On and off-page strategies to encourage more visitors to your website

Written by: Daniel Groves.
Daniel is a UK-based business consultant who specializes in helping startups grow and scale.

Whether you’re a freelance graphic designer or an agency looking to add more clients to your roster, having a website is a no-brainer. However, having a website with little to no traffic is not only a waste of time, money, and resources but also a missed opportunity. 

Since 99 percent of consumers go online to find information about a product or service before visiting a physical store, having a website that is user-friendly, responsive, and rich in useful information is crucial for business success. 

So how do you get traffic to your website? And more importantly, how do you get targeted website traffic? Keep reading to find out.

How to get traffic to your website: 3 on-page ways to increase traffic

Page Speed

Let’s face it, with the amount of competition out there, consumers don’t have time for a website that takes ages to load. Not only will your bounce rate be sky-high, but you’re less likely to convert casual visitors into consumers. 

Going for a cheap hosting option is the biggest contributing factor. They often share resources between multiple websites, which overloads the server and leads to poor loading times. Solutions like managed cloud hosting could be a game changer for your site speed. Tapping into the cloud offers scalability and reliability for your website, even during traffic spikes. While it’s not the only route to faster load times, it’s a great option for the majority of websites. 

Simply put, the faster your site loads, the less likely you are to lose your potential customers to your competitors. 

You can also take several steps to test the speed of your website and ensure you aren’t contributing to lazy loading for users. These include compressing large videos and images, improving your site structure, removing unnecessary design elements and plugins, and reducing redirects. 
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is a great way to check your site’s performance and current page speed. It’s also a Google-supported tool, so it can tell you whether you’re hitting the benchmarks needed to improve your SEO ranking.

User Experience (UX) Optimization

Another way to increase organic search traffic is to ensure that your website offers all visitors a seamless and user-friendly experience. 

A positive user experience encourages potential customers to stay on the site, check different pages, and ultimately buy your product or service. 

In a mobile-centric world, your website design must be responsive to different devices. A clear and user-friendly navigation structure is essential for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website, as it allows visitors to navigate through your website without much thought.

You’ll also want to use legible fonts and font sizes, break up your written content with engaging images and videos, and add a clear call to action. All of this makes interacting with your website more enjoyable for your visitors, which increases the likelihood that they’ll come back and recommend you to other people.

High-quality and up-to-date content

Content is a major factor in attracting new visitors and increasing organic search traffic. Through well-curated blogs and up-to-date product and service descriptions; you can reach audiences who want to learn more about a particular topic and then reel them in. 

However, even the most “evergreen” content becomes stale after some time. Therefore, regular article updates are important, as they can help bump you up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and, in turn, help you get more traffic. 

But it’s not just about changing a couple of words and calling it a day. To see the results, you have to:

• Fix broken links
  
  
• Update outdated statistics
   
• Replace outdated external links with more recent resources
  
  
• Re-optimize your meta title and meta descriptions
  
  
• Make sure your keywords are still relevant
  
  
• Add more long-tail keywords

With Google’s implementation of Search Generative Experience (SGE), these changes are more important than ever, and you will require an adaptive strategy to be in a strong position to outperform competitors. 

Among the biggest changes, expect a shift in how consumers collect information and interact with brands online. SGE provides a summary directly within the search engine results page (SERP) that aims to reduce the time needed to satisfy the user’s query. This is expected to result in less organic traffic from Google searches. However, it’s also a call to provide engaging, high-quality, and targeted content that entices potential customers and clients to click through to your website to learn more, beyond what’s provided in Google’s summary. 

To ensure you still get targeted website traffic, even with Google SGE, you need to:

• Pay special attention to user intent: Make sure your content is timely and exactly what your potential customers are looking for. Anticipate any follow-up questions they may have, and focus on answering those questions within the same post.
  
  
• Focus on making your content readable: Avoid long sentences. Headings, subheadings, lists, and well-structured paragraphs help make your content more accessible.
  
  
• Optimize metadata and keywords: Enhance your content by optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, and extracts. Use long-tail keywords, which lead to more specific queries and, therefore, more targeted website traffic.
  
  
• Include first-hand experiences: Create content that stands out from the crowd to attract clicks from users in the SERP. First-hand experiences, reviews, and quotes help to make your content relatable and enticing, drawing higher levels of traffic to your domain.

How to get traffic to your website: 3 off-page routes to consider

Earn backlinks

One of the biggest contributing factors to SEO, off-page SEO in particular, is backlinks. The more topically relevant earned links from reputable websites you have directing to your own, the more you will increase your own website’s domain authority. 

The higher your domain authority, the greater the chances of earning high SERP rankings. In addition, you also get more traffic from third-party websites that include your link in their content, directing their audience straight to key pages on your site. 

It’s also worth highlighting that buying backlinks goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines and could result in your website being penalized.

So how do you get traffic to your website through backlinks? Here are some strategies that you can implement:

• Reach out to reputable websites and offer to write a guest post in which you can link to your own website.
  
  
• Publish ultimate guides and lists that other websites simply HAVE to link to.
  
  
• Reach out to other websites with broken or outdated links and offer yours as a replacement.
  
  
• Build free and useful tools such as calculators, performance analyzers, templates, and educational tools that can help you earn organic backlinks and generate new leads.
  
  
• Create infographics that other websites can use and link to.

Social media

Social media is a great tool for audience development. Use it! 

Managing your social media presence can be time-consuming especially if your resources, skillset, and knowledge are limited. For many small businesses, aiming for a sustainable social media model means focusing your efforts on one or two platforms where your target customer is most active and engaged. This will help you work more effectively and avoid spreading yourself too thin by trying to deliver a strategy over multiple platforms and campaigns. 

If you’re a B2C site, analyze who your target audience is and opt for the social media platform that’s most suitable for that demographic. If your customer base is mainly Gen Z, hone in on your TikTok strategy. If you’re targeting late millennials, Instagram might be your best bet. 
Conversely, if you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn offers a plethora of opportunities to share your content and directly connect with the companies you’re targeting.

Some quick tips for LinkedIn success include:

• Using hashtags
  
  
• Engaging with other businesses, creators, and customers
  
  
• Creative content production in the form of mixed media that helps showcase your products/services in a unique way.
  
  
• Include links in your bio to direct customers to your website, where they can learn more about your offering and brand. 

Adopting these LinkedIn best practices not only leads to targeted website traffic but also makes people more curious about your brand. It can even help you earn those backlinks. 

Online reputation management

In addition to aspects related to SEO, off-page strategies that are sometimes overlooked include online reputation management, i.e., ensuring a good reputation reflected online. 

Monitor your online reputation by actively responding to comments and reviews on digital platforms such as Trustpilot, Google My Business, and Yelp. You should also consider industry-specific platforms, like OpenTable for restaurants, Zillow for real estate, and TripAdvisor for hospitality and travel. 

Engaging with your audience, addressing complaints, and responding to good feedback not only boosts your brand’s reputation but also encourages repeat visits to your website.

Final thoughts

Both on-page and off-page strategies play a crucial role in achieving more targeted website traffic and encouraging more people to engage with your product or service. 

By implementing a comprehensive on-page SEO strategy, enhancing the user experience, managing your online reputation, and leveraging social media, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings and attract qualified traffic. 

Competition is fierce in any field, so staying ahead of the game by really nailing your website is vital to maximizing your business’s potential for success.