How to increase website traffic

Website Traffic – the number of unique users who visited the site during a limited period. High website traffic on the internet, like a good flow of customers in a store, ensures a stable income stream. Of course, this is true only if visitors are interested in the product and it aligns with what brought them to the store or website and their initial expectations.

Online traffic, like acquiring customers offline, should be handled by marketing specialists. But for some reason, in our country, there is still a belief that everything on the internet is free, including promotion and advertising. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

How to get traffic? From which sources? Why is engaging traffic a serious job that requires skills and cannot be free or “cheap”? We have prepared an article that will provide answers to these questions and more.

One of the most common questions is: How to get maximum traffic with minimal investment? You will also find the answer to this question in this article.

Commercial Websites: How to Increase Traffic?

An important aspect of engaging traffic is that visitors to a commercial website should be targeted, i.e., potentially interested in the offers published on the pages. If people come and leave the site immediately, it will only get worse, and there is no point in non-targeted traffic. You need sales, not impressive visitor count numbers.
To engage targeted traffic to Business Site clients’ websites, we use the following approaches:

• Search engine optimization;
• Remarketing and retargeting;
• Social media and YouTube;
• Professional networks and industry platforms, forums, and media.

Today, there are more websites than people who have access to the internet. Those who have never encountered websites before and don’t know what online sales through a website entail may think that simply having a website will bring in customers and sales. But this is a mistaken belief. It’s as if the online community eagerly awaited, constantly asking, “When will this wonderful new website finally appear?” In reality, think about how you search for something on the internet: you choose from the links that appear on the first or second pages of the search engine results. And you certainly don’t think that someone is launching a website that matches your expectations right now, which might soon also appear at the top of Google 🙂

To work with traffic, you need to know and understand a lot, but you can master the basic concepts and understand what’s what in just 8 minutes – that’s about how long you’ll spend reading this article attentively.

Sources and Methods of Traffic Acquisition

Traffic – these are website visitors. In fact, traffic is the main indicator of effectiveness. No matter how high your rankings are on Google or how many platforms your banners are on, if there’s no traffic, promotion (marketing) is ineffective!

This is important because understanding the end result provides an understanding of the principle and eliminates most common mistakes.

To get traffic (visitors to the website), you need to go to platforms that are visited by the audience segments you are interested in:

• Google and other search engines.
• Facebook, X (former Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and other social networks.
• Youtube.
• Forums.
• Thematic portals.
• News resources.
• Messengers – the trend 2020s (Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp).

These platforms are visited by hundreds of millions of people every day.

For example, Instagram is visited by over 500 million users daily, and the total number of registered users has long exceeded 1 billion. Ponder over these numbers. And if, like us, you see this as a tremendous resource for sales, continue reading this article.

So, the essence of website promotion is to ensure that information about your website, along with links that users can click on to visit it, is placed on all the TOP internet platforms.

As you can see, there’s nothing too complicated, and you could conclude your study of website promotion and increasing website traffic on the internet at this point.

But, as always, there is one very unpleasant nuance:

I give the highest priority to website promotion in search engines because they provide the highest quality traffic (visitors) to the site. What’s also important is that while SEO doesn’t yield instant results, the rewards of proper promotion can be reaped for quite a long time, even if digital marketing investments cease for a period.

This is related to how search engines work:

So, if you’re selling “bulk gravel in Kiev” and your potential customer enters the query “buy bulk gravel Kiev” into Google, and they see your website listed in the top positions, you will receive a targeted inquiry. First, this customer needs that particular product. Second, they need it very soon because few people enter such queries without a current need.

In practice, users have become accustomed to trusting websites on the first or second pages of search results. That’s why it’s crucial to rank there. It’s achievable, thanks to various SEO techniques, but trying to do it on your own without experience makes the likelihood of conquering the top positions for relevant queries close to zero. Unfortunately.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising and SEO

There are two ways to increase traffic from search engines:

1. Contextual advertising (Google Ads).
2. SEO website promotion in Google and other search engines.

Each of them has its own characteristics, which are outlined in the table below, so when taking a comprehensive approach, both context and SEO are used in parallel:

SEO promotion is the preferred method for those who are willing to play the long game. If you don’t need visitors “yesterday” and can wait for the return on investment, this method brings a lot of benefits to your business. It offers the possibility to increase your target audience for free (in the long run), generate revenue from advertising, links, guest posts, and more. This method is suitable for mature businesses that have established interaction with their target audience and received positive feedback. In SEO, money is spent to make the website attractive to search engines and users, building a reputation that continues to engage traffic even if investment in promotion is temporarily halted.

