If you have a website, you’re going to want people to see it! In the digital marketing world, we refer to the collection of visitors to our website as “traffic”. Just like foot traffic in shopping malls, or car traffic on the highway passing a billboard, web traffic is important for selling products and services online. Without people seeing your website, nobody will use it!
Many website owners have the same question: how do I get traffic to my website? We’ve compiled our favorite ways to get traffic: both free and paid.
Free Ways To Get Traffic
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is one of the oldest ways to get traffic online. People have been studying Google and other search engines for decades to figure out how they can get them to rank their website higher for their desired search keywords.
The basic tenets of search engine optimization are building links, content creation, and on-page optimization.
We wrote entire guides to search engine optimization, as it can be a complicated topic. Check out our latest guide to local SEO here!
Google My Business
If you’re concerned about SEO efforts not paying off immediately, Google My Business will get you listed almost immediately. It’s Google’s free tool that helps searchers locate businesses in their area.
Not all businesses will benefit from Google My Business, as it’s tailored to local reach businesses with physical addresses. But once you sign up and are verified, your business will start appearing in local Google searches and on Google Maps!
We have a guide on how to optimize and publish a Google My Business listing, check it out!
Social Media Posts
Social media has been the center of the Internet for over a decade, and that has yet to change. People find, share, and comment on content via social media, and as a result, it’s the best way to reach a lot of people at once.
The best thing about social media is that you have near unlimited reach. When someone shares your post, they blast it to their own social network. The more people that share it, the more people get to see it!
This, however, comes with the downside that if nobody sees it, it never gets shared.
Paid Ways To Get Traffic
Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of the first forms of Internet advertising that is still popular today. Google PPC is one of the most common networks, as they allow you to buy ads on the Google search engine, Youtube, search partners, and on their display network!
The best thing about PPC is that once you set up your ad, it appears immediately. No need to wait for SEO efforts to pay off, or for people to share your content: you get immediate results. Even so, you don’t pay unless someone clicks on the ad!
Google PPC has you bid on keywords that appear in search terms. Your ad shows when someone searches for a term related to (or including) your keyword. This way, you can find people who are searching for your business or offerings specifically!
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising, most notably done through Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and LinkedIn, is one of the most common ways that businesses pay for traffic online.
The way it works is that you figure out the kind of people you want to see your ad, then you choose how you want your ad to look. The targeting options on Facebook range from age, gender, language, interest, demographics, Facebook page admins, and more. You can even create custom audiences of people based on your own mailing list!
In Summary
Traffic is one of those hot-button topics that people love to talk about. However, getting traffic to your site isn’t rocket science: it just takes a bit of effort and, in the case of advertising, some money.
We at SEO Guru Atlanta use a holistic approach where we create a digital marketing strategy around multiple ways of getting traffic. This depends on your business. Our focus, however, is on search engine optimization. Contact us to find out how we can help your business get traffic quickly!
