The Top 5 Ways to Get New Traffic To Your Site in 2022: And the Pros & Cons of Each Strategy
Written by Cristina Jayo • Edited by Cecilia Jayo
Today, the big question we’re answering is:
“What are the best ways to attract more website traffic?
Our quick answer is:
There are 5 main strategies you should be using in 2022 to get more traffic to your site. These include implementing and maintaining SEO, strategically leveraging an existing audience, consistently posting valuable content, managing engagement on social media, and using paid digital ads.
Website traffic is understandably one of the biggest concerns for anyone who runs an online business. You need traffic to build an email list, make sales, to fill your coaching programs, and more. Without traffic, your brand is hidden under the rug. So the question is, where do you get all that traffic? You can start with any of these strategies, and eventually, apply all 5 traffic-generating strategies for best results. We’ll also dive into the “pros & cons” of each strategy. Enjoy!
1. Implementing & Maintaining SEO
Pros:
Good SEO increases the chances of potential customers or leads randomly coming across your website, through the searches they make on web browsers.
Usually SEO isn’t the most costly marketing tactic, meaning you can make a really good ROI.
SEO improves your credibility & trust online, because Google bots for example will see your website is professional, and boosts your ranking. FYI Google considers a huge list of items such as: created content, website speed, mobile usability, and more as reasons for ranking.
Unlike other marketing options, SEO provides 24/7 promotion. Once your optimized content is out there, it’s available for anyone to find, at any time of day, and exactly when they want to find it. (Not just the 30 seconds of ‘forced’ air-time you’d get from a traditional commercial.)
SEO optimizes your website performance, which can largely impact your customers. For example, SEO can improve your website’s accessibility, speed, and more, which can drastically improve your customers’ experience. This also enhances your digital ads success, because SEO data can help inform your strategies.
Cons:
If you want your SEO to be most effective, you’ll want someone to manage it consistently. We recommend setting up monthly updates, but if you’re starting out, consider updating your SEO every quarter, or at least yearly.
Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, so you have to stay up-to date on the latest methods in order to keep up with competitors.
2. Borrowing An Existing Audience
Pros:
The idea is that you can pitch your material to brand partners, influencers, or publications to see if they’re willing to promote it to their followers/readers/viewers. If you don’t have a huge audience, but you have great content, this can be a great way to boost your exposure.
It can be free if you find the right brand partner who finds your content to be at equal value to them and their audience, compared to the exposure they are offering. One of the main kinds of partnerships we recommend is leveraging “guest opportunities”. For example, find a podcast, blog, or social account that features weekly guest ‘appearances’ in your subject of expertise. They’re probably happy to welcome your contributions, since they need a consistent flow of guest content.
Cons:
You’ll need to spend some time researching in order to find good brand partners, and once you do, you have no guarantee they’ll say yes.
You probably want to prepare a Media Kit to provide a quick overview of what you can offer.
You probably have to spend a good amount of unpaid time working on this, and maybe even pay some freelancers to help you finalize materials, but it’s worth it if you get access to true potential customers that trust your partner’s recommendations. It’s like skipping 10 steps from your marketing funnel –and saving a lot of time and $ in doing so!
3. Posting Consistent Valuable Content
Pros:
When done correctly, this is the best solution for long-term growth. It can be “free” if you decide to manage it in-house.
With social media, you don’t need a website or blog to post quality content. Just make an account on your chosen platform and off you go!
Social Media is incredibly popular across the globe, so by leveraging its power, you can have access to a huge audience, whereas older generations had to pay large sums of money to access as many potential customers.
Notice we said “posting consistent content” and not “creating consistent content”? That was intentional. You don’t need to kill yourself creating endless amounts of content. It’s way more practical to recycle the same content and present it in different ways, on different platforms, and via different mediums.
It’s also important to note that engagement plays a significant role in social media algorithms. And the algorithms are pretty good at spotting bots ☝️You might even get blocked for not using a platform authentically, so be careful with that!
You can book a Social Media Strategy Workshop if you’d like us to help train your team.
We also offer Social Media Strategy and Social Media Management Services if you’d like a more hands-off approach.
Cons:
It usually takes some time to warm up cold leads, so it can take a while before you see some noticeable ROI.
Copywriting is it’s own career, so if you’re not comfortable writing, the best advice I can give is to either practice on that skill or hire a copywriter! These days, authenticity is KEY, and that’s why it’s extra special when the content is created or at least curated in some way by those in charge of a brand (founders/CEO) who have their heart in it, and can truly express the personality of the brand.
