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[This post is updated annually to add and remove ways to drive traffic to your site. It was last updated May 2023.]

You need more website traffic. If you run an online business, traffic is your lifeblood because it enables your business model to work as intended and for you to scale your business. Therefore, you need to deploy multiple strategies to bring new visitors to your site and keep old visitors engaged with your content.

Here are 46 time-tested methods to supercharge your website traffic in 2023.

Focus On First Time User Acquisition

Audit Your Website

The best way to drive scalable and consistent traffic to your website is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Instead of just doing tasks for their own sake, take a strategic approach. A full website audit is a great starting point to a game plan so that you can identify and focus on your highest leverage opportunities.

To audit your website, combine a site crawler with a digital marketing tool like Semrush.

Both of these tools proactively discover current opportunities or issues and help you proactively ideate marketing opportunities and content updates as you go about building your business.

Create New Content

The best way to increase traffic to your website from organic traffic is to increase the number of pages on your website that can rank for your most valuable keyword terms. This also helps to bolster your website’s SEO.

Consider where you can add:

  • new category pages,
  • new blog posts, or
  • new pieces of attractive content (visuals, quizzes, forms, etc.) that target specific keywords.

Optimize Old Content

Because you are tracking your keyword rankings with Semrush (…right?), you can find the keywords that you rank near the bottom of the first page.

Then, you can go add useful content, keywords, and visuals to those pages to help them rank better. Google also prefers updated and new content over old, stale content.

Launch New Products

A great way to attract new users to your website is to launch new products that meet their needs. The great part is that you can often charge for these as well and make money by getting new users into your full conversion funnel.

Create Online Courses

The great thing about the Internet is that you can publish any type of content you want. By creating long-form content like courses that are targeted to user needs and specific keyword phrases (don’t forget keyword research!), you can drive more traffic to your site.

From there, aim to convert your visitors into email addresses that you can then plug into your sales funnel.

Plus, online course websites exist in plenty so you can put them on places like LinkedIn Learning to further expand your reach.

Accept Guest Posts

Similarly, many sites want links for SEO purposes and access to your customers. If they’re not a direct competitor, let them guest post on your site! Then, they are invested in your company and will promote the content that they’ve produced, which also gets you in front of their audience. A true win-win.

Publish Infographics

If you have a designer in your company, outline bite-size pieces of useful information your audience will enjoy and ask them to create eye-catching graphics using that information. Infographics tell a story and will help people see your content, products, and business in a new way.

If you don’t have a designer on staff, Canva is an excellent, easy-to-use tool for non-designers.

Give Podcast Interviews

Podcasting is HUGE these days. One of the best ways to grow a podcast audience is to invite influential people to your podcast. Think of it as the audio version of a blog guest post. So, get one or two podcasts under your belt to get comfortable with the format (or launch your own), then start targeting podcast producers to get onto their shows.

Start A Podcast, Plug Your Business

Starting a podcast is extremely popular these days and for good reason. They can build a great audience, have a high barrier to entry to succeed, and can set you apart as a true subject matter expert in your field.

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok is still relatively cheap today when compared to Google Adwords. These sites also allow you to segment down by demographics or target by keywords so that you hit your ideal audience.

Knowing and targeting your audience is imperative. Otherwise, you are just tossing ad spend out the window and likely relying on vanity metrics (ones that do not directly drive valuable traffic and sales) such as a Facebook ‘Like’.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

PPC is usually best used for conversion-oriented keywords, which is great because it gets you a new, high-value audience that is also ready to convert. PPC is more expensive than social media marketing but highly targeted with more valuable leads (in most cases).

Create Pinterest Boards

Pinterest is a super-strong domain. This means Google gives credence to content like Pinterest Boards and this can improve your rank results. Do your typical keyword research for your website, then take some of those keywords and target them on Pinterest.

Pro Tip: Use your other online resources and channels (website, Instagram, email newsletter) to share your Boards and get them indexed faster and ranking higher.

Promote Pins On Pinterest

Unless you have a diehard following or a niche business, it’s not enough to simply create content if you expect it to rank well and drive traffic. You need engagement. Rankings are influenced by engagement stronger than ever before and this generally requires some ad spend. Use an allotted budget to promote pins on Pinterest to your target audience.

