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From social media marketing tips to SEO strategies, learn how to drive more traffic to your website.
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Below, you’ll find 21 proven strategies to drive relevant traffic to your website and turn visitors into customers. Each method is designed for savvy internet audiences, helping you build a modern online presence.
To increase website traffic, you need to be able to get your business in front of your ideal customers.
With paid social media ads, you can create highly targeted campaigns that serve tailor-made ads to customers who are most likely to purchase your products.
When planning to run paid social media ads, consider these platforms:
Traffic: 👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Low
With over 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. Facebook ads allow you to target users by their interests, behaviors, locations, and more, optimizing your chances of conversion.
Use Facebook dynamic ads to target potential customers based on their browsing history and online activity. These ads are automatically generated, showing relevant products from your website that people are likely to be interested in.
For even more precise targeting, add the Meta pixel to your website. Advertising pixels track user behavior to refine ad content and placement.
Traffic: 👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Low
Some 90% of Instagram’s two-billion-odd users follow a business account, making it a valuable source of interested traffic. But if you’re only aiming for organic Instagram engagement, you might be missing its full potential. Instagram ads can boost your website traffic and increase sales—you can even sell directly on Instagram, so users don’t need to travel anywhere.
If you’re using a personal account, converting it to a business account will unlock additional features that are essential for advertisers. You can create ads in various formats such as photos, videos, carousels, collections, and stories, allowing for flexible and creative marketing approaches.
Exploring Instagram’s tools and hashtags, and jumping on the platform’s latest trends can win you more followers and strengthen your campaigns.
Traffic: 👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Low
If you’re looking for ways to attract buyers to your online store, Pinterest is a source of motivated traffic with clearly signaled interests. According to Pinterest, users tend to be more affluent and more willing to spend compared to other social media sites.
Promoted Pins are especially useful for reaching people who are actively looking for ideas and products. This type of Pinterest ad displays your content at the top of search results, and has been shown to influence users’ purchasing decisions.
Pinterest works well when targeting niche audiences. Whether someone is redoing their garden, planning a wedding, or updating their home décor, the platform helps associate your brand with their interests.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: High
Google Ads stands out from social media advertising by targeting people who are already searching for what your website provides. These ads let you place your web pages in front of users who’ve made relevant searches on Google and YouTube.
There are several Google ad formats:
Understanding these tools and effectively applying them can maximize your ad spend. Creating and managing YouTube ads is a discipline that takes time to learn, but when deployed effectively, it can flood your website with relevant traffic.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Medium
Despite questions over its long-term future in the US, TikTok continues to be a powerful platform for sourcing traffic. Users increasingly view TikTok as a place to find new content that matches their interests. For marketers, it’s a space to connect with large audiences in almost any demographic.
While creating TikTok marketing content takes time, it can be a great platform to add to your marketing arsenal. You can also use TikTok Shop to sell on the platform, so you don’t need to convince users to visit your site.
The TikTok ads platform is easy to use, with preset options for budgeting and audience selection.
Generating traffic via social media can require more than posting ads for your website. Social engagement often comes from encouraging conversations with the right people, responding thoughtfully, and driving excitement and enthusiasm.
Traffic: 👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Effort: Medium
When you launch your business, turning to friends and family for support is a great tactic to generate initial awareness, traffic, or even your first sale (thanks, Mom!).
Take inspiration from the content website Upworthy. It generated its initial traffic by reaching out to friends and family. The company set a goal of getting 1,000 Facebook fans by the end of launch day. It worked, providing valuable traction.
Reach out to your friends and family in a targeted way. Are there channels for talking to your extended family, coworkers, or community? Send a note and tell them about your new store. On social media, tell the story of your business in an update.
Once you have the attention of your friends and family, ask them to share your website with their networks. This type of exponential reach is the key to successful word-of-mouth marketing.
Traffic: 👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Leverage: Medium
You don’t need to start selling products or publishing content before you engage with people on Instagram. Blackbird Baking Company, a bakery in Toronto, Canada, built an audience of engaged, passionate bread lovers on Instagram before it opened its first storefront. This ensured it had a great reception when it opened its doors.
