9 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your New WordPress Site

Written by:
Kathy Zant
| Published:
May 11, 2023
| Updated:
July 29, 2024

You’ve taken the most important step for your business: you got your new WordPress website up and running. Congrats! Now, you need to help it serve your business objectives with high-quality traffic.

Attracting high quality traffic to your site is a critical part of making your WordPress investment pay off. With a strategic goal of increasing traffic to your site, you’ll be making decisions that affect all aspects of your business. Not only will it raise awareness of your brand, but it will also help you improve your website’s authority, search engine rankings, conversion rates, and of course revenue.

Above all, more traffic also means an increased ability to make better decisions about your marketing as you study and analyze how prospective customers interact with your site. By creating a playground for communicating with your market, you can learn and grow in your initiatives.

Website traffic refers to the number of visitors or users who access a particular website. It is a measure of the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. Website traffic is often quantified by the total number of visits, page views, or unique visitors within a specified period, such as a day, week, month, or year.

drive traffic

How to Measure Website Traffic

The only way to measure your website traffic is through Key Performance Indicators – KPIs for short. Simply put, KPIs are data-driven performance metrics that determine the effectiveness of your marketing activities.

While there are plenty of KPIs available for tracking on a website, we’ll focus on the traffic sources KPIs for the purposes of this article.

This KPI tracks the traffic sources that drive people to your website. These sources include social media, direct traffic, referral traffic, organic search, and email. By monitoring your analytics – preferably through Google Analytics – you’ll know which channels are performing well, so you can adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

Ideally, you should track the KPIs that are closely tied to your business goals. So, if your goal is to increase traffic with a strategic aim of improving business revenue and market share, keep an eye on that KPI.

9 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google’s overarching mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Other search engines, like Bing, want to help users “search less and do more.” To achieve this, people need to find trustworthy and comprehensive information, fast. That’s where SEO comes in.

SEO is an ongoing set of practices meant to improve the user experience on websites. Such practices involve keyword research of your site and your competitors’ sites, followed by up-to-date, high-quality content.

Great SEO requires that website owners follow precise guidelines in order to earn top-ranking positions on search engine results pages (SERPs). That ensures websites are as useful as possible for ideal visitors.

Of course, writing solely for search engines can do more harm than good. Aim towards being of service to your target market with effective content exhibiting your expertise and experience to gain that SERP competitive advantage.

2. High-Quality Content

When talking about content, we mean the content of your blog posts, as well as the content across all of your website’s pages.

But what does “high-quality” content entail?

High-quality content incorporates the search queries (also called keywords, keyphrases, or keyword phrases) your audience uses to look up information related to your business. If you know what your ideal prospects need immediate help with, you can create content that better addresses their needs.

What’s more, search engines like Google boost reliable, people-first content. This is even more true since Google released their Helpful Content update in 2022. Your content should be written and structured in a way to present helpful, detailed, and reliable information that immediately answers visitors’ questions.

If you run an ecommerce store, you should focus on creating unique and engaging product descriptions that include multiple images and videos. Many ecommerce and dropshipping plugins allow you to quickly edit product descriptions and manage product listings in bulk. This allows you to easily tweak your descriptions to improve conversions and drive more organic traffic through search engines.’

3. Social Media

Social media is a universally authentic way to engage with potential and existing customers and meet your audience where they congregate online. By sharing your content in helpful ways on social media, you entice your audience to learn more about you and your business.

The amazing thing about using social media to generate traffic is the potential of repurposing content. You can recycle the content you create for your website and easily reformat it for different social media platforms, thanks to tools like Canva.

In addition, apps like Hootsuite help you manage all of your social media in one place. As a result, you can schedule and post your content when your audience is more likely to engage with it.

It helps to participate on social media as well. If someone replies to your post, thank them and reply back. And if there are conversations happening in other communities, participate as your brand/business to build relationships.

It also can make sense to build community yourself around your brand. Groups, meetups, and other community building activities using social media can be exceptionally helpful in creating a community that markets your products and supports your brand.

4. Social Proof

People run to where the buzz is at – which is why you need to back your website up with tons of social proof. That includes adding reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content to your primary pages.

Of course, social proof is far easier to gather when your business is already somewhat established. If a successful brick-and-mortar store is transitioning to the web, it likely already has plenty of raving fans vouching for it.

