7 Major Channels You Can Take Advantage of to Drive Traffic to Your Website
If you take a look at your Google Analytics, you will see that there are 7-8 vital channels where your website traffic comes from mainly.
On the absolute top level, these include every possible way to drive traffic to your site. By all means, you can drill this down to particular websites, but we’ll get into that in a while.
Generally, if you can be extraordinary at even one of these channels, you can have massive volumes of traffic flooding into your site.
Let’s discuss how to utilize these major channels to drive traffic to your website and drill down into each of them.
Every Possible Way to Get Traffic to Your Website
Here are the seven major channels you can utilize to drive traffic to your website:
- Organic search
- Paid search
- Social media
- Display
- Referral sites
- Direct
- Organic Search
So far, organic search is the most potent way to drive traffic to your site.
Organic search helps you get free traffic from different search engines, including Google, Bing, etc.
Let’s take Google, for example. If you search for “car maintenance,” Google will display multiple business listings offering those services.
Now, if you manage to secure the #1 position for this keyword (or any relevant search term for that matter), a great deal of that organic search traffic will be navigated to your site.
Remember, you can earn the top positions for various keywords in your industry by implementing multiple strategies like writing more SEO-friendly blogs, optimizing images, building backlinks, and much more.
For this, all you need to do is follow the search engine’s best practices and make your site Google-friendly.
And these “best practices” are no top secret either.
Just visit Google Search Central to get to know these best practices that you should meet to boost your website’s discoverability and Google search visibility.
Once your site fulfills Google’s best practices, you should start giving indications to the search engine.
This is to inform Google that their users are discovering the information they are searching for on your website.
Some indications you will want to check include backlinks and site metrics such as CTR, time on site, and bounce rate.
Nevertheless, you should know that obtaining top-ranking positions in organic search results can easily take anywhere between 6-12 months or more.
Organic SEO is undoubtedly one of the most effective strategies out there, but it can be too slow when it comes to producing visible results. It takes time to do so, but the results are long-lasting, so it’s all worth it.
While you should undoubtedly implement this strategy, you can also employ other channels side-by-side to generate quick results. Thus, ensuring both short and long-term success for your business.
- Paid Search
When it comes to driving traffic from search engines, paid search is undoubtedly the quickest way to do so.
The paid search involves running ads on search engines to generate traffic.
For instance, when you perform a Google search for a product/service, let’s say “car repair,” you will instantly see a couple of Google ads at the top of the SERP.
Now, these businesses are paying to show up at these top-ranking positions for this particular keyword.
They must be paying a few dollars for this exact search term, and each keyword differs in cost depending on its overall level of competition.
Despite all that, the paid search shows a very efficient and quick way to drive traffic to your site.
You need to create a Google Ads account first (if you don’t already have one) to get going with paid search advertising.
However, before you start running your ads, it is recommended that you get certified in Google Ads first.
These certifications are free-of-cost, and without them, your advertising dollars can easily go down the drain.
- Social Media
The quickest method to get social media traffic is through paid ads.
All you need to do is build an ad, target it and start bringing in traffic to your website right away.
Paid advertising on social media platforms can help you gain instant visibility, drive clicks, generate sales, and, therefore, increase your revenue.
When you produce any content for social media, the first thing you need to do is ensure that your target audience sees it. And well, what’s the fastest way to do that if not running paid ads?
However, that’s not all. This will then have a snowball effect.
Users you advertised to will start following you on social media and share your content with their friends and followers.
Furthermore, your content might do so well that the particular social media site will start ranking it within their platform.
For instance, if you are posting the content on Instagram, your top-performing content could appear on the platform’s Discover tab.
Or in the case of Twitter, it might rank as a “Top Tweet.”
Once this starts happening, you can dial back your paid ads and begin enjoying the organic aspect of social media.
Moreover, as soon as you gain organic social media traction, your ROI shoots up since you won’t be paying for traffic any more.
But the only way to truly achieve organic growth on social media is through producing valuable content regularly.
To put it another way, you need to build content that your audience likes to see, engage with and respond to.