First, the bakery followed a disciplined social media marketing strategy. It generated follow-backs by following select people it determined may be interested in a new bakery. These include restaurateurs and self-declared bread enthusiasts in Toronto.
You can find people with interests in your niche or field. Search relevant keywords in bios and profiles.
Second, Blackbird made sure the photos it uploaded of bread being baked and delivered to stores were mouthwatering and shareable.
Third, Blackbird Baking Company engaged proactively with followers to discuss local community issues. Topics included life in Toronto, great food, and, of course, bread.
So when the bakery finally opened, there were lots of interested people waiting to buy its goods.
Here’s how you can engage with an Instagram audience:
Reddit has thousands of niche-based forums, called subreddits. You can find a subreddit on nearly any subject, for example, /r/bicycling, /r/scifi, or /r/corgi.
Reddit poses an interesting opportunity to grow brand awareness and generate website traffic. It’s a place where passionate folks congregate around their favorite topics, sharing advice, best practices, and personal life stories.
Here’s how you could use Reddit if your business is selling hair products. Navigate to a few subreddits such as /r/femalehairadvice, where there’s discussion on all aspects of haircare for women. There are also subreddits like /r/haircarescience, /r/curlyhair, or simply /r/hair.
To promote your business and drive traffic to your site, create a new post. Make the post brief but detailed, with concrete examples to engage readers. Here are the components of a great Reddit post:
Pay attention to Reddit’s platform guidelines and Reddiquette values. Some subreddits don’t allow promotional material. If you post about your site in a thread that doesn’t want it, you may find that no one upvotes your link, and you may get banned from the subreddit.
Alongside promoting your website on relevant subreddits, you can also turn to threads like /r/entrepreneur for advice, tapping the know-how of more than three million subscribers. Other browse-worthy threads include /r/smallbusiness, another source of general business advice.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: High
Contests and giveaways are a great way to get more followers on Instagram, increase social media engagement, and drive traffic to your website. With viral contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes, you can quickly drive traffic to your site by exchanging contest entries for sharing your site.
Contest and giveaway apps on the Shopify App Store make it simple to embed giveaways into landing pages and blog posts. Social sharing gives sweepstakes a chance to go viral and spread around social platforms. See how Toyota fan site Prime Driven leverages giveaways to generate traffic.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: High
Offering time-sensitive discounts can be an effective way to get people to take action, generating traffic and increasing sales. Putting an expiration on your discount leverages scarcity, a powerful psychological sales trigger.
In the example below, the bags and accessories brand Rareform offers a discount that expires after one day. If you’ve launched your store recently, consider adding a minimum qualifying purchase for your discount offer. This can be a smart way to offer your fans an incentive without compromising your profitability.
Product discounts aren’t the only time-sensitive offer you can provide customers. If you don’t normally offer free shipping, then occasionally doing so can be a compelling incentive to drive traffic from social media or email marketing campaigns to your store.
Influencer marketing involves partnering with successful social media content creators to promote your website to relevant users. This form of marketing harnesses the creativity and reach of notable people in your industry, leveraging the trust they’ve earned with audiences to refer traffic to your store.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Effort: High
As many as 70% of shoppers use Instagram to inform purchasing decisions, highlighting its potential to convert browsing into sales. This makes Instagram an excellent avenue for boosting brand visibility and driving traffic to your online store—especially when you partner with an influencer.
Bloggers and social media celebrities are highly trusted by their followers. Finding a relevant influencer to feature your products is an effective tactic for increasing your traffic. For example, lifestyle influencer Estée Lalonde promotes brands by incorporating products into her posts:
Find influencers to drive sales with Shopify Collabs
Shopify Collabs makes it easy to partner with creators, promote your products, reach new customers, grow your sales, and track affiliate performance all from Shopify admin.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Effort: High
Having connections who will talk up your product—especially if they’re connections engaged audiences of their own—is essential to driving traffic to your site and increasing sales. This is where blogger outreach comes in.
