So, you’ve taken the advice we discussed in our last blog post and decided to build a website for your business—a real, professional one, not one from that web guy who said he’d do it for free.

You’ve established what your brand looks like online and launched your site. Now, you’re on the fast track to getting the word out about your product or service like never before.

There’s only one thing left to do: get people to show up.

Knowing how to increase website traffic is more complicated than just throwing some ads on Facebook. For one thing, traffic comes from different places and figuring out what methods work best for your site can take a lot of testing and experimentation.

For another, not all traffic is the same or can even produce the right results for your business.

The truth is, getting your website set up is the easy part. Finding the best ways to increase website traffic is where things get tricky.

You can’t just launch your website and then let it run on autopilot, expecting people to show up. Traffic is not just a critical component of not just getting prospects to visit, but also a benchmark of your site’s success.

Knowing ways to increase website traffic helps you see just how well your marketing is working in general, most importantly by allowing you to see how many of those visitors are actually converting into sales.

From there, you have the ability to split test different offers and content to more accurately hone what works for customers and what they respond to.

Your need for evaluating traffic goes beyond sales, though. All those insights about what offers and content work best ultimately help you know your audience better, giving you future knowledge to further develop your brand to speak to the people you need to reach with your message.

And that all helps you get more leads, more conversions and more customers who will hopefully keep buying from you again and again.

But there’s a fine line between getting the traffic you need and knowing where it comes from and exactly what it is, and if you’re going to know the best ways to increase website traffic, that’s the place to start.

Busting Some Myths About Increasing Website Traffic

First, let’s look into some common pitfalls that prevent business owners from getting the most out of their web traffic. At the top of the list is the question of whether all traffic is created equal.

“I’ve got a ton of visitors to my website,” you might say, “but they’re not buying. What’s up with that?”

Here’s what’s up: traffic is about quality, not quantity. Knowing how to increase website traffic isn’t about getting tons of hits—it’s about the quality of that traffic and the intent of your visitors. High traffic might look great on paper, but if it isn’t producing results, it’s all just padding.

Good traffic comes from targeting the right audience with laser precision, presenting just the right offers, at just the right time.

2,000 visits from people who have not been targeted isn’t equal to 200 visitors who have already been primed with Facebook ads, SEO, blog posts and other types of traffic we’ll explore later.

Like all other steps in the Customer Value Optimization process, it’s about building a relationship, and pinpointing exactly who your audience is and how to reach them is the best way to do that.

A handful of high-intent leads is better than a massive amount of visitors who will likely click through your site and then do nothing else.

Again—it’s all about knowing who your audience is and then crafting a specific traffic strategy that will speak to their needs and the problems your product or service can solve.

Business owners with a brand new website that hasn’t had time to generate leads yet also fall prey to another myth, though: that there’s some kind of magical quick fix to their traffic woes.

So what do they do? Deploy an automatic traffic generator. But here’s the problem: while free website traffic is possible, automatic traffic generators won’t get you very far, or anywhere at all, really.

For one thing, using automatic traffic generators can wreck your Google search ranking. Google searches can easily detect spam, and since automatic traffic generation typically uses bots to get the job done, these services can actually work against your website rather than for it.

In fact, there’s a chance Google could ban your site, or that other advertising platforms could ban it as well.

And if that happens, it’s going to become virtually impossible to target the traffic you actually need to reach.

Remember from our last post that if you run a local business, 88% of people who find you in a Google search will visit your location within 24 hours.

This means that if you fall back on automatic traffic generation as a solution and it negatively impacts your Google ranking, there’s a chance they may not find you at all.

The truth is that there is no easy path to building the kind of traffic that will actually get you results. It takes time, experimentation, testing and trial and error to figure out the right process for your product, service and audience.

So, what’s the best way to make your website stand out from the massive amount of digital competition it faces on the Internet? Here are some of the proven strategies that online marketers use to increase website traffic.

Optimize Your Website for Speed and Efficiency

Maybe this seems more than a little obvious…but many issues with traffic are rooted in exactly how well your website works. People have short attention spans, and if your website doesn’t load instantly, they will likely move on to something else.

More specifically—if your site takes longer than 5 seconds to load, it is a virtual certainty than they will leave.

You also need to be aware of how your website loads on a wide range of devices. With the majority of consumers shopping from their phones, a poorly designed mobile site can put you at a significant disadvantage—in fact, 73% of them will switch to a different site altogether as a result.

Another factor that can prevent traffic from being effective is how well your site is organized. Good websites are very clear about where different types of information can be found and most importantly, what action you want visitors to take.

Where it’s downloading a lead magnet, scheduling a consultation or making a purchase, you need a clear call to action directing them on what to do next. Without that direction, the only action at their disposal will be to bounce.

So take the time to evaluate the overall efficiency of your site—if you’re not getting the results you want, it’s important to rule out easy fixes before reevaluating your entire strategy to increase website traffic.

Increase Website Traffic with Online Advertising

Once you’ve determined that your site is well organized and working properly, it’s time to move on to the obvious: paid social media and search engine traffic are great ways to get your product or service in front of the right people.

Facebook, Instagram and Google ads have made it easier than ever to do this, letting you take your profile of your audience and segment them based on interests, demographics, previous interest in your product and more.

It’s a great deal…but before you start spending money on ads left and right, you need to know exactly how you’re going to make money from them.

Getting visitors to your website is fantastic, but once again, it’s all about the quality of that traffic. And if you’re going to spend money to drive traffic to your website, you need to ensure your investment will pay off in the form of high-intent visitors.

Plus, as people visit your website and click on ads, you’ll be able to use online advertising to retarget those visitors and bring them back, taking advantage of their previous interest in your business.

Remember…the only traffic that matters is the traffic that makes a profit.

Want to learn specific techniques for Facebook advertising? We’ve got a blog post for that—click here to learn more!

Increase Website Traffic with Search Engine Optimization

There’s a rumor that SEO is dead…but it’s not true. On-page SEO is one of the most effective ways to rank higher in Google searches, thus giving you a solution to increase website traffic.

SEO is more than just doing keyword research and tastefully incorporating those phrases and words into your website, blog posts and other copy, though.

Are you optimizing your headlines and subheadlines? How about taking advantage of meta-descriptions, putting keywords in the URL and embedding image captions?

Putting together an SEO strategy doesn’t take much time, costs next to nothing and can increase website traffic.

Increase Website Traffic With a Blog

Blogs work on numerous levels to increase website traffic.

First, they establish authority for your brand in Google searches, especially if they are lengthy posts (1,500 words or more) and include links that drive traffic to other pages in your site and incorporate your optimization keywords.

This makes you more likely to rank when people search for these topics.

Second, they give visitors an opportunity to engage with your content because you are offering something of value: an answer to a question they’ve likely been exploring in an online search.

You can also take advantage of blogs as a tool to drive traffic by also inviting guest bloggers or doing interviews with experts in your field.

Want to learn more about how to more accurately define your audience and target them with the right content at the right places in your funnel? We’ve got a great tool…our Next Level Segmentation ebook!

Click here to download yours now and learn how segmenting your traffic is the key to more sales.