Partnerships

Especially in business-to-business (B2B) spaces, partnerships can be a goldmine for customer acquisition. Build out referral programs with complementary companies that have overlapping audiences and try to funnel some of their traffic back to your site, either through website mentions, social media channels, or even their email marketing.

Link Acquisition

This feels like an old-school tactic, but the more backlinks you have to your site, the better your site will rank. If it ain’t broke, right? So acquire links to your site from content, from relevant resource pages on other sites, and from outreach that you do.

Promote Content Via Outbrain/Taboola

Content promotion is generally affordable these days, and with tools like Outbrain, you only pay when users click your ads. People with content sites make thousands of dollars a day, all from promoted content.

Create Satellite Websites

If your main website is around one niche yet you operate in many niches, you can build out websites specifically targeted at those other niches. For example, if you operate a website selling cosmetic products, you could create a satellite website called groomingproductsformen.com and use that site to funnel traffic back to your other sites. You need to disclose that you own those other sites, but this is a robust way to spread organic reach and improve rank.

Speed Up Your Website

A fast site converts better, and on a big site, you will get more organic traffic because the search engines can crawl your site faster and find more content. Start with switching hosts and then optimizing your code, all while making sure you are using aggressive caching and a content delivery network (CDN).

[If your marketing team has never brought this up, beware. It might be time to get started with Credo.]

Conduct New Keyword Research

If you’re struggling to increase traffic to your site, you could benefit from doing new keyword research to get fresh content ideas – or just to make sure your master list is up-to-date. You can then create new content with ease!

Target Longtail Keywords For SEO

If you don’t have a very strong website, you can target longer tail keywords (<50 searches a month, more general terms). These are often much easier to rank for. From there, you can start building up a base of content that you can then use to earn links and propel rankings for more competitive, valuable keyword terms.

Target Hacker News/Reddit/Relevant Forums With Content

If you can get content or a product to go viral on a site like Hacker News, Reddit, or ProductHunt, you can get upwards of tens of thousands of visitors and often increase signups and sales. Reddit marketing research shows that Redditors love links more than any other content. ProductHunt is also an incredibly strong resource and can generate significant traffic and thousands of dollars in sales if you are able to get onto page one.

Run Competitions & Giveaways

People like free stuff. We all like free stuff. One of the best ways to drive traffic and improve your email list, and therefore find new audience segments, is through competitions and giveaways. Give away high-value items and incentivize entrants to share the giveaway on social media in order to get more entries. The Kingsumo Giveaways plugin works well for this.

Speak At Conferences

Conferences can be a great way to get in front of a targeted audience. This is not for the stage shy but if you don’t mind public speaking, speak at a conference and encourage your audience to tweet about it (put your Twitter handle at the bottom of every slide). Boom, done! You are now in front of their social media audience.

Advertise At Conferences

While speaking is the best way to get in front of your audience at conferences, advertising is second best. You can leverage advertising for brand recognition, offer discounts to those at the conference, get links from people doing roundups, and more. It’s a big win, especially if you can tie revenue directly back to your company.

Free Swag At Conferences

Again, people like the freebies. Quality swag works wonders for advertising your brand, and what better place to give away swag than at conferences full of your potential customers? You’ll build brand recognition and goodwill.

Create Content For Slideshare

Slideshare is its own social network. By creating content for Slideshare specifically and promoting it, you can also land on the popular content sections of their homepage, driving quality traffic back to your account and your website. Make sure you link back to your site from your Slideshare account!

Create YouTube Videos

If you can create videos in a cost-effective manner, YouTube is a great distribution platform. Almost any new phone has a high-quality video camera. It takes time to build up a channel but generates a huge audience if done well.

Run Webinars

Webinars can drive a new audience to your site when you invite guests with large audiences. These guests can promote your webinar to on their own audience!

Use HARO To Acquire Contributors

Help A Reporter Out is a great way to find sources for stories you are writing. While this won’t directly get you a new audience, by including their quotes and tagging them on social media you can access their audience.

Teach A Class

Are you a subject matter expert? Teach people how to do what you do, whether in person or online. Put the content on Slideshare, rinse and repeat.

