9 Proven Ways to Grow Website Traffic and Increase Your ROI

As the world becomes more connected globally, most people and organizations need a platform to reach the rest of the world. Creating a website is an excellent way to connect to a large group of people and to be visible to a target audience. But building a website is not an easy task because it costs a lot of money to hire design and development experts. It also consumes a lot of time and effort to ensure your site gains organic traffic and provides a worthy return on investment (ROI).

To simply create a website and leave it as it is will be a waste of time and money, your website must work hard positioning your brand in front of your customers and prospects.

Here are proven digital marketing strategies that increase organic traffic to your website and ensure online visibility. You will come to grasp what search engine optimization (SEO) is and how it works.

1. Optimize for Search Intent

Search intent is the reason for a user searching for answers online. While one user might be looking for answers, others browse to learn or buy something. 

Some might even be searching for a particular website and this is where search engines like Google come into play. Google makes sure that they provide the readers with the most useful answers to the questions they have searched for. Ahrefs.com provides the best example of this.  The Ahrefs team increased their traffic by +600 percent in less than six months. 

Let’s try and understand what they did to gain such a massive surge in just a short amount of time.

The most significant step they took was optimizing for search intent. Ahrefs’s website now has more than 53,000 organic visits per month. What they did is make sure the keywords on the page corresponded to the intent of the user. SEO is highly dependable on users intent. Over time, Google has improved its algorithm for identifying high-quality webpages and the pages are classified according to the search intent.

2. Write In-Depth Content that Comprehensively Answers a Specific Question

Writing in-depth content helps you gain more organic traffic to your website. ActiveCampaign is quite aware of the fact and by doing just that, they increased their blog to 100k readers every month.

They achieved that by giving long and detailed answers to any queries, the readers searched for. 

According to research, content with more than 2000 words is likely to garner more organic traffic compared to shorter blogs. ActiveCampaign gains more traffic by writing long, thorough content that is detailed and research-based. It improves their blog posts for advanced search engines to crawl and identify the valuable content. 

The content found on ActiveCampaign’s website engages the audience, which establishes trust among their readers and leads to better audience engagement, a higher possibility of conversions and ultimately, a boosted growth rate. 

“The most important thing for content marketers to understand is that what we are communicating is not the value of the content. It is the value of the relationship with an audience. Our content has zero value unless it changes behavior in our audience.” –Robert Rose, Co-founder of the Content Marketing Institute.

3. Write a Comparison Post

What is a comparison post? How do you create it?

A comparison post is when you identify the significant differences between two or more websites or brands. When creating a comparison post, you should:

• Choose competitive products or services 
• Provide information about each product or service
• Include facts and graphics to accompany the text
• Describe the unique features of each product or service

For example, HubSpot vs. HootSuite

This post is a top-ranked comparison post that compares two social media marketing tools available in the market, namely HubSpot and HootSuite. 

These two sites generate productive commercial tactics to drive leads via social media platforms and both act as a traffic generator.  

In this post, the author discusses both the tools separately and moves on to their features. He then identifies the unique characteristics of each software tool. This is an easy way to ensure the reader remains on the page for longer and the piece has a higher chance of being shared or referred to in pieces of content published on other websites. 

Comparison posts are usually specific and people often search for this type of content on the internet.  Most times, the user is ready to purchase and wants to find out the advantages and disadvantages of comparative products or services. Hence, there is a high chance for your post to be viewed.

4. Use the Suggested Search Hack to Boost Your SEO Traffic

SEO is the key to your marketing strategy. However, to make your SEO efforts effective, you need to think like an SEO expert and use clever hacks to boost your organic traffic. Growandconvert.com used Google’s suggested search hack to find easily achievable targets for one of their clients and in six months, they were able to gain more than 12,000 visitors a month at ThinkApps.

How Did They Achieve This?

Growandconvert.com researches all the queries the target audience has. They acknowledge every challenge and issue a prospect goes through at the various sales funnel phases and while seeking answers. Following this, they optimize the content to address the user’s intent and offer solutions that resolve the identified issues. Growandconvert.com boosts its SEO traffic by making content that matches the search intent and is successfully ranked by Google.

5. FAQ Schema

FAQ schema is a set of organized data comprising different questions and answers regarding a specific topic. 