Contextual advertising in search engines is the optimal option for landing pages, one-time events, and seasonal sales. It allows you to get results “here and now,” plan your budget, track campaign effectiveness, calculate the cost per lead, conduct marketing experiments, and see their results in statistics. Choosing contextual advertising makes sense at the start of your business to assess its prospects and decide on the feasibility of investing in SEO. However, it’s important to remember that with context, you’ll have to pay for each visitor, and if you stop paying, the flow of traffic will dry up.

But there’s a third option – using both tools simultaneously. High-frequency queries (HF) are worth promoting through SEO, while low-frequency queries (LF) are better suited for contextual advertising.

The math here is as follows: Let’s assume the cost per click is $1. To promote the HF query “website creation” in SEO, you need to invest $100 per month, and for the LF query “turnkey website” – $50. “Website creation” will bring us 1500 unique visitors per month, while “turnkey website” – 45. Thus, if you promote “website creation” through contextual advertising, you’ll spend $1500 on this traffic, but if you invest in SEO, it’s only $100. Conversely, by investing $50 in SEO to increase traffic for the “turnkey website” query, you’ll only get 45 unique visitors, which you could have acquired for $45 through contextual advertising.

Remarketing and Retargeting

I’ve given these methods a second priority in importance because they allow you to “re-capture” users who have previously visited your site through relevant search queries. These visitors are already familiar with your brand, product or service offerings, advantages, and may have already made a purchase or taken other desired actions on your site.

When, after some time, your website’s ads “follow” them during their internet browsing, they are more likely to return and make a new purchase, sign up for services, complete abandoned cart orders, or review your terms and conditions before making a final decision. In other words, remarketing/retargeting works on a loyal, “warm” audience, which is why it occupies a well-deserved second place on my list.

How Does Remarketing and Retargeting Work?

A special code is placed on the website to track the actions of visitors: which products they were interested in, which pages they viewed, what they purchased or added to their cart or wishlist, how much time they spent on which pages of the website. The gathered information can be used to display advertisements to these users that match their interests: products from the viewed category, cross-sells, new arrivals, promotional items, reminders about abandoned carts, and more.

Remarketing and retargeting represent a re-engagement with your website. This kind of contact is called “warm.” It means that the likelihood of purchasing a product on your website increases significantly because users have previously encountered your offer somewhere and have remembered something about it (or not remembered, but in any case, preliminary contact plays a huge role in the final decision-making).

The criteria for tracking user actions on the website can be configured in the Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager account. The benefits of using it include:

• Working with an initially interested audience.
• The opportunity to remind a person about an unfinished action.
• Increasing brand recognition among internet users.
• Increasing the average purchase value through offering similar products or additional accessories.
• Flexible settings, the ability to predict user actions and interests with high accuracy.
• Increasing conversion rates and depth of engagement.

However, there are some pitfalls:

• AdBlock blocking advertisements.
• “Banner blindness” – automatic ignoring of any banners by users.
• Intrusiveness of “chasing” advertisements – occurs if the user has already completed all actions on the website and is no longer interested in the topic.
• The system does not account for “one-click” purchases made by phone.

You probably want to know what the actual difference is between remarketing and retargeting?

Ways to Bring Visitors Back to the Website

Types of Retargeting:

• Search Retargeting. Used to remind a person about a previously visited website if they enter a search query on a similar topic. This is a classic way to bring people back to the website to complete a target action or make a new one. When using this method, you need to consider the visitor’s level of interest, the time elapsed since their last visit, and the actions they have taken to make retargeting as effective as possible.
• Behavioral (Dynamic) Retargeting. Determines a person’s interests and preferences by tracking their search queries and visited websites, and displays a banner with relevant products or services. This type of retargeting is very useful for websites with a wide range of products and services, as it allows you to “show” the visitor exactly what they are looking for. However, if the website’s range is not large or changes very frequently, this advertising method may not yield the expected results.
• Social Retargeting. Retargeting on blogs, social networks, forums, where the target audience is gathered. It is suitable for cases where the target audience spends a significant amount of time on these platforms. When using this method, it should be taken into account that people use social networks for relaxation and entertainment, and may not always be ready to leave the platform and visit a website to make purchases or order services.
• Mobile Retargeting. Retargeting in mobile apps. This tool has high potential as the percentage of mobile audiences is constantly growing. It makes sense to use mobile retargeting if analytics show that a large percentage of your target audience comes from mobile devices.
• Lookalike. Advertising is shown to a “lookalike” audience with identical behavioral characteristics found in your target audience. This significantly expands the audience reach. However, there is no guarantee that every new visitor attracted will be part of your target audience. You can find your Lookalike audience in Facebook Ads by adjusting the level of similarity from minimal to the maximum possible (from 1 to 10).

