The 5 Types of Website Traffic and How to Increase Them!

When people first walk through the doors of your business, do you know what bought them there? Were they recommended by a friend, did they see you on a billboard, or did they just wander off the street out of curiosity? 

Having customers and clients walk through your doors is one thing, but knowing how to get more business like that is of the utmost importance. This is true of your website too. Traffic comes to your website from a range of different sources, and if you don’t know where it’s coming from, you won’t know where to focus your digital marketing efforts.

Fortunately, through tools like Google Analytics, you can get an insight into where your website traffic is coming from. Once you’ve established this, you can focus on increasing the web traffic that matters most to you.

Boost Traffic to Your Website Through These 5 Avenues

1. Direct Traffic – Using Your URL

Direct traffic is when a visitor opens their browser, enters your website URL and goes straight to your website. 

Direct traffic is a sign that your brand is strong and well-recognised, so it’s no wonder it’s a common form of traffic for giants like Facebook or Google, which handles billions of searches every day.

Some tips for increasing direct website traffic include:

• Keep your website URL simple and as close to your business name as possible

• Use a .com domain or an extension that’s trusted in your region

• Have your URL present on your branding, your business card, and any sponsorship material

• Consider offline marketing efforts such as billboards, TV ads, radio ads, and flyers that encourage/incentivise people to visit your website.

• Focus on promoting your brand so when people think of your product or service, they think of your business

2. Paid Search Traffic – Online Advertising

Paid search traffic is when visitors land on your website as a result of paid ads. In digital marketing circles, there are several types of paid advertising, including search ads, display ads, shopping ads, and video ads.

To drive web traffic, we would recommend search ads. These Pay-Per-Click ads are offered by companies like Google and Bing. They allow you to display a relevant text ad in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) above the organic results.  

Some tips for improving the click-through rate and cost of these ads include:

• Focus on improving your Google Ads quality score by selecting relevant keywords, writing high-quality ads, and optimising the page your ad leads to (the landing page)

• Use negative keywords to prevent your ads from being displayed at unsuitable times

• Use the Sitelinks extension to drive users to different pages on your website to maximise both traffic and conversion

• Add a Call-to-Action to give users a reason to click your ad and tell them what clicking your ad will do

• Consider retargeting to bring past visitors back to your website and generate more traffic that results in genuine leads and conversions

3. Organic Search Traffic – Looking for Services Like Yours

Organic search is when users land on your website after clicking on an organic search engine result (not a paid ad). Research shows that organic search is responsible for more than half of all website traffic, with this number climbing even higher for B2B organisations.

The key to increasing your organic search traffic is ranking highly in SERPs for relevant queries. To rank highly in search results, you need to invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is the process of optimising the on-page and off-page aspects of your website to achieve high search engine rankings.

SEO involves, but is not limited to:

• Researching relevant keywords for every page of your website

• Creating high-quality content that makes use of those keywords

• Optimising title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and image alt text

• Linking to other relevant pages on your website as well as external resources

• Optimising speed and User Experience (UX) on your website

• Earning brand mentions and backlinks to your website from other authoritative websites

To learn more about SEO, check out Ahrefs guide to SEO success for beginners.

4. Referral Traffic – All Other Traffic

Referral traffic is everyone who comes to your website through sources other than search engines or directly entering your URL.

Here are a few ways to enhance your referral traffic:

• Email marketing: Build your email list and send subscribers high-quality resources from your website. Take the time to research the best subject lines to increase your email open rate

• Guest blogging: Write and pitch articles to relevant publications and include a link back to your website in the blog post

• Press mentions: Let’s take online marketing agency Supple Digital as an example. Supple is mentioned and linked to in publications such as Ant Hill Magazine and Mumbrella thanks to feature articles and winning industry awards. If your business has a notable story to share, a bit of PR with relevant news publications can help you to earn a mention and a link

• Online reviews: Get listed on online review websites, especially those relevant to your industry. Taking Supple Digital as an example, online Supple Reviews that mention the company’s URL is another way to garner interest and increase referral traffic 

• Social media: Building your social media presence is another way to increase referral traffic to your website, but we’ll go over that in our next point.

5. Social Traffic – A Special Kind of Referral Traffic

Social traffic is traffic that comes to your website through social media channels. While it is technically a form of referral traffic, social media marketing is a strategy of its own, and social traffic is listed separately in Google Analytics.

 Some tips for driving social traffic include:

• Maintain healthy and active social media profiles on all the major platforms for your industry

• Make sure you’re posting regularly and use scheduling tools to plan your posts in advance

• Don’t just use your posts to sell! Instead, raise awareness about your brand and share useful resources, especially at the beginning of social media journey 

Analyse Your Traffic and Get Started Today

Boosting traffic to your website is all about planning and executing a range of SEO strategies (online and offline marketing). To get started, check where your traffic is currently coming from using Google Analytics. The next step in the process might be talking to a digital marketing agency, especially if you don’t want to do all the legwork yourself! Whatever path you choose, we hope the points above can assist you in increasing traffic to your website.

Author Bio:

Mukesh Prajapati: A Digital Marketer and marketing strategist who works with Supple, a top Digital marking and website designing agency in Australia. Apart from this, he loves to write blogs on web design, SEO & internet marketing.