Bill Widmer, a blogger and SEO expert improved his clicks by 15.23 percent using FAQ schema. Widmer has helped various websites and publications increase click-throughs to their site.  He also manages one of the most interesting blog called The Wandering RV.

Before using the FAQ schema, Widmer had to deal with intense competition with different websites. The chances his blog would surpass those well-established sites were quite slim. So, to get more genuine clicks, he focused on adding the FAQ schema to his content. 

It enabled his blog to obtain satisfactory organic traffic results and also appeared in the search engine results page (SERP).

6. Add Internal Links to Your High-Priority Content Pieces

Various sites add internal linking to their content to improve their SEO. NinjaOutreach is one such website that did no other alterations but simply worked on their internal links.  Applying this method boosted their organic traffic by 40 percent.

It also improves user-experience. Users find it effortless to look through relatable content when needed if you have proper internal linking wherever required. NinjaOutreach can now easily pass on the link juice from one page to another and simultaneously keep the bounce rate low.

Is Internal Linking Really Worth It?

Internal links help a lot t boost link-flow on the website. When you use platforms such as WordPress, you should make use of internal linking. Internal link building is the most powerful SEO approach. 

Google ranks pages on internal links too, you can use internal linking to enhance search visibility and drive traffic to increase your site’s revenue. According to the search engine, the number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page.

Along with NinjaOutreach, Ahrefs and Moz are some of the free tools to increase your traffic.

7. Use HARO to Boost SEO Traffic

Chanty.com uses Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, to create links that are less time-consuming and worth the effort. This is one of the easiest and safest ways to get quality  backlinks from other websites.

Chanty constantly acquires five to 10 backlinks weekly using HARO. This platform has helped Chanty in gaining more traffic, links and exposure to public relations and publicity for their business. This page even gained enough of a reputation it was featured on Business Insider and American Express.

HARO also serves as a connection between reporters and bloggers. Chanty mostly invests their time supplying information, answering queries related to their field of specialization and does a follow-up with a reporter.

These are some of the ways on how to improve Google search ranking and drive organic traffic to websites using HARO.

8. Use User-Generated Content

Any type of content produced and advertised by unpaid sponsors is User-Generated Content (UGC). It is created by the loyal customers of a business or dedicated brand followers. Instead of the brand advertising its content, it is the customer that brings them in front of a broad audience.

With the help of UGCt, a non-profit healthcare association advertised informational articles by the dozen. In just 12 months, they were able to boost their traffic by 228% percent and achieve their growth strategy.

They approached millions of followers on social media channels. With all the comments from different perspectives suitably complementing the content. One of the UGC strategies many companies employ is customer reviews. Because the review comes from the customers, it gives a genuine view of the business and it helps improve both SEO and ROI, too.

9. Participate in Podcasts

Starting a podcast helps increase your organic traffic and search results. For those who do not have the time to read, a podcast is quite helpful, informative and insightful.  The podcast is a remarkable platform where the listeners explore and receive new information in the form of audio blogs. It is a beneficial add-on to a successful SEO strategy.

Shane Barker, an influencer and marketing writer for INC, can get backlinks from distinguished sites. All he does is simply appear as a guest on a few podcasts of other influential productions. Guest podcasting broadens his audience and promotes his marketing as well.

Barker also aims to be interview in other influencer’s podcasts and respond to the audience queries which lead to his credits. At the same time, he gains backlinks from notable sites like LinkedIn Marketing Blog, Biteable, TopRank Marketing, etc.

Takeaways

• In this article, you have nine proven ways to increase your audience and organic traffic through digital marketing efforts.
• This traffic determines your brand’s online visibility and how successful your website is in attracting new, unique visitors.
• By optimizing for search intent, you can increase your organic visits to the website.
• Writing in-depth and specific content and comparison-type blog posts can boost your audience.
• Using suggested search hacks, FAQ Schema, HARO and adding internal links only further enhances your website traffic.
• UGC and podcasts will help you gain organic traffic and appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Conclusion

All of the points covered are suggestions that help to attract traffic and generate revenue. 

SEO focuses on increasing search traffic, it amplifies your SEO and makes your site user-friendly, appealing and easily navigable. SEO can help you target website traffic and boost your organic clicks quickly. 

Try these nine steps on your website and let us know your thoughts and experience by leaving a comment below.