Also, remember, when you are just starting out on social media, avoid picking more than two platforms.
That’s because it is better to perform exceptionally well on two platforms than work half-heartedly on five.
All of us know that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are the top social media platforms today.
Pick two of these and give them your best shot.
Email marketing is possibly one of the most cost-effective methods to keep driving traffic to your website and stay in touch with your recent visitors.
Users who subscribe to your email list are generally the people who are most engaged with your business.
Moreover, in comparison to the associated returns, the cost of email software is minimal.
Even single emails can result in thousands of dollars in ROI.
There are various email tools available in the market that you can use and start sending weekly or monthly emails to your subscribers.
Plus, nowadays, you can even set up entirely automated email campaigns that work without even requiring you to lift a finger.
- Display
This is another type of paid traffic that can boost your overall site traffic.
Display traffic is generated when a visitor lands on your website by clicking on an ad you ran on some other site.
These display ads work wonders when it comes to bringing prospects back to your site.
For instance, if a user saw one of your products, you could run an ad advertising the same product and target them on other sites they are visiting.
This will help you keep your brand on top of mind, acquire more traffic and boost your chances of making more sales.
- Referral Websites
Needless to say, the internet has so much more than just social media.
You can take advantage of referral websites to bring in a considerable amount of traffic to your site.
But do you know what referral websites are exactly?
These are simple websites that “refer” their visitors to your site by including a link to it.
For your brand, you can start driving referral traffic from:
- Business directories
- Public forums
- Guest blogs
To put things into perspective, let’s take a deeper dive into each one of these.
- Business Directories
To begin with, you should ensure that your company is listed in all top business directories related to your business.
For instance, if you own a coffee shop, you will want to make sure that you are listed on platforms like Google and Yelp.
Prepare a list of all places where your customers may go to find businesses similar to yours, and then ensure you are present there.
You can even step up your game by sponsoring your business listing to show up higher in such directories, which may further lead to even larger referral traffic volumes.
- Public Forums
Another step that you can take to bring in referral traffic to your site is participating in public forums.
For instance, platforms like Quora are “hotspots” for getting massive amounts of referral traffic.
Here you can focus on a particular industry and answer different relevant questions that users put forward.
You can insert useful links, such as a link to one of your blog posts, within your replies, which could get you a great deal of referral traffic.
Some other popular public forums include Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Reddit.
In addition to this, the same tactics might also work well on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn groups.
- Guest Blogs
Guest blogging is yet another helpful strategy that can result in heaps of referral traffic.
This is the point where you discover popular sites or blogs in your niche or industry and offer to make your blog contributions for free.
They receive free content, and you get free exposure. It’s a win-win!
Within your guest blogs, you can link back to your website by inserting quality links.
Naturally, as readers go through your content on these popular sites, they will most likely click on the links you’ve added.
This is an excellent link-building strategy that not only brings traffic to your site but also helps your SEO.
However, make sure that these links you include offer some value to your readers and don’t look like an out-of-the-blue item.
- Direct
The last but not least major channel is “direct” traffic.
Direct traffic refers to when a person visits your website without clicking on any link from another platform or site.
To put it another way, they land on your website by entering your site’s URL in the search box directly.
Direct traffic can occur due to various things:
- It might comprise visitors who saw your brand on TV or heard of it on the radio, or read about it in print media.
- It can also be a user who interacted with your brand on one device and later used a different device to visit your website.
- It could also involve returning visitors, i.e., users who have been to your site before and are now coming back for more information or perhaps to make a purchase.
Think of direct traffic as a direct outcome of good brand awareness.
So, the more direct traffic you receive, the better brand awareness your business has.
Hence, you can also use your direct traffic to indirectly measure the effect of your overall marketing and branding strategy.
Wrapping It Up
By now, you have gone through every major channel that you can utilize to drive substantial traffic to your website.
To summarize, organic search, paid search, referral sites, social media, email, display, and direct are the seven top ways to pump up your overall site traffic.
If all this seems like a lot of work to do, you can always call in the experts! With a professional digital marketing agency, you can make the most out of these major channels.