You could have the most amazing website in the world, but if no one visits the website, then it’s pointless.
Paul Cookson said, “A website without SEO is like a car with no gas.”
If you’ve looked at your Google Analytics & your website traffic isn’t where you want it to be, or you’re interested in getting more visitors to your website each week, then this post is for you.
In this post, you’ll learn about five different ways people visit your website and how to drive more traffic to your website.
Get More Traffic to Your Website
Traffic can come to your site in 5 different ways.
- Organic Search: Traffic from search engine results that are earned, not paid
- Referral: Traffic that occurs when a user finds you through a site other than a major search engine.
- Organic Social: Traffic from a social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
- Organic Video: Users arrive at your site via non-ad links on video sites like YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo.
- Direct: Any traffic where the referrer or source is unknown. Direct traffic is most often the result of a user entering a URL into their browser.
Give ways to boost the traffic in these five different sectors.
Organic Search
Organic Search: This involves working on your SEO search rankings. 75% of people will never scroll past the first page on a Google search, so you need to rank on page 1 of Google. The core pages of your website (home, about services, portfolio) can only rank for so many keywords. That is one of the reasons why blogging is so important. It helps you diversify and enrich the keywords you can rank for.
I will admit that I haven’t been the best at blogging in the past. In 2022, I blogged two times the entire year. But one of my goals this year was to blog consistently, which I’ve been doing. I published six blog posts in 3 months. I wanted to see how it affected my keyword ranking, so using Google Analytics, I can see in the last 28 days, my number one driver of traffic was organic search resulting in 753 visits. In December, I had 574 visits from organic search.
The only difference I’ve made is starting to blog again regularly.
If your domain is relatively new or you haven’t blogged in the past, then it may take longer to see results. The more you blog and the more “authority” you have, the quicker you’ll see results. Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that measures how successful a site is when it comes to search engine results.
Generally speaking, a weak domain authority score will fall somewhere between 0-20. Anywhere between 20-30 is getting there, and between 30-50 is good. 60-100 is excellent.
Blogging and Organic SEO Search, in general, is a marathon, not a sprint. You invest for the long term.
Referral Traffic
Referral: Traffic occurs when a user finds you through a site other than a major search engine. This is when getting published becomes helpful. Websites like The Knot & Wedding Wire have a Domain Authority of 60+, meaning they easily rank for keywords. If you can get published by major sources, then it’s not just about the immediate publicity. In the post, they will backlink to your website and a backlink from a major website is good for your domain.
I hosted a masterclass with Kristin Green of Published & Pretty to help you gain more PR.
Getting backlinks from other websites helps grow your authority and get referral traffic to your site.
SEO Coach LeAnne Wong said, “Without backlinks, your chances to rank on Google are close to zero.”
Organic Social
Organic Social: Traffic from a social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram. Something I’ve noticed creatives failing to do on social media or invite their audience off the platform.
Social media is a great tool to grow your relationship with your audience. But at some point, you need to direct your audience off the platform and to your website.
This could be a blog post, your contact form, or an updated portfolio – something that helps them take the relationship off social media.
You must be careful because you don’t want to do it too often. I try to drive my Instagram audience to my website at least once a week.
Organic Video
Organic Video: Users arrive at your site via non-ad links on video sites like YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo.
Have you ever google a search term, and a video pops up? That’s an Organic Video search. It also could mean they clicked to your website from the video description. The few from Organic Video Search on my Google Analytics stay on my site the longest. That indicates to me it’s high-quality traffic.
Direct
Direct: Any traffic where the referrer or source is unknown. Direct traffic is often the result of a user entering a URL into their browser.
There’s not much you can do here to improve your direct search. But you might see an uptick after an in-person networking event. This is simply someone putting your URL directly their browser.
Those are the five different avenues to increase traffic to your website and get more leads. Remember, you can have the most beautiful website in the world; if no one visits it, it doesn’t matter.
Without backlinks, your chances to rank on Google are close to zero, so sign up for the masterclass with Kristen Green to get backlinks from major publications and amp up the traffic to your website.
Now you know exactly how to get more traffic to your website, but you’re wondering if your website is ready to convert visitors to leads? I’ve got a post for you to read next to help you with that.
