Website traffic is a vital driver of overall business growth, so it’s important to learn multiple methods to increase your website traffic. Traffic allows you to measure marketing methods, improve search engine credibility, gather audience insights, and the most important benefit, gain more customers. Yet when searching for how to increase traffic to your website, you’ll quickly realize there are countless methods and ideologies out there. Where do you even begin?  

In this article, we will focus on leveraging search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing in increasing traffic to your website. These three techniques might be different in concepts, but they become more effective when combined.  

In short, integrating these three techniques enables a digital marketing flywheel that lets you enjoy the best of both worlds and can potentially double your website traffic when done right. Read on to find out how you can increase organic traffic to your website using these three techniques. 

Optimize Using Audience Data 

While SEO is generally about befriending search engines, it’s also crucial that you optimize your website around the behavior of people you want to reach. The key is in developing a keyword strategy around search data from your audience. How do you do it? Consider how people are making searches on Google today – it could be through specific keywords, an open-ended question on the search bar, or through a voice assistant.

Having said this, try being more human when approaching SEO. Heavily incorporating two to three keywords on your website copy, blogs, and metadata is now considered too “robotic” and could negatively affect your rankings on search pages. Instead, you may use long-tail keywords that will identify your website as a destination for a particular topic.  

This blog post, for example, is intended for those who want to get more traffic to their website. Using the keyword ‘how to increase organic traffic to my website’ would be more effective than just ‘website traffic’ because of its similarity to the way a user would make a search. Optimize for search engines, but remember real-life behavior, too. 

Create Content Around Buyer Personas 

Optimizing for the search engines is useless if you’re not driving profitable customer or client actions. This is where content marketing comes into action; it connects with your readers and influences them in making purchasing decisions. 

To ensure you entice them until the decision stage, create content pieces that fit your buyer personas—fictional yet realistic representations of your target customers. If you haven’t created your audience personas, here are a few tips that may help you in designing them: 

• Check your existing customers and social audience. Gather information, such as age, location, language, spending power and patterns, interests, challenges, and more. 

• Learn why they love your products or services. Tapping on social media listening is one way to find out customer experiences. 

• Identify customer goals. Are they only researching, looking for reviews, or are they ready to buy? 

Once you have buyer personas in place, you can deliver content that will be most relevant and valuable to your audience. The easiest way to use your audience personas is to cater your content to them. 

Below are the three (3) stages of the buyer’s journey along with their ideal content formats: 

• Awareness Stage. Where personas are experiencing that need to be fixed. Blog posts, social media posts, and explainer videos are ideal pieces of content targeting this stage. 

• Consideration Stage. Where personas are considering solutions to their pain points. The best content pieces to offer for this stage are product comparison guides, case studies, and free samples. 

• Decision Stage. Where personas have decided on their solution or turned into buyers. Examples of ideal content formats for the decision stage are product descriptions, free trials and demos, reviews and customer testimonials. 

Update Old Web Copy and Blog Posts 

Here’s another link between SEO and content marketing: when you update your old web content or blog posts, you get Google to crawl your site more frequently. It’s like technical SEO, where search engine spiders crawl your website, but without coding—just upgrading.

Having fresh content is critical for your website because Google favors frequently updated content. If you frequently update your website or articles, Google finds it easier to search for your web pages and add them to the index. 

Frequent updates can help you have a better chance of ranking on the search engines. While a higher post frequency doesn’t necessarily increase your overall website rankings, it can increase organic traffic to your website. 

Here are some of the best practices for content updates: 

• The key is quality, not more content. If your blogs are only 300-word long, bumping up the wordcount is a good idea. However, adding paragraphs just for the sake of updating can’t guarantee you good results. It’s necessary to keep your content standards high and write around what your readers want. 

• Incorporate valuable, targeted keywords. Keywords are a vital part of SEO. Optimize your content for a more relevant keyword. Targeting new keywords can expand your search visibility and help you bring more traffic. 

• Add new or update old links. Like keywords, internal and external links also play important SEO roles. Interlinking your web pages and linking your blog posts to your website can positively affect your SEO. 

Publish Evergreen Content

Creating evergreen content doesn’t only increase organic traffic to your website, but it also keeps driving regular traffic to your web pages for as long as you want it. The reason behind this is simple—such content doesn’t go out of date.

Not only does evergreen content stay fresh for readers, but it also remains popular in search engines. Google will find your content relevant, allowing you to become more visible and rank higher in search results pages. Here are a few tips: 

• Choose evergreen topics. Keyword tools like Ahrefs can help you look for popular, consistently searched topics. Use such tools to see what keywords have positive trends and build your content around these keywords.

When writing blogs around evergreen topics, avoid using terms with a short lifespan, such as this month, last year, yesterday, and more. If you’re thinking about writing for a relevant year, for example, ‘content marketing best practices in 2021’, update the content every year or ensure the content will remain valid over time. 

• Update content when necessary. As discussed in the previous point, Google recognizes web pages with fresh content. You should refresh your content as often as necessary to ensure its evergreen and increase its chances of driving traffic or attracting leads and shares. 

• Build high-quality backlinks. The good thing about evergreen content or regularly updated content is that it can generate consistent leads, establish a brand reputation, and above all—give higher search engine rankings. 

To ensure your business reaps these benefits, build links to your fresh content, encourage sharing on social media, and consider doing guest posting. 

Promote and Optimize Your Social Media Channels 

Did you know that an optimized social media profile has high chances of driving organic website traffic? Social media optimization follows the concept of SEO, where relevant keywords are included in bio sections to make the profiles searchable. 

When writing social media copy, be sure to make it keyword-rich. Add relevant keywords naturally, so your target audience can find you in the search. Doing this not only increases your discoverability, but also helps increase organic traffic to your website. 

Aside from creating keyword-rich descriptions, you can also boost your organic social media reach by doing the following: 

• Upload a high-quality picture. Your profile picture puts a face to your brand, so it must reflect that. It should also be recognizable; avoid using an image that has nothing to do with your business. 

• Add links to your website. Take advantage of social media’s ability to build brand awareness. Include links in your bio section to lead target customers directly to your website. 

• Use hashtags sparingly. Hashtags are like keywords that categorize the content. Consider adding hashtags, but only relevant ones, to promote your business and boost your visibility. 

Start Getting More Website Traffic 

Search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media marketing are equally essential in helping you increase organic traffic to your website. 

One doesn’t perform better than the other as all techniques can help bring your business in front of searchers, build an audience, and ultimately—convert prospects to customers. Instead of treating them as separate, different practices, why not integrate your SEO into your content and social media marketing strategy, or vice versa? 

If you’re up for this idea, NFT would be happy help you get started. Our team of industry experts will draw your target audience to your website through on-page and off-page SEO, engaging content and by improving your social media presence.