How to Get the Most Benefit from Remarketing

1. Segment Visitors Based on Their Behavior on the Website: Interested, uninterested, those who have made a purchase. Obviously, showing ads to interested participants will yield the best results.
2. Segment Visitors Based on the Time of Their Website Visit. Those who visited your site 2-3 days ago are more likely to return and complete the desired action compared to those who visited a week or a month ago. If reminding the former is enough, the latter may need an incentive like discounts or bonuses.
3. Determine the Frequency of Ad Display. This will help avoid crossing the line where ads become annoying and create a feeling of being pursued. For example, the ad can be actively displayed for the first 30 days after a site visit. Then there’s a month-long break. Then you can remind the user again for 10 days. Take another break. And invite the user to return to the site after 3-4 months since their last visit.
4. Show the Customer What Motivates Them to Make a Purchase. For example, if someone quickly left your site, it makes sense to remind them of your brand. If they showed interest in a specific product category, show them banners with those products. If someone viewed a product in detail or added it to the cart but didn’t buy it, offer discounts, bonuses, special offers, etc. For those who have already made a purchase, suggest cross-selling, accessories for the purchased item, and so on.

Social Media and YouTube

The third priority is explained by the fact that this method of increasing traffic is not suitable for every business. You need to assess the possibility of selling your products and services to social media users realistically. For example, if you sell construction materials, promoting on social media may lead to a budget drain that could have been more effectively invested in contextual advertising or SEO. For some products, it’s better to focus your efforts and budget on making Google promotion work rather than considering social media for traffic acquisition.
Increasing website traffic through social media works well for businesses in the following sectors:

• Service Industry: cafes, restaurants, beauty salons, auto repair shops, clubs, etc.
• Consumer Goods: clothing, furniture, jewelry, food, toys, perfumes, cosmetics.
• Professional Services: psychologists, marketers, business coaches, photographers, tutors, cosmetologists, and others.
• Leisure and Travel: last-minute tours, special offers, etc.

Considering that in 2024, people increasingly trust YouTube and social media, where they spend up to 80% of their online time, more than search engine results; thanks to video and SMM, even those who didn’t consider these traffic channels in 2024 are now successfully promoting their products. We will definitely create a separate article on the non-standard traffic channels that have emerged in recent years for both B2B and B2C. For now, just keep in mind that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are not only for cosmetologists and craft coffee shops. You can also sell heavy machinery and bulk coal, as long as you use the right approach. You may have noticed that even government agencies and organizations are actively engaging with audiences on TikTok, expanding their age range and increasing brand recognition. TikTok promotion today produces results that satisfy both a small coffee shop and a large international bank. The key is understanding the specifics of TikTok promotion and knowing the algorithms.

According to eMarketer, 3.96 billion people from around the world use social networks, and this number is increasing every year. If your target audience is present on social networks in significant numbers and your type of business falls into the list of promising directions for promotion, feel free to take advantage of these platforms:

• Close communication and interaction with customers.
• The opportunity to gain the trust of users and increase brand recognition.
• Wide audience coverage and detailed targeting options.
• Availability of feedback, the possibility to restore reputation, and address negativity.
• Quick response to advertising.
• Strengthening the website’s position in search engine results.
• The ability to drive a large number of users through viral content.
• Relatively low cost per lead.
• Direct sales of products and services.

However, don’t forget about the challenges you may encounter when increasing traffic through social media:

• Results may take some time to achieve. Initially, you’ll need to build trust before you can start selling.
• Entering social networks is a significant decision. If you suddenly change your mind and stop managing a community or a public page, it could negatively impact your company’s reputation.
• The need for interaction. It’s crucial to respond promptly to user questions and inquiries, preferably within an hour.
• Difficulty in predicting results.
• Requires significant time investment (or delegation), proper goal setting, strategy, and planning.

How to Get Targeted Traffic from Social Media?

