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The same strategies don’t work like they used to. Discover how you can grow your traffic and increase website engagement in 2023.
Web traffic is the life and blood of an online business. If you have a stable conversion rate on your site (2 – 3% is considered a good global benchmark) you can better understand how much web traffic is needed to hit your conversion or revenue goals, thus making web traffic vital to your business. We’re experts who have worked at Facebook, Google, and Cisco. We’ve helped thousands of businesses grow website visits and revenue. New digital marketing tactics, data privacy, and AI are constantly shifting and phasing out web traffic strategies that might have worked in the past. In this guide, you’ll learn everything from start to finish to have success with growing your website traffic.
If your traffic metrics are decreasing over time (users, sessions, pageviews), then you should focus on acquisition steps that are geared towards attracting both new and returning visitors. SEO is a great way to build up your audience over time, these users are typically more engaged and convert at a higher rate than paid media channels. Paid ads on Google and Facebook, for example, will increase your new users quickly and efficiently because you can pay per click to your website. The thing to analyze here though is high bounce rate from paid channels because you don’t want to pay for users that are not interested in what your site is offering.
For measuring web traffic, some people will just look at Sessions others look at Users but the secret is analyzing Users, Sessions, and Pageviews together. Analyzing all three of these will paint a complete picture of your web traffic. Definitions of these metrics in simple terms:
Now that we know what to measure, let’s see how we can increase these metrics.
The real question should be how can I attract and engage an audience to come to my website? New customers won’t wake up and say “Hey, I am going to check out xyz.com today.” or “Hey, I am going to search for business names all day.” They are looking for a solution to their need or problem. If you don’t put content or ads out there that can provide a solution to their problem they won’t visit your site, period. You have to meet them half way, at least. And you can do this through, organic social channels like Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, you can do this through email if you have a decent size subscription list, or you can do this via paid ads.
If you think about it, the quality of your content and the relevancy of your creative will have the biggest impact on attracting and increasing web traffic. In other words, you get out what you put in. More often than not your customers will be very similar to you (to find out who your customers are you can just ask Plai, “Who are my target customers?”). This means that if you are creating an ad on Facebook don’t half-ass it, make it the best ad ever and something that even you would click on. Same thing for email or a post on Instagram.
Now that we understand creating quality content is crucial we need to focus on distribution of the content so users can find it. If content is king, distribution is queen. We will break this out by free and paid methods.
SEO (Tip 1): You can easily make a blog on your site that answers popular questions about your industry. To find questions search on Quora or Buzzsumo for questions with high popularity and engagement. Write a blog post on that topic and show that your business is the expert. When users search for the question on Google, your website and article will show up and boom, you can get new qualified website visitors for free.
SEO (Tip 2): Make sure you are using keywords to describe your business and product that people are actually searching for. You can use free tools like Google Trends to determine popularity of a topic or keyword. You can also use Google Ads Keyword Planner if you have a Google Ads account. The Keyword Planner will give you estimates for monthly searches on a keyword and even provide more popular recommendations. Use these popular keywords and make sure each page is tailored to these keywords to improve your Search ranking on Google.
Email (Tip 1): To optimize your email channel you need to focus on your email click-through-rate, which is the rate at which people who open your email click to your website. One tip is to streamline your email to focus on one call to action. Try a super simple approach, so readers can take in your information in a matter of seconds. After including a link once, don’t be afraid to add it later in the email as well. Some people might want more information before taking action.
Social (Tip 1): To increase the Social traffic to your website treat your social profiles and posts with SEO just like you would your website. Make sure every field in your profile is filled and add backlinks to your website from your social channels. By linking to your site from your social media channels, you’re creating high-quality backlinks to your site – an important result of social profile optimization.
Paid Search (Tip 1): Paid Search through Google Ads is the best option for local businesses and businesses who want to see lower funnel impact from digital marketing. Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day. With Paid Search Ads, you can target customers searching for a particular question to answer a problem with keywords that relate to your business. Pro Tip: To grow high quality traffic with Paid Search, start with using Phrase Match keywords with Enhanced CPC bidding, while setting budget around $10/day. Phrase match will allow you to be more targeted than Broad Match and reach more people than Exact Match. Enhanced CPC bidding will make your new campaign easier to manage because it is automated. You will get a good amount of data and can see the CTR of each keyword. Make sure you analyze the CTR per keyword and pause those keywords with a lower CTR so you can spend budget on the keywords that work.