Blogger outreach is about more than making friends online. It’s a process to offer value and tell bloggers exactly what’s in it for them. Simply asking for help rarely works. Instead, here are some blogger outreach ideas to help you generate traffic:
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Medium
Instead of waiting for an influencer to feature you, you can feature them first. This networking tactic is an expansion of blogger outreach. The core of the tactic is: Write a blog post featuring an influencer, and send it to them in an email or via X in the hope they will share it with their audience.
For example, a cosmetics brand could write a blog post on what to look for in buying your next foundation, and ask beauty influencers for their opinions. Or, an outdoor gear website could write a blog post listing their favorite 10 hiking influencers.
After you’ve produced your blog post, reach out to the influencer with a link and ask them if they can share it with their audience.
Content marketing is about creating interesting, informative, and engaging content to organically attract traffic to your website. From videos and podcasts to guides and ebooks, there are endless opportunities for your business to branch out into the world of content and generate traffic.
Original content helps position your business as an industry thought leader and build your brand. Your business’s content strategy can include anything your customers might find relevant or interesting—don’t limit yourself to content that includes or focuses on your products. Instead, consider any and all topics and resources related to your business that your customers would find useful.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Months
Effort: Medium
Every month, approximately 70 million new blog posts are published on WordPress, the world’s largest blogging platform, generating more than 20 billion monthly page views.
While there is ample opportunity to reach an audience with blogging, you’ll need to be purposeful about your content to attract relevant traffic. Solving problems with search engine-optimized content is the best editorial policy for most blogs. Finding the right subjects to write on involves persona building, keyword research, and content gap analysis.
Successful content marketing on a blog starts with two things:
What problems do your potential visitors have? What interests them? What do they do for fun? What are they passionate about? Craft blog content based on the answers to these questions.
To get in front of the right audience, make a list of topics and phrases to target.
Ask yourself: If I were looking for this product/service/article, how would I search? What words would I use? What phrases? Getting in the mind of your visitor-to-be is the key to generating quality traffic.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Months
Effort: High
In 2024, as many as 47% of Americans listened to at least one podcast per month. Much like blogging, podcasting gives you the potential to excel in a specific niche, targeting a specific audience.
Unlike a blog or social media post, however, there’s no call to action that easily turns a podcast listener into a website visitor. As a result, you’ll need to find ways for listeners to easily reach your website.
Shuang Esther Shan, who manages the Shopify Masters podcast, uses three methods. For in-app podcast descriptions, she provides a summary of the episode with a link to the corresponding blog post.
Second, on the Shopify blog, she publishes podcast transcripts and summaries for hearing-impaired audiences. Finally, if an episode includes mentions of apps, tools, or any other useful resources, she’ll provide a list of relevant resources with each item linked.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰
Time to ROI: Months
Effort: High
While there are various options for hosting videos, YouTube is the most popular channel for generating traffic. It’s also the second-largest search engine in the world.
Potential reach on YouTube is impressive: more than 2.7 billion active users with a wider reach among 18- to 49-year-olds than all US cable TV networks combined.
So, how do you narrow down that massive audience and get the right eyes on your YouTube channel and then back to your store? Here are some of the different types of YouTube marketing your business could use:
Free Reading List: Video Marketing Tips and Tricks
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When customers search for your products, you want your website to rank among the top results. Earning prized positions in SERPs is a key ingredient for generating sustained, qualified website traffic.
Search engine optimization is the process of fine-tuning your website to increase its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.
SEO is a fine science that requires learning the rules that govern search engines like Google and applying them selectively to your site. You can use popular SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SemRush to help you find opportunities to optimize site content.
Traffic: 👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Low
Search engines show a page’s title tag on their results page for search queries. Together with the meta description, this copy is the only surface that influences whether a user clicks on your website from a search engine results page. That makes your pages’ title tags important.
As Google explains, “Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.”
When writing title tags:
Traffic: 👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Days
Effort: Low
A meta description acts as a summary of a page’s content. Search engines often display it on the results page under your title tag.
Clicks to pages can be won by an alluring and interesting meta description. Google explains, “A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.”
If your meta description doesn’t offer a compelling reason to click, it could affect your organic search ranking. It’s also worth noting that meta descriptions can be any length, but they’re often truncated to fit the device the search is performed on.