1. The easiest way is to publish useful and engaging content on your website and include “share” buttons for social media. If the content goes viral, it will actively spread among social media users and drive new traffic to your site. This tool also makes website promotion in search engines more effective. Viral content is an excellent solution, especially for platforms like Instagram, where posts in stories can be a great tool for attracting a new audience.
2. Create and manage communities and public pages on popular social networks, and manage them correctly (I’ll provide more details below).
3. Place like boxes on your site with the option to subscribe to your public page or group without leaving the site. Additionally, the like box displays avatars of people who have already subscribed, with priority given to acquaintances and friends. It also shows the total number of group members. This psychological trigger, “social proof,” encourages visitors to join the community.
4. Implement targeted advertising, collaborations, and sponsored mentions by opinion leaders. Recently, there has been a trend towards the popularity of collaborations with microbloggers and opinion leaders with audiences ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. Since their audience is smaller, trust levels are higher, and there is closer interaction (for example, an opinion leader with over a million followers cannot respond to most messages, which reduces the level of trust).
5. Increase engagement through various activities, sections, and contests. If we’re talking about promoting a product company on social media, this could be a contest with the main prize being the product itself. This increases product recognition during the contest.

Promoting and marketing your website through social media requires setting specific goals (sales, brand loyalty, trust, website traffic, etc.) and developing a corresponding strategy to achieve those goals. This strategy forms the basis for creating a content plan, which should include:

• Informative posts, about 60% of the content. These include posts that provide value to readers and align with the brand’s theme. For example, for a coffee supply company, these could be posts like: “What’s the difference between decaffeinated coffee and classic Arabica?” or “10 facts about coffee you may not know” or “Why is coffee beneficial? Expert opinions.”
• Entertaining content, about 30% of the content. These are posts with humor, beautiful images, all within the brand’s theme. If it’s a company that supplies coffee, you can actively involve employees in creating posts, making them the main characters of the visual content. Customers who are brand advocates (brand advocates are those customers who talk about your company to others simply because they want to and love your brand, not because they were incentivized by a discount or a free offer) can also be generators of both informative and entertaining content (e.g., stories featuring your company’s page).
• Product-related content, around 10% of the posts, offers solutions to readers’ problems through the product or service.

But if you’re not a blogger or a brand evangelist, your goal is not just to accumulate followers and collect millions of likes under each post. For business accounts, the key goal is to push everyone interested deeper into the sales funnel. So, in commerce, the key performance metrics for social media presence are sales and targeted website conversions. Everything else—shares, likes, comments—is additional value.

Which Social Network to Choose for Promotion?

If website promotion in Google suits almost any business, it’s a bit more complex with social networks. To make website promotion effective, it’s essential to choose the right platform:

• Facebook – the most popular social network, visited by over 2 billion users daily. Practical experience shows that educational companies, automotive, financial, B2B segments, restaurants, coffee shops, and news resources are most effectively promoted here. Facebook’s audience responds well to unique content such as author-led training programs, workouts, meditations, self-development, etc.
• Instagram – a perspective and increasingly popular social network. Over 500 million people are registered on Instagram. This network’s feature is its emphasis on visual content, so it’s best to sell something aesthetically appealing. Beautifully presented food, cosmetics, clothing, accessories, jewelry, handmade exclusive items, and more. Popular formats include Instagram Reels, a short video format similar to TikTok. It’s easy to create (Instagram offers music options), and currently, it generates organic reach, meaning you can get organic traffic to your page through Reels.
• YouTube. About a million people watch videos on YouTube every day. The total YouTube audience has already exceeded 2 billion people (imagine that number). Successful website promotion on the internet through YouTube is possible in various business niches, from pet products to high-end clothing brands.
• Pinterest. If you know how to present your business in beautiful, inspiring images, this social network is for you. It’s effective for promoting creativity, beauty, fashion, and style-related items: artworks, photography services, stylists, makeup artists, tattoo artists, clothing, accessories, beauty salons, etc.
• X (former Twitter). According to statistics, over 65% of companies with 100+ employees have accounts on this social network. X is often used for selling clothing, shoes, electronics, books, sports equipment, cosmetics, handmade accessories, furniture, auto parts, construction materials, and more.
• TikTok. The fastest-growing social network. According to statistics, more than 2.9 billion users visit this social network daily. When TikTok first appeared, serious brands didn’t take this platform seriously for promotion. Today, major cosmetic, automotive, men’s and women’s fashion brands actively use TikTok as one of their primary promotion platforms. TikTok’s audience is not limited to just teenagers (as it was in the early days of the network). Today, TikTok is used by various brands and services. Regarding services, successful profiles include educators, doctors, consultants in construction, insurance, and more, who share not only entertaining content but also informative content. TikTok has a trend of growing popularity of useful and informative content. Unlike in the past when TikTok allowed only very short videos, now the platform offers options for 15-second, 60-second, or 3-minute videos.

