If you have a website, and are attempting to attract an audience, you might have wondered where your website traffic comes from. Website traffic comes from a few main areas: organic, direct and referral, paid, email and social media.
Organic traffic comes from the search engines. So people are finding you from a search enquiry from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo or one of the other search engines on the internet. If you have a lot of content on your website, this is more likely to happen. Or much of your traffic will be for specific keywords for which you are ranking highly on the search engine results pages (SERPS). For example, if you have a store which specialises in something, that keyword is likely going to bring up your website – especially if you have a locally based business and someone is searching locally.
Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From?
Direct traffic comes from someone who knows your website url. So your website address is typed directly into the search bar at the top of the screen (on a laptop/computer). Or this kind of traffic can come through some unknown source too. If you use business cards and flyers to advertise your business, you might get people finding your website through this form of advertising. Direct traffic usually comes form someone who knows your website address, or has visited you before.
Referral traffic comes from other websites. If someone has linked to your website from theirs, visitors can find you through the referral link. Or, if someone recommends your website from an email, this can also be a form of referral.
Paid traffic is another possibility if you’re paying to drive traffic to your website. Paid platforms such as Google Adwords, Microsoft Bing, and social media platforms also offer paid advertising for website owners. Paid advertising is one of the fastest and most effective ways to drive customers to your business online. With Facebook, for example, you can even specify the type of person you want to attract. Demographics such as their interests and location can be used to attract the most likely type of people who will buy from you.
Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From? – Email Marketing
Email marketing is also a great way to get people to your website. By building an email list of subscribers, many website owners boost their number of visitors. An email list can be built by offering a giveaway of some kind on a website.
Ebooks, video courses, downloads and discounts are just a few of the things website owners offer to their subscribers. This encourages website visitors to opt in to their email list. Once on your list, you can send out updates and new content for your subscribers to visit.
Social media is another source of website traffic. By sharing content on social media, and building communities, groups and pages etc., website owners can begin to attract people from Facebook, Linkedin, X.com and many others.
Diversifying Your Traffic Sources
Having a diverse source of traffic can be a good thing if one particular source lets you down. For example, if you rely heavily on paid traffic, but have a problem with your advertising account, it can leave you vulnerable. In the same way, relying on SEO (search engine optimisation) too heavily can give you problems. When Google updates their algorithms and your website is penalised, for example. Your rankings can quickly fall off the search results overnight, leaving you without any traffic.
So it’s a good idea to do a little of each:
- Paid advertising (e.g. Google Adwords)
- Email marketing – build an email list that you own
- Social media marketing – sharing content on social media
- SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – create lots of content which can rank on the SERPS
- Offline advertising – directing people to your website directly (direct traffic)
Getting More Traffic To Your Website
As you can see there’s lots of ways to generate traffic to your website. If you set aside a marketing budget each month, paid traffic is the fastest method of getting people to find you online. However, you need to be careful because not all that traffic will convert into customers. So make sure you target the right people who are most likely to buy from you. See my post on target audience and learn about your customer avatar. Then start with a low budget you can afford to lose while you learn.
SEO Search Engine Optimisation is another way to attract (organic) traffic from the search engines such as Google and Bing etc. To attract a lot of organic traffic, you need to create valuable content on your website which is targeted towards your ideal customer (customer avatar). Write content which will be useful to those people you want to attract. Share your content on social media frequently to give yourself another “stream” of traffic. You can use social share buttons and software to help with this. See my post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Offline advertising is another option to attract direct traffic to your website. Use flyers, business cards, newspaper adverts and the like.
For referrals you can write blog posts for other website owners within your industry. Do this in exchange for referral links (also known as back links). Back links are a highly valued ranking algorithm factor which can boost your content in the search results pages and give you more free traffic from Google.
If you know people within your industry/niche, you can always reach out personally to ask for backlinks too.