Good meta descriptions:
Traffic: 👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Effort: High
Getting backlinks for other websites is a well-known technique for boosting SEO. However, internal links also play an important role in helping pages rank. This is because of the Google metric called PageRank, a formula that can measure the importance and value of a page by the quantity and quality of pages that link to it.
Linking from pages with a high PageRank on your domain can pass authority and help the target page rank better. Alternatively, linking from low- to high-priority pages on your website can pass that PageRank back to your priority pages.
Here’s what you can do to optimize your website’s internal linking:
Incorporate links naturally, using anchor text related to the keyword you’d like the target page to rank for. You can find ideal anchor text to link by searching in Google with the following search operator: site:yourdomain.com “keyword or phrase related to page.”
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Effort: Medium
Next on the SEO checklist for your website is building a keyword strategy. Because they’re easier to identify, it’s tempting to target short, high-volume search terms. But you might be missing out on page views if you’re not looking at long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords, which capture more detailed or specific search queries, are easier to rank for and usually get clicks from search engines at a higher rate than shorter, more generic terms.
Here’s an example of how you can maximize your exposure to long-tail variations and increase your traffic. Imagine you want to optimize a web page to appear in search results related to the Logitech C310 webcam. To increase traffic to the page, you’ll need to create content that’s relevant to variations of “Logitech C310” searches.
For instance, keyword research might reveal related terms like “review” or “compatible with Mac.” You might compare the differences between similar webcam models, making sure to include key search phrases such as the production year and model number. Incorporating various modifiers into the content on your page increases its potential to rank for a wider range of queries around the primary keyword.
Traffic: 👤👤👤👤
Cost: 💰💰
Time to ROI: Weeks
Effort: High
Rich snippets are enhanced listings that appear in search results with additional information such as ratings, price, and availability, making your entries stand out.
To make the most of rich snippets, ensure your website’s structured data is correctly implemented. This data helps Google understand the content of your site, which it can use to display in a more detailed and appealing format in search results. To check and manage your structured data, utilize tools such as the Google Structured Data Testing Tool, which helps identify and fix any issues with your site’s markup.
Some of the marketing strategies in the list above generate highly relevant traffic for your website, while others produce large volumes of general visitors.
For example, imagine you’re targeting young professionals interested in buying office supplies. LinkedIn posting might be a good option for finding individual clients, while Google Ads could bring in thousands of general clicks.
Successful website traffic acquisition involves doubling down on the most relevant traffic, while also considering practical factors, such as:
Aim for strategies you can execute consistently. Spreading yourself thin with too many tactics can lead to frustration and poor results.
Increasing website traffic starts with picking a marketing strategy and a relevant channel. Remember, a good digital marketing strategy is about layering short-term and long-term tactics so they work in tandem. Once you feel like you’ve mastered one, come back to this list and pick your next traffic-driving tactic.
Illustration by Rachel Tunstall.
Start by optimizing your website for search engines to increase visibility in Google search results. Engage with your audience using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X, tailoring content to the interests and needs of your target demographic. Additionally, invest in high-quality, engaging content to encourage shares and backlinks. Consider running targeted pay-per-click advertising campaigns and collaborating with influencers to extend your reach. Speed optimization, mobile-friendliness, listing your site in online directories, and engaging in guest blogging are also effective strategies to boost website visits.
Free methods for increasing website traffic include leveraging the power of social media. Regularly promote engaging content to build a loyal follower base. Create valuable content that resolves common issues or provides insightful information relevant to your audience to increase the likelihood of shares. Build and nurture an email list to keep your audience informed and engaged, and participate in online communities and forums to increase visibility. Additionally, utilize SEO strategies to improve your organic search rankings, and consider guest blogging to tap into new audiences.
Driving organic traffic to your website hinges on optimizing your content for search engines—a tactic known as SEO. Begin by identifying key terms and phrases that your target audience searches for, and create relevant, high-quality content to answer those search queries. Regularly updating your website with fresh, relevant content will keep your audience coming back and signal to search engines that your website is a reliable source of information.
To quickly drive traffic to your website, invest in pay-per-click advertising to place links to your website in front of your target audience on search engines and social media platforms. This method allows you to generate significant traffic immediately after your ads go live.
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