’s 1,000% increase in website traffic was looking only at traffic from organic search. Imagine how much traffic he could generate on top of that with the right promotion strategies!

By promoting your content, you get the most out of your work, instead of just letting it ride and seeing where you end up. Most people really neglect promoting their content and focus more on creating content.

But remember, the whole point of creating content is to get traffic to your website. So why not make sure you get the most traffic posible out of your work? While I don’t think the 80:20 rule some marketers believe in is quite the right ratio, there’s something to be said about taking time to promote your work.

There are a lot of ways to promote your content, but the ones I’ve found the most traffic from are:

  • Pinterest
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Guest Posts
  • Interviews
  • Influencer marketing
  • Backlinking
  • Business profiles and local SEO
  • Syndication
  • PR
  • Joint ventures

Going back to your audience research, you should know more about where your ideal audience hangs out online and what that means for how you should spend your time promoting your content. After all, if your audience never gets on LinkedIn except to update their resume from time to time, promoting your content there is likely a waste of time!

Tailoring your content promotion strategies to your audience is the best way to save time and get the most traffic possible to your content.

how to get traffic on website and convert it to make money online

Convert your traffic into business goals

Now that you have a lot of traffic coming to your site, you need to do something with it. At the end of the day, we all want traffic for some reason or another. And when you start to really get a lot of traffic to your site, you’ll be kicking yourself if you didn’t set up a way to convert that traffic beforehand.

There are a number of ways to make money online but the most popular are:

  • Sell physical goods
  • Sell digital products, like courses
  • Sell services
  • Sell other people’s things with affiliate marketing

As part of building your traffic-generating website, you should set up a sales funnel to help direct that traffic towards converting into one of those channels for achieving your business goals. That can be something as involved as a multi-part email sales pitch to something as simple as a way to buy your products with strong calls-to-action across your site.

My favorite way to stay in touch with customers on the long term is to use email marketing, regardless of how you convert traffic into paying customers, including for affiliate-based income! Email marketing isn’t dictated by changing algorithms, doesn’t require you to pay to talk to your existing audience, and is full of people who want to hear from you, assuming you built your email list the right way from traffic on your website and online presence.

Once you’ve got a lot of traffic to your website, you can start working on conversion optimization and increasing your conversion rates. But the big caveat? You have to have enough traffic to your site to begin with to work on conversion optimization.

So before you start getting excited about getting people to convert, work on getting more traffic to your website first with parts 1 to 3 above.

Learn more on how to get more traffic to your website

I hope this article on how to build your website traffic has helped you get a better understanding of what you need to go to grow your website traffic and giving you direction to get where you want to go. You’ll find a lot of great articles linked up here on my site to help you with individual topics in this post!

If you really want to get the most out of my content, signing up for my email newsletter I send out once a week where I tell you what techniques are working right now, what marketing news you need to know, and how I’m building traffic to my own websites and clients.

I hope you decide that this article was really valuable for you—and that you want to hear more from me!

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