Facebook Ads (Tip 1): One of the more popular paid platforms is Facebook Ads. Facebook has unique targeting options that make finding your audience extremely easy. You can layer targeting like Female, Ages 18-34, Interested in Lifetime movies and recently wen traveling. When you first start out you may be focused on everything but the actual creative in the ad. But, the creative that you use in your ads, especially for Facebook, will either make or break your ad campaign. Think about who you want to target then make ads that are specific to your targeted audience. This may take more work, but it will pay off in performance once you start running your campaign. It is better to be more relevant to a smaller audience than generic for a large audience. That is why Facebook offers a metric called Relevance score for each ad. Pro Tip: Each ad will have a Relevance Score based on a 1 to 10 scale, 10 being the highest. Facebook wants to show relevant ads to it’s users and will reward advertisers by showing their ad in more placements on Facebook at a cheaper cost. This will help you drive more web traffic, cheaper! You want to go for Relevance Scores greater than 7. Anything below 6 will be more expensive. If you do have a low Relevance Score, try adjusting your targeting.
Display (Tip 1): Paid Search (mentioned above) can be expensive, lucky we have the Display network in Google Ads which we can use reach thousands of potential customers for just $10. Display ads have a plethora of targeting options, but can be broken down into two categories: Behavioral targeting and Contextual targeting. Behavioral targeting, like Affinity targeting, is better for brand awareness. You can use behavioral targeting to reach people who have an interest in affinities related to your business, like Baseball fans or Car enthusiasts. Contextual targeting is better for driving clicks to your website. You can use it to show on specific website placements like weather.com, espn.com, and more. You can also use contextual targeting to target topics or groupings of websites based on a similar theme, like Tech News. Pro Tip: To get high quality traffic, try layering Behavioral and Contextual targeting so you can target people who are currently interested in your business while they are browsing relevant content.
More (Tip 1): Amazon Marketing Services, Twitter, iTunes, and more each have their own advertising platforms that can be utilized to grow your website traffic.
Tip: Use Plai to launch a YouTube advertising campaign in minutes, like a pro!
“How many visits do I have today? Do people find my website engagement?”
A good website design and website experience will keep users visiting more pages and coming back for more. If a user can’t find what they are looking for or a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, there is a possibility that user may never come back. On the other hand if your site is easily readable, has a nice flow, and loads fast you can build brand loyalty for having a great customer experience
1. Online users only have an 8 second attention span so for web design, simplicity is your friend. Try to explain your product or idea as succinctly as possible on your main web pages and link out to other pages for more information. It is important to make sure your content resonates with your target audience to keep them engaged. Make sure your headings stand out in size and color for users. Pro tip: Create call-to-action buttons that stand out visually and drive the user to visit more pages. A/B testing your CTA’s to find the right wording will drastically improve your pageviews.
2. Build a simple user flow that keeps users engaged with useful internal links that provide users with easy access to other information on your site. Make sure your site is built for mobile. Mobile traffic to sites has been doubling over the last two years, placing a greater importance on the flow of your mobile site. Another tip is to make your site navigation simple which will allow website visitors to easily browse the content that is relevant to them, thus improving your pageviews.
3. Add useful graphics or videos and prioritize white-space. “A picture tells a thousand words”, so instead of writing try adding an image to your site. Make sure the images are on brand with the rest of your site so that a user will feel comfortable when going to view another page. When you place images on your site, don’t forget to add Alt text to them to improve your SEO and show up in Google Images – which will bring you incremental traffic. According to a recent study, white space around section titles and text can increase user engagement by 20%. White space can help separate your ideas or products while making it easier for users to understand. White space is your friend!
4. Optimize page speed by compressing the file size of your images, using only one to two fonts, and keeping animations to a minimum. Doing these three things will improve your site speed instantly. Even more importantly, site speed is used to calculate your Google page rankings so having a fast site will allow you to gain more traffic by showing up more often in Google Search results.