Mentor A Startup

Mentoring startups is a great way to build goodwill within your industry. Often you can also get guest posts and leverage their brand to build backlinks or to be quoted as a trustworthy, subject matter expert.

Sponsor Meetups

Meetup.com is one of the most popular websites for organizing groups of people to get together. Many of them accept sponsors, who do things like give free meeting space or pay the bar tab. A meetup can be a great way to get your company or product in front of your ideal target audience.

Reach Out To Get Included In Email Newsletters

Some companies distribute daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters that curate content from around their industry, and many of these have a lot of subscribers. If you have content that fits their audience, reach out to them and see if they’ll include your article in their next edition. The worst thing that can happen is they’ll say no. Never try, never know!

Answer Quora Questions

If you write online, then you probably know the Q&A platform Quora. Quora is a fantastic place to find questions people are asking about your area of expertise. Write a great answer, share it socially to get some upvotes, and watch your traffic (and referrals!) soar.

At this time of writing, Credo receives about 10,000 views a quarter on our Quora answers and has received over 320,000 in the last few years:

Focus On User Retention

Once you’ve attracted your customers to your site, they’ll often leave your site and come back a few times before they actually convert. On average, it takes eight touchpoints to get a sale. Sometimes they’re doing research, sometimes they get distracted by other sites, and sometimes they’re just not ready to buy or give you the information you so badly need from them to drive your business forward.

Here are 10 ways to get people back to your site:

Collect Email Addresses & Send Consistent Emails

One of the simplest things to do that most people don’t do is send consistent email marketing to their customers on their email list. Whether this is a weekly newsletter or a daily piece of content to teach and sell, this is the best way to keep your users engaged. The best part is that once you set it up, your customers will all see that same content. Each email open is a touchpoint on your way to a sale or conversion.

Write Guest Posts

similar-web-similar-sites

By using a site like SimilarWeb, you can find sites related to yours. If they know your audience, you can usually get content onto their site that helps them build traffic while at the same time getting access to an entirely new audience.

Do Retargeting Advertising

If you operate a business online and you’re not retargeting, you are leaving high-quality leads (and money) on the table. With all the different display networks available, not to mention Facebook, you can easily target people who have come to your site but not purchased to come back and finish their conversion.

Advertise On Similar Sites

Once again using SimilarWeb or SEMrush, find the sites similar to yours that are not competitors and see if you can advertise there. Voila! Now their audience is your audience, too.

Bid On Competitor Keywords

This strategy is slightly greyer on the ethical scale than many of the others, but Adwords allows you to bid on many competitors’ branded terms. If they’re searching for your competitor, they should also know about you.

Promote Content On Social

You might not know this, but your followers on social media (especially Facebook) don’t see all of the content you post. If you see a piece of content being successful and getting good exposure, either boost that post or promote it to your custom audiences (created in the backend of the Facebook Marketing Suite).

Let Users Subscribe To Content

Some Content Management Systems (CMS), like WordPress, will let people subscribe to replies to the comments that they leave on your content. You can also use a myriad of tools (like SumoMe) to capture email addresses to which you can send content when it publishes. See how these are all tying together in one big cohesive ball of new traffic?

Email Users When Something Happens Onsite

If you’ve had someone sign up for your product, email them when something happens (a product goes out of stock or comes in stock, metrics change, new features are available) to get them back to engage with your product again.

Email Users Who Abandon Their Shopping Cart

If you run an e-commerce site, email them when they’ve left something that they wanted to buy. They showed interest in your product and are very close to a purchase. An email could be just that little nudge they need.

Affiliates

If you run a site that has products directly for sale, consider an affiliate program. While affiliate programs take management, they are also a great way to get others to talk about your products for free and you only pay if they buy something.

Influencers

There’s little doubt that influencer marketing is here to stay. Get influencers (specific to your niche) to post about your products, blog on your site, and then share it. Or interview them and provide it for free to your users.


We recognize that not all of these will work for every site or business, but many combinations will. Mix and match to find your ideal options. Leave your comments about how you drive traffic to your site this year!

If you are looking for someone to help you market your business but your monthly marketing budget is less than $2,500 a month, check out our new low-budget projects flow. Tell us about your project/needs, and we’ll have interested professionals reach out to you directly. If your monthly marketing is over $2,500, set up a time to speak on the phone with us here.