Traffic is something we all strive for in digital marketing. Without traffic, there are no leads and without leads, there won’t be any conversions.
There are a ton of options to drive traffic to your website, but you have to make sure that the traffic is relevant and of high quality. Otherwise, you’ll just be attracting visitors who are likely to leave soon after landing on your site, thus increasing your bounce rate.
While it’s ideal to use organic channels to cut costs, it can take months before you actually start getting the kind of traffic you need. During this period, you could be running at a loss that can be extremely difficult to make up.
That’s why you should combine organic methods with paid methods that can get you high-quality and relevant traffic effectively.
In this post, you’ll discover some of the most effective tactics to drive high-quality traffic using both organic and paid methods.
Using Organic Channels
#1: Create Interesting, Shareable Content
This is easily the most important step. Good content lays the foundation for almost every aspect of your business and marketing efforts.
Even if you manage to drive some traffic to your site, your visitors won’t stay for long if they don’t find engaging content to consume.
That’s why you need to create high-quality content that people will want to share. With more shares comes more visibility, which then results in higher traffic.
You can identify topics that your target audience loves using tools like BuzzSumo. Just enter a keyword and the tool will bring up data about the most-shared and most engaging content on that topic.
You can then use that information to develop content ideas that will appeal to your target audience.
Besides this, you should also focus on creating more long-form content for your readers. Long-form content is highly effective for providing actionable insights and tips that the audience can apply in real life. This makes it highly engaging and worthy of sharing.
In fact, a BuzzSumo and Backlinko analysis found that long-form content tends to get the most social shares and backlinks. Blog posts between 3,000 and 10,000 words got the most backlinks. Blog posts between 1,000 and 2,000 words got the most social shares.
And don’t forget the importance of adding a suitable call-to-action that encourages your readers to share. You could test out different CTAs and see what works best to get more social shares.
Case Study: How Qzzr Increased Social Shares by 200%
Qzzr simplified their share options and only highlighted the Facebook share option. They also optimized their generic CTAs and used a stronger “Share on Facebook” prompt.
In addition to increasing the size of the button, they also changed the color. This simple optimization effort helped them increase social shares by 200%.
#2: Contribute Content to Reputable Sites
There are several benefits of contributing content to a reputable site. It helps you gain more visibility among a relevant audience and gives you more credibility in the industry.
This means you’ll be able to drive a lot more traffic to your site. Specifically traffic consisting of people who are interested in reading more of your content or learning more about your products/services.
Plus, the backlinks from these authority sites will help you boost your Domain Authority and search engine visibility. This further contributes to increased traffic from search results.
Adam Enfroy, for instance, published eight guest posts on websites with DAs of above 60. This resulted in a 372% increase in organic traffic. In addition to getting 247 new backlinks, his Alexa Rank also improved by 600,000.
You can start looking for guest posting opportunities by running a search on Google using a relevant industry keyword + write for us. You can also switch up the phrase with, “become a contributor,” “submit guest post,” etc.
After this, use the Domain Authority Checker to determine the Domain Authority of all of the relevant sites in your search results. Aim for sites with a DA of above 60, if possible.
Before you start reaching out to them or pitching to them, make sure you equip yourself with brilliant content ideas. It also helps if you have some published writing samples so they can see what you have to offer.
#3: Create Roundup Posts
Roundup posts are a great way to collaborate with influencers, especially when you’re in the B2B industry.
The reach and authority of these influencers can give your content more visibility, which will drive plenty of high-quality traffic to your site. Besides, you won’t have to pay them for participating so you’ll be minimizing costs.
When Tor Refsland put together his first roundup post, he managed to get 20,231 page views in just six days. The post also saw 1,500+ social shares and helped him gain 185 new email subscribers.
Here are the steps you need to follow to create a roundup post:
Step One
Pick a topic that would be relevant to your target audience.
For example, if you’re in the content marketing niche, you’ll need to pick out topics related to content marketing. This could be anything from content research and development to content distribution.
Step Two
Then get a bit specific and think of what people would want to learn within those topics.
For instance, they might be interested to learn about content research tools or they might want to get some expert tips on developing shareable content. You can even narrow down your ideas to two or more specific topics and conduct a poll to find out exactly what your audience wants to learn from you.
Step Three
After this, you can start looking for influencers to include in your roundup.
The previously-mentioned BuzzSumo tool also comes with an influencer search option. This tools helps you view important statistics like their following size, retweet ratio, and Domain Authority. If you cater to a B2C audience, however, you can also use tools like Influence.co to run your search.
