One of the most common requests we get is something like
We have a brilliant [idea, product, service, etc], but just too few people know about us. We like our website. We like the messaging. We just need more people coming to our site. How do we get more website traffic?!?
Types of Website Traffic
This might seem basic, but if you think about it, there are only 3 major categories of website traffic:
- Direct Visitors: These visitors arrive because people know about your URL, and they type it directly into their browser window
- Search Visitors: These visitors started at a search engine, and they clicked an SEO, PPC or GMB link and came to your site
- Referral Visitors: These visitors were at some other website, and that site had a link to your site. The person clicked the link and arrived at your site.
If we get a bit more technical, those 3 categories are broken down a bit further.
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- Direct Visitors
- Search Visitors:
- Organic Visitors
- Paid Visitors
- Display Visitors
- Referral Visitors:
- Social Visitors
- Email Visitors
Inside a Google Analytics account, you can see the traffic broken down further into these traffic types.
So let’s discuss how to get more of each of these types of visitors.
More Website Traffic: Direct Visitors
These visitors because they either have visited your site previously OR they recently heard about your site through some offline means. For example, you passed out business cards or flyers, you did some radio, TV or billboard advertising, etc. Do whatever you can to promote your website through offline means!
More Website Traffic: Organic (SEO) Visitors
This post isn’t the place to talk much about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. We have lots of sections on our site that discuss SEO. Check out our main SEO overview page.
More Website Traffic: Paid and Display Visitors
Paid Visitors refers to visitors that went to Google, did a search, then clicked on a text Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad. Display Visitors refers to visitors that went to a site other than Google, and they clicked on a graphical or text Google PPC ad. This happens much more than you likely realize. However, both Paid and Display visitors are a topic better suited to our PPC pages. We suggest you start at our PPC Overview page.
More Website Traffic: Referral Visitors
Most Referral visitors come from several key types of sites. Many visitors come from directory type sites. Lots of other referral visitors come from industry specific sites. For example, we recently built the website for the Heber Half Marathon. The race directors listed their site in lots of race sites, and they got hundreds of visitors and several hundred race registrations from listing their site on those race sites. See the example below:
More Website Traffic: Social and Email Visitors
These are pretty self-explanatory. If someone is on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or other social media pages, and they see your company page and click on a link and arrive at your page, this would be counted as a social visitor. If you do some email marketing, and someone clicks on a link from within your emails, this would count as an email visitor. Since Sebo doesn’t drive visitors via Social and Email channels, we won’t discuss this further in this post.
In Summary…
In summary, the way to get more website visitors is to promote your site offline, through Search Engines, and through other sites. Look through your Google Analytics accounts to see how people currently arrive at your site. You’ll learn a lot by going through that process.
Want some help? Fill out the form on the right side of this page and we’ll point you in the right direction!