Quality over quantity: 10 ways to drive high quality website traffic

Let’s make this clear first: when I say quality traffic, I mean visits from the people you’re trying to reach and engage with. You need to keep your target audience in mind at all times. Otherwise, you’re taking the ‘cooked spaghetti’ approach: throwing a bunch of stuff against a wall and hoping something sticks.

With that in mind, let’s dive into 10 surefire ways to drive high quality traffic to your website and reach your desired audience: 

Content is king. It’s crucial to getting your audience to notice you in a sea of competition. Not to mention its role in determining your ranking position in search results. Your content should be informative, clear, and above all, it should resonate with your target audience. 

The structure of your content also plays a role in how it's received by your audience. You want your content to be easy to understand. Use headings, bullet points, and include visuals within your content to keep your content digestible and enticing. 

What use is killer content if it’s not found and read by the right people? Merely creating content just won’t cut it. You need to optimize your content to ensure it’s reaching your target audience. That's where on-page SEO (search engine optimization) can help you. 

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website's content. This involves using meta descriptions, optimizing your images, including relevant keywords, and integrating internal links. By doing so, you help search engines identify and understand your content, which helps them determine your ranking position in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

List posts or listicles are articles written in the format of a list. They’re one of the most popular content types out there, thanks to their ability to present large amounts of information in digestible, numbered sections. In short, list posts are easier to scan, process, and interpret by human eyes. 

They’re also relatively easy to create. You need to pick a topic, identify the points you want to make, and create a list of bullet points. Then all that’s left is to iron out the details and type it up. 

As the world becomes more social media-savvy, it’s no surprise that social platforms have become invaluable marketing tools. Establishing and maintaining a social media presence allows you to attract new customers and engage with existing ones. By sharing branded content like thought leadership articles, infographics, and online videos, you’ll increase brand awareness and pave the way for directing traffic straight to your site.

Being active in your community and engaging with your audience will humanize your brand and help you build meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers. One way to do so is through social media. It can be as simple as answering your followers’ questions, sharing helpful insights, or responding to their comments on your posts. You can also host virtual events or let your customers share feedback through surveys. 

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing isn’t dead. In fact, it’s a highly effective way to reach your audience. That being said, we’ve all had our inboxes flooded with marketing emails we’ll never open. That’s why it’s key that your emails are relevant for your target audience. Include clear calls to action and make sure to track your emails’ performance. 

A backlink is a link directing you from one website to another. You gain a backlink every time another website links to your site. Think of backlinks as proof of your website’s credibility: they show that your website is a valuable source that’s worth linking to. By acquiring quality backlinks, you will build trust with site visitors and search engines by showing you’re trusted by other websites. This can help improve your site’s domain authority and ranking position, and ultimately increase traffic over time. 

One way to build backlinks is to write guest articles. Guest blogging enables you to link back to your website within the content you write. You want your links to come from credible sources, so it’s important to submit your content to strong, trustworthy websites. 

Technical SEO refers to tactics used to optimize your website’s back end. It basically refers to work done to build a strong technical foundation. Examples include implementing responsive design, simplifying URLs, and improving your web pages’ loading speed. Check out my article on the 9 factors of technical SEO success to help you get started. 

By including technical SEO in your overall SEO strategy, you’ll make it easier for search engines to find, crawl, and index your website. Needless to say, technical SEO plays a vital role in increasing site traffic. 

Creating engaging and relevant content takes time, which today’s marketers never seem to have enough of. That’s where repurposing content can help. Simply put, repurposed content is content that already exists and has been altered to serve a different purpose and expand its reach. This usually involves turning it into a new format, like turning an article into an infographic - or vice versa. 

Repurposing content saves you time and helps you reach a wider audience. That’s because your site visitors consume content in different ways: some may prefer to read an article, while others may be more drawn to visual content. By having the same content in different formats, you ensure more engagement from more visitors. 

You know you’re a marketer when your motto is “Test, test, test.” A/B testing is a split test that helps you determine what content performs better in comparison to others,  and what works best for you. Based on the results of these tests, you can decide how you want to go about creating content that converts.

When it comes to attracting quality website traffic, there’s no overnight success. The secret is to implement a well thought-out strategy and stick to it.