Step Four
Develop a list of questions to ask the experts and then reach out to them via email.
The Influence.co tool also provides you with each influencer’s verified contact information, so it should make the outreach process easier.
#4: Come Up with Engaging Podcasts
Podcasts have a huge potential to attract a significant audience because there are more podcast listeners than you think. In fact, Nielsen reports that 50% of all U.S. homes or 60 million homes are podcast fans.
To add to this, podcast listeners are some of the most engaged online audiences. In fact, 80% of them listen to all or most of each episode. And they listen to an average of seven shows a week.
A combined study conducted by Triton Digital and Edison Research also found that most podcast listeners were tuning in for at least an hour every week. The mean weekly listening time was 5 hours and 7 minutes. This is more than enough time to engage people with your podcast episodes and possibly even drive them to your site.
You may already know that it’s not a good idea to host podcasts on your own site due to bandwidth restrictions. So choose a good hosting provider and start creating a series of podcast episodes on engaging topics. You could include a call-to-action at the end, encouraging listeners to check out something on your site.
Using Paid Channels
#1: Invest in Google Ads
Advertising in Google search results is one of the most popular methods to get paid traffic. It allows your ad to show up at the top of highly-relevant search results.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Google ads can show up even more prominently than the top-ranking organic search result. This increases your brand visibility and has a high possibility of driving quality traffic to your site.
For instance, Garenta ran an optimized AdWords campaign, which contributed to 50% of its traffic and 40% of its online transactions.
But to generate the desired impact through Google ads, you need to take a strategic approach. You can’t just target any popular keyword and wait for your ad to bring in traffic.
There are several elements like ad copy, ad creative, etc. that play a role in driving traffic to your website. So you need to test different variations of these elements to identify the most profitable options and optimize your campaign.
Start by creating different ad groups, targeting different demographics and interest groups. Create multiple variations of ad copy, ad creative, and CTA for each ad group. And then tag each variation with UTM parameters so you can keep track of the results. Keep track of how much traffic you’re getting from each ad variation to identify the most profitable options.
To simplify this process, you can use tools like UTM.io to automatically generate tagged URLs for your campaigns. This tool also lets you keep track of all of the tagged links you’ve created so you can easily organize everything in one place.
#2: Pay to Promote Your Top Posts
On social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, you don’t have to set aside more time and resources to create a new ad from scratch. These platforms let you pay to promote your existing social media posts and content to attract high-quality traffic.
This is a great way to boost your visibility with an audience that appreciates good content but isn’t yet following you.
But don’t make the mistake of investing your money to boost just any post. Take the time to study the performance of your existing posts and see which ones seem to perform the best.
You can use the native analytics on Facebook and LinkedIn to see which of your posts are driving the most engagement.
On LinkedIn, see the “Update Engagement” section of your “Update Analytics” to see how your posts are performing.
On Facebook, go to “View Insights” of your brand page and go to “Posts.” This section will show you how your posts are performing in terms of reach and engagement.
Analyzing your social media post performance will give you an idea of which content your audience likes. So even if you decide to boost these posts, you know you’ll be spending money on something that’s likely to drive the best results.
#3: Retarget Visitors with Social Media Ads
Retargeting previous visitors with social media ads is a great way to rekindle their interest and get them to visit your site again. Since these people have already visited your site in the past, it’s likely that they have had some kind of interest in your product or content.
So a strategic ad on social media could quickly re-capture their interest and help you increase your traffic.
You could run ads that are relevant to the content or pages they’ve viewed when they first visited your site.
For example, someone who viewed your “storage solutions” category could get ads showcasing the latest products in that category. Someone who’s abandoned some items in their cart could get ads showcasing those forgotten items.
You could even showcase ads with your latest reports, case studies, or blog posts on influencer marketing to someone who’s read your influencer marketing posts in the past.
A lot of people may have forgotten about your brand and your products or content after a month or two. You’ll have to remind them of your existence and get them to engage with your site again.
When WordStream became a reputable name in the digital marketing industry, they were struggling to gain brand recognition. They were getting plenty of traffic, but only 20.76% of them were returning visitors.
They wanted to change this and started retargeting people who visited their free tool without converting. This resulted in a 65% increase in returning visitors. It also helped them attract a more engaged audience, with people spending a lot more time on the pages they visited.
Final Thoughts
These are some of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your site using both organic and paid channels. You can choose from any of these options and develop a strategy to improve site traffic.
But whatever you do, avoid relying on a single channel. Test different organic and paid channels and use a combination of the channels that work best for you.
