You’ve launched your website and it’s beautiful. You can’t wait for people to show up and start buying from you. After all, you spent all this time, money, and effort to make it perfect – you built it, so they will come … won’t they?
Not without some help from you.
What is website traffic?
It is a very literal phrase. Website traffic isn’t a thing – traffic refers to people who find and visit your website. Every website needs traffic. You don’t build a website for yourself, you build it to share information about your business and to get new business.
Why is website traffic important?
Website visitors (traffic) equals business opportunities regardless of what your business is or if it sells products or services.
Traffic = Opportunity
Yes, you need to capture those visitors to turn them into leads. And yes, not all traffic is equally good. But before you can capture them and decide if the visitors and leads are the right ones for you, you have to create awareness of your business online and tempt, lead, and direct them to your website.
A website without visitors is just a billboard in the dark!
How to get website traffic?
There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. Here are 5 ways to get started:
1 – Paid Traffic
This is the most obvious and generally the quickest way to get traffic to your site. It is also the most expensive way, which if you have a limited budget might make this the wrong choice for you to start with.
Paid traffic can include:
- Search engine ads on platforms like Google and Bing;
- Image banner ads you see on websites and social media;
- Sponsored content in the form of articles and blogs.
The advantage of paid traffic is the potential speed that you get traffic, but the disadvantage is when you stop paying, your traffic drops off.
2 – Organic Search
Organic search is generally called Search Engine Optimization and is considered ‘free’ traffic. But that is misleading. It is not ‘free’ it costs time and effort, which is a finite resource for all of us. That being said, it should be a part of every business’s online traffic plan.
Optimizing your website to be found when people search for information, products, and services can be very technical and include a number of moving parts. The two main buckets are:
- On-page: the content on the page of your website and the meta-data supporting it behind the visible parts of your website. This involves writing great content for your visitors and making sure the technical parts behind the scenes are in place and working for you.
- Off-page: This refers to the activities and signals outside your website that creates a path back to your website. Unlike on-page SEO, you don’t have full control over what happens outside or ‘off’ your website, but there are definitely things you can do to help build the foundation and the direction of the signals on the internet to your website.
This is a slower build but can create a foundation that will drive traffic to your website for years
3 – Social Media
It can often feel like social media is a monster that has taken over the world and we forget that for business it is one more tool we use to reach our potential customers.
A tool we use, not a tool that controls us.
And it is a tool that can be very powerful in growing awareness of your business brand, building traffic to your website and capturing leads. You need to post with purpose – sharing your website content though shares, images, video on social in a way that prompts interaction. Make it work for you!
4 – Question & Answer Forums
There are many places to answer questions to share the information you have, which builds your credibility and authority. You can start with platforms like:
- Quora,
- Yahoo Answers
There are many others, but you can start here. The key is consistency.
5 – Reputation Management
Reviews and review sites can have a huge impact on how you are found. A lot of them like Yelp and TripAdvisor are really search engines in their own right.
Are you asking for reviews and helping shape the message? Have you done a recent search to see what reviews might be out there? There are 3 possible positions your business can fall under:
- Bad ones, which can a devastating affect if not dealt with.
- None, which can put you at a disadvantage to your competitors.
- Balanced, you have consistent positive reviews, so are in a solid place to counteract an occasional bad review.
If you are getting reviews on independent sites, then it increases your brand, shows social proof and creates more paths & signals back to your website, generating more traffic for your website.
There are many ways to generate traffic for your website. Break down the tasks into small bite size pieces and start building your traffic today.
Not sure where to get started? If you need help with these steps and more, check out our guided e-course “Traffic in 15-Minutes Per day” below.
Founder & CEO of ThinkFlame, Shelly Patrick, trains individuals and companies to understand how their marketing affects their sales conversation and how to integrate marketing into their yearly plans for consistent growth.