In that same vein…photography, graphic design, art direction and video production are ALL also careers in their own right. If you want to reach the full potential of content creation, you’ll want to set up a team that you can rely on. That being said, there are many new tools out there that you can use if you want to DIY it: Unsplash for photography, Canva or Colorcinch for graphic design, and TikTok or Instagram Reels for simple video editing are great tools to help you get started.
In order to manage your social media accounts effectively, you are required to know best practices for social media, have an understanding of who your niche target audience is and which platforms they spend time in, how to leverage proper hashtags for your niche, how to schedule posts in advance, how to create valuable and engaging content, how to run giveaway campaigns and form influencer partnerships, and more; which can be a lot to take on if you’re already busy managing other important aspects of your company.
4. Managing Social Media Engagement
Pros:
Social media engagement is arguably one of the most overlooked, misunderstood (yet most effective) elements of a complete social media marketing plan. This gives you a leg-up in many ways, because it’s possible your competitors aren’t putting too much effort into it (or they’re doing it wrong), allowing you to come out on top.
It’s not about the metrics. We’re not robots. Good, real, engagement strategies can help you connect with your customers on a more personal level. Aside from helping out with your brand image, this helps you truly understand their needs, which means you can better serve them. By listening to what people are saying about your industry or competitors, you can learn about problems or opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. Not only that, but you’ll also waste less time/money trying out products or marketing tactics that won’t interest them.
Feel free to reach out if you need help with social media! (Click here to learn about our Social Media Management Services)
Cons:
Everyone knows you “need” engagement, but not everyone knows how to generate the right kind of engagement, and most people don’t have the time for it. That’s why most business owners opt for hiring a social media brand manager or virtual assistant that can help manage the engagement. Even if you start off doing it on your own, eventually you’ll probably need to (and want to) spend some $ on an assistant.
Don’t be fooled! Some brand managers or social media management companies may try to make you believe “all engagement counts” –which couldn’t be further from the truth. Paid engagement for example? GARBAGE. I know I’m being blunt here, but I cannot stress this enough. I’ve seen too many clients go for this, but if you’re looking to make sales, you need authentic engagement from potential customers. Paying for someone to comment/like and move on (aka: bot-style) is a waste of money, it affects the accuracy of your data, which can lead to extra unnecessary spending on digital ads, and the list goes on.. Seriously, just don’t do it.
5. Paid Digital Ads
Pros:
You can get really specific with your target audience and even send each segment of your niche a specific ad with targeted messaging for optimal results.
If your offer is truly amazing, you might convert leads who have never even heard of you before into buying customers with a single campaign.
Once the algorithm understands who your paying target is, you can have a very high return, which in turn pays for your ads. So yes, ideally you will have a campaign that pays for itself like we’ve managed to do for our clients —Yay! Free ads! (Click here to learn more about our digital marketing offerings, or schedule a quick 1-hour digital ads consulting call)
Cons:
It takes some upfront investment to allow your social media platform to complete its “learning phase” and really start working to its full potential. You can expect around two to three months of low-ROI before seeing optimal results.
It can get quite expensive if you do it wrong, or if you don’t have an ads expert managing, monitoring, and continually optimizing your campaigns.
This strategy might not be right for a brand that hasn’t had any sales yet, or if you’ve only had friends and family sales (and especially if you’ve relied thus-far on fake sales and fake followers!). The algorithm for digital ads tends to work by analyzing data from sales that were previously made and leads that were previously generated in order to know who to target as a priority. This means that if you don’t have much data there yet, you might want to focus on getting some organic sales first.
So, the question is, where to start, right? We suggest you go in this order:
First, make sure to have a solid strategy, brand identity, and website design with good SEO strategies applied. You should also have at least 9 posts on social media to give your audience an introductory base of what to expect from your brand.
Then, grow your audience quickly by strategically borrowing an existing audience whether it’s through a partnership, influencer campaign, traditional PR, or by having guest appearances in media outlets that your audience trusts.
Next, move on to engAging those new leads though consistent social media posting.
Nurture your audience through authentic Social media engagement. Slowly use this to continue to grow your fanbase and warm-up cold audiences.
Finally, once you have a few consistent sales under your belt, move on to paid digital ads to multiply your sales and re-target your warm audience.
To summarize, here’s our quick list of the 5 best ways you can get new visitors to your website:
Implementing & Maintaining SEO
Borrowing An Existing Audience
Posting Consistent Valuable Content
Managing Social Media Engagement
Paid Digital Ads