Look at your owned audience size on Email, Social, Facebook, YouTube, Blog, you name it. There is one benchmark that you should be looking at across all of your channels to measure how likely someone is to visit your site. The metric is click-through-rate:
(Total Clicks) / (Total Impressions) = Click Through Rate
In other words, how many people saw your content and actually clicked to your website. A great benchmark across all industries and channels is somewhere around 2-3%.
If you have 5,000 emails on your list and you send an email promoting your website, expect somewhere somewhere around 125-150 people to actually visit your website.
If you are trying to grow your web traffic all of the sudden, email does not seem like the best channel to focus on. That is why a lot of companies will focus on SEO because 1)There are billions of searches everyday on Google which means thousands of opportunities to get people to your website 2) They can use SEO to grow their email list and then use email as a more effective channel to grow website traffic. Note, expect a higher click through rate if you are offering a sale or promotion (or if your creative is on point as mentioned above).
Tip: Ask Plai, “What are my best social media channels for getting website visits?” to find out your best social channels to focus on for increasing your website traffic.
Knowing where to start can be overwhelming. That’s why it is good to compare your acquisition channels overtime to see what channels have had the biggest decrease in web traffic overtime. You can do this in Google Analytics:
A good website design and website experience will keep users visiting more pages and coming back for more. If a user can’t find what they are looking for or a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, there is a possibility that user may never come back. On the other hand if your site is easily readable, has a nice flow, and loads fast you can build brand loyalty for having a great customer experience
1. Online users only have an 8 second attention span so for web design, simplicity is your friend. Try to explain your product or idea as succinctly as possible on your main web pages and link out to other pages for more information. It is important to make sure your content resonates with your target audience to keep them engaged. Make sure your headings stand out in size and color for users. Pro tip: Create call-to-action buttons that stand out visually and drive the user to visit more pages. A/B testing your CTA’s to find the right wording will drastically improve your pageviews.
2. Build a simple user flow that keeps users engaged with useful internal links that provide users with easy access to other information on your site. Make sure your site is built for mobile. Mobile traffic to sites has been doubling over the last two years, placing a greater importance on the flow of your mobile site. Another tip is to make your site navigation simple which will allow website visitors to easily browse the content that is relevant to them, thus improving your pageviews.
3. Add useful graphics or videos and prioritize white-space. “A picture tells a thousand words”, so instead of writing try adding an image to your site. Make sure the images are on brand with the rest of your site so that a user will feel comfortable when going to view another page. When you place images on your site, don’t forget to add Alt text to them to improve your SEO and show up in Google Images – which will bring you incremental traffic. According to a recent study, white space around section titles and text can increase user engagement by 20%. White space can help separate your ideas or products while making it easier for users to understand. White space is your friend!
4. Optimize page speed by compressing the file size of your images, using only one to two fonts, and keeping animations to a minimum. Doing these three things will improve your site speed instantly. Even more importantly, site speed is used to calculate your Google page rankings so having a fast site will allow you to gain more traffic by showing up more often in Google Search results.
Look at your owned audience size on Email, Social, Facebook, YouTube, Blog, you name it. There is one benchmark that you should be looking at across all of your channels to measure how likely someone is to visit your site. The metric is click-through-rate:
(Total Clicks) / (Total Impressions) = Click Through Rate
In other words, how many people saw your content and actually clicked to your website. A great benchmark across all industries and channels is somewhere around 2-3%.
If you have 5,000 emails on your list and you send an email promoting your website, expect somewhere somewhere around 125-150 people to actually visit your website.
If you are trying to grow your web traffic all of the sudden, email does not seem like the best channel to focus on. That is why a lot of companies will focus on SEO because 1)There are billions of searches everyday on Google which means thousands of opportunities to get people to your website 2) They can use SEO to grow their email list and then use email as a more effective channel to grow website traffic. Note, expect a higher click through rate if you are offering a sale or promotion (or if your creative is on point as mentioned above).
Tip: Ask Plai, “What are my best social media channels for getting website visits?” to find out your best social channels to focus on for increasing your website traffic.
Knowing where to start can be overwhelming. That’s why it is good to compare your acquisition channels overtime to see what channels have had the biggest decrease in web traffic overtime. You can do this in Google Analytics:
Logan Welbaum