Increasing Website Traffic with YouTube

This method of increasing traffic provides a very wide audience reach, allows you to introduce customers to the brand, build trust, and gain interest. To achieve good results on this platform, you need to:

• Analyze the target audience and search queries to choose relevant topics for creating videos.
• Provide maximum useful and up-to-date information, answer the audience’s questions.
• Incorporate keywords into video titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Add videos to the appropriate category so they appear in the list of related videos when other recordings are viewed.
• Share links to the channel or videos on other websites and social media.
• Remind viewers about the possibility to subscribe to the channel, like, and leave comments.
• Regularly upload new videos.

YouTube Shorts to Increase Traffic

These videos are designed to hold viewers’ attention for a short period of time, making them ideal for viral distribution. YouTube actively promotes this format, and using Shorts can give your content an additional boost.

Benefits of Using YouTube Shorts

• High Reach and Virality: YouTube Shorts have a high potential for viral distribution due to the platform’s algorithm frequently recommending them. They can appear in the feed of users who are not yet subscribed to your channel, helping to attract a new audience.
• Mobile Audience: Since Shorts are specifically designed for mobile devices, they allow for effective engagement with an audience that prefers to consume content on the go. This is particularly important given the growing popularity of mobile video viewing.
• Quick Feedback: The short format allows you to quickly test ideas and receive feedback from your audience. You can experiment with different topics and formats to understand what works best for your target audience.

Professional Networks, Industry Platforms, Forums, News Resources

Why have I assigned these channels fourth priority? Firstly, they provide limited audience coverage. Secondly, if a search query like “buy a washing machine in Kiev” clearly indicates the intention to make a purchase and identifies the target customer, industry platforms gather people with various intentions: finding like-minded individuals, getting answers to their questions, giving advice or sharing experiences, finding useful information, and more, making them impossible to segment. Even after reading your article, a person may not necessarily rush to your website to make a purchase or order a service. However, there are advantages, such as:

• The opportunity to increase brand awareness.
• Non-intrusive evergreen product/service advertising.
• Acquisition of “eternal links” that expedite website promotion on the internet.

How to Properly Use This Tool?

1. Choose the right platform for publishing articles or press releases based on relevance, traffic, authority, and search engine ranking.
2. Create high-quality content that is useful, interesting, and unique. The article’s topic should be of interest to users (which can be verified through search queries).
3. Include links with different anchors to avoid suspicion from search engines.

Traffic from Messengers

According to statistical studies, people use messengers more actively and frequently than social networks. In 2024, this method of communication may likely replace email communication. Communicating with the audience through messengers opens up some good prospects for businesses:

• The ability to constantly stay in touch for interaction and customer support.
• Notifying customers (special offers, discounts, promotions) in a convenient and unobtrusive way. The perfect point of contact.
• Bringing customers together in thematic communities, chats, groups, and channels to increase brand recognition, build trust, engage, and interact.
• Selling products and services.
• Automating routine processes through chatbots.

However, this traffic channel is given the lowest priority. In messengers, you can’t be pushy; unexpected advertising is generally not well-received by the vast majority of users, and messages offering products or services from unknown senders are often marked as spam.

Messenger	Available Communication Formats	Suitable For	Advantages	Tips for Usage
Viber	Groups, public chats	Any type of business	The ability to react to text and visual content (likes). Stickers, emojis. The ability to turn off notifications in groups. Using bots.	1. One group – one business direction. 2. Adding to the group should always be expected, after establishing preliminary contact.
Telegram	Groups, channels, secret chats	Any type of business	The ability to track the number of views. Unlimited number of members in a group. Channels with one-way communication. Privacy protection in secret chats.	1. Increase audience engagement through polls. 2. Use bots for post editing, creating polls, and other relevant functions.
WhatsApp	Chats, broadcast lists	Mainly for those actively promoting on Instagram	The ability to format text as an image, audio, or video content. Sending messages to a list of users (up to 256 people) who have your phone number saved.	1. Use the messenger for consultations, customer support, and sales. 2. Use the broadcast feature cautiously to prevent users from considering your message as spam.
FB Messenger	Groups	Businesses successfully promoting on Facebook	Quick communication with customers from the Facebook network. Contacts can be added even if they don’t have a Facebook account, using their phone number.	Messenger often doesn’t notify about messages if they are sent by non-friends. Send messages only to your friend base.

In one article, you can’t cover everything, but the information above should be sufficient to understand why businesses need traffic and where to get it. As you may understand, it’s impossible to handle this on your own if you’re not ready to set aside other tasks and dive deep into SEO, SMM, managing contextual and targeted advertising, working with influencers, and other subfields of digital marketing.