So, what should you do if you’re just starting out and have no traffic flowing in?

In this case, your best choice is to use your expertise to piggyback on businesses that already have a lot of traffic. Tactics like guest blogging, in which you write content for other websites in exchange for a backlink, can bring you increased brand awareness and more referral traffic.

5. Email Marketing

Give your site visitors an offer they can’t refuse, and they’ll be more than happy to exchange it for their email address. Whether your offer is a freebie, a template, an e-book, or any type of lead-generating content, email marketing is your chance to nurture subscribers and drive qualified traffic to your site.

Building an email list is a proven, cost-effective way to keep your audience updated on your business’s latest news and promotions. It’s important, however, that you encourage email subscribers to click through to your site by adding calls-to-action (CTAs) to your emails.

When you’re writing to your email subscribers, remember where your words end up: their inbox. It is a more intimate setting where you can personalize your conversation. Stand out in the sea of other promotional emails by using an effective subject line and brief, succinct content that helps your users easily get an idea of how your content serves them best. Then, make sure you link to your site and deliver on the promise you provide in your email.

6. Internal Linking

One of the main reasons why your website needs a blog is your internal linking strategy. That simply means smoothly linking to other blog posts within your blog posts (like we just did) in a way that indicates what a page is about.

Internal links will increase your chances of getting more of your content read and shared. As a result, you’ll boost user engagement, time on site, page views, and traffic.

It’s also essential to check for broken internal links regularly. Leading your visitors down a blind alley can discourage them from remaining on your website, which could hurt your SEO rankings.

7. Site Speed

Visitors won’t return to a website they couldn’t even access in the first place. A snail-paced website won’t retain even the most qualified prospects.

In fact, a survey by Unbounce found that 70% of consumers agree that a slow page speed is a deal-breaker when buying from online retailers. And, as you know, search engines frown upon anything that prevents users from getting what they want.

According to a 2019 study by Portent, website owners should aim for a 1-4 second page load time to improve conversion rates. If you’re in ecommerce, you should aim for 1-2 seconds of loading time. Search engines will thank you.

Luckily, if you’re using Kadence, you’re using one of the best tools for creating blazingly fast websites that delight your audience.

8. User-Friendly Design

Your design is the first thing people see when they land on your website. Not only is it a reflection of your brand, but it can create a lasting impression on your prospective customers. A user-friendly design also boosts dwell time, which signals to Google that the content is helpful for your visitors.

Best of all, you don’t have to be a designer to own a beautiful, yet effectively simple WordPress website. Tools like Kadence theme help you build professional class websites with a simple drag-and-drop editor. So you can have a fast and stunning website in minutes.

9. Keep Measuring Your Performance

The only way to know what’s working is to track your performance and keep tracking it. User behavior constantly changes, and your website should keep up with it. Besides, what works today may not work tomorrow.

Improving traffic involves amping up your strengths and removing your weaknesses. By sticking to what’s effective right now, you can ensure your marketing efforts work at full capacity.

Wrapping Up

Working to increase your website traffic develops a favorable chain reaction. The more people visit your site, the more online presence and brand awareness you’ll earn. Finally, with increased authority come greater chances of turning qualified visitors into happy, paying customers that also tell their friends about their positive experiences with your brand.

If you’re looking for powerful products and resources to help you drive quality traffic to your site, a Kadence Bundle is the way to go. With helpful tools like Kadence Conversions and the Kadence Testimonial block from Kadence Blocks, you’ll be able to not only grow your audience, but build strong connections that last.

Create Your Website With KadenceWP Today!

Kathy Zant
Written by Kathy Zant

Kathy is a writer and speaker who helps businesses and people thrive. She creates some of the best content and tutorials about how to get more out of technology, marketing how-tos that help you grow your business, reports on security issues you need to know as they occur, and gives you all the tutorials to stay ahead and secure your life and business.

View more articles by Kathy

Kathy Zant

By Kathy Zant

Kathy is a writer and speaker who helps businesses and people thrive. She creates some of the best content and tutorials about how to get more out of technology, marketing how-tos that help you grow your business, reports on security issues you need to know as they occur, and gives you all the tutorials to stay ahead and secure your life and business.

Updated July 29, 2024

| 8 min read

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