Scenario. Your boss asks you what marketing channels bring in the most website traffic…
You check Google Analytics and notice that you are acquiring 70% of your website traffic and attributed website conversions through social media. You report the good news, and everyone leaves with a smile.
There are several things wrong with this interaction. If 70% of your traffic and conversions come through one source or channel, you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure.
So how do you achieve a good mix of website traffic?
This article will examine the issue of relying on one traffic source and introduce methods to diversify your website traffic.
The Problem With One Source of Traffic Dominating the Others
You need to diversify your website traffic.
It is similar to financial investing. If you put all your money in one stock and that stock fails, you are out of your money.
For example, if you own an e-commerce store selling clothing and solely rely on running paid ads on Google and Facebook, what happens to your website traffic if those companies go belly up? You are stuck with little or no website traffic.
The same applies to using only organic methods of traffic. If you generate thousands of sessions of organic search traffic that account for up to 90% of your total website traffic, you are at risk of one Google algorithm shift to then 90% of your website traffic.
The tech world has never been as volatile as it is today. Tech companies have been in the media due to legal issues and questionable business decision-making.
All it takes is one lawsuit to bring down one of the giants (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple) that provide many applications businesses need for survival.
So what do you do to diversify your website traffic?
Step 1 – Analyze Your Website Traffic Using Google Analytics
The first thing you need to do is check out the breakdown of the traffic to your website.
If you do not already have Google Analytics installed on your site, get it installed and wait three months to get the first read of your traffic to break down.
We will use Google Analytics 4 instead of Universal Google Analytics because the latter will be discontinued soon.
Navigate to reports, then acquisition, and finally click on the traffic acquisition tab. Make sure the filter is on the default channel group.
You should now see a breakdown of all your traffic segmented by which channel the traffic session originated.
Google Analytics 4 segments the traffic into several categories, including those below and much more:
- Direct – traffic that enters your website in the search bar or traffic Google can attribute as starting destination.
- Organic Social – unpaid posts and links from social media sites.
- Paid Search – traffic from search campaigns like Google Ads, or Bing Ads.
- Paid Social – paid traffic driven from social media sites.
- Organic Search – When people search your site on search engines.
- Email – visitors to your site from email.
- Referral – traffic originating from other websites, usually linking out traffic.
- Video – traffic generated from a YouTube video, etc.
Take inventory of your traffic situation. Google Analytics 4 has charts and graphs to help you configure your data.
If you notice that one channel is significantly outperforming the others, you should probably work towards improving some of its competing traffic sources.
Step 2 – Determine What Channels to Optimize to Attract More Traffic to Your Website
Once you identify a channel to optimize to acquire more traffic, you can follow some of our suggested strategies to balance your website traffic.
Organic Search
Organic search is probably the best channel you can always increase your traffic.
To increase your traffic from organic search, you need to begin writing relevant content and apply the best practices of search engine optimization.
Your content needs to be relevant and helpful to your target reader. For example, your content piece has to provide helpful information if the search intent is looking to learn more or acquire information.
You can write the content yourself or invest in a content writer to deliver the content for you. You can find lots of freelance writers on sites like Upwork and Fiverr.
Before you even write a word, you need to perform keyword research, which is the first step of SEO. Find keywords that match your readers’ search intent, make sure that keyword is searched often enough, and determine whether the competition is too high for your site to rank for that keyword.
Chances are that your site, won’t be able to rank for the keyword you want. That’s not a problem. Look for more specific keywords, as known as long-tailed keywords. Long-tailed keywords generally have a lower amount of traffic volume and less competition, making them easier to rank for.
There are so many things you need to cover concerning search engine optimization that you need to cover to potentially acquire traffic. However, many helpful resources of there listed below can help you optimize your site for SEO.
- Keywords Everywhere – find competition information on Google search queries – i.e, number of backlinks, site authority.
- All-in-One SEO – A WordPress plugin that helps optimize content to rank in search.
- SEranking – a tool that monitors site performance on search. Provides competitor research and keyword research.
- SemRush – a tool that monitors site performance on search. Provides competitor research and keyword research.
- Ahrefs – a tool that monitors site performance on search. Provides competitor research and keyword research.
- Moz – a tool that monitors site performance on search. Provides competitor research and keyword research.
- Screaming Frog – crawls your website and finds technical SEO problems with your site.
Organic Social
Driving more traffic from social media is another fairly simple task. However, this optimization might require more thought regarding your brand and where its ideal customer likes to hang out.
For example, a warehouse company maybe shouldn’t consider using social media, while an e-commerce company proudly displaying its products should use social media.
Simply put, to get more traffic from social media you need to build a following by posting engaging content.
You need to identify which social media channels your ideal audience uses, and create content targeted to them. Blogs, articles, videos, and user-generated content are great ways to acquire traffic through social media.
Tools that can help you boost your social media strategy include:
- Buffer – lets you schedule your posts in advance which frees up time to generate more content.
- Canva – a design tool that allows you to quickly generate quality-looking social media post images and videos.
Increasing traffic usually goes hand in hand with optimizing another traffic channel. The idea is that you need to acquire email subscribers which are generated in the exhaust of other sources.
For example, you can write great content and acquire subscribers that way. Your social media profiles might be very engaging and you drum up subscribers that way. You can run paid media campaigns to reach subscribers through a landing page.
Ultimately, you need to build a subscriber base.
After you begin to accumulate subscribers, you can implement email marketing tactics like a brand newsletter to help drive your subscribers back to your website.
The better you get at email marketing and the bigger your email list grows, the more traffic you will see come to your website.
Read our guide on ways to build an effective email marketing program.
Referral
When addressing referral traffic, the best way to increase this form of traffic is to branch out and look for partnerships or begin an affiliate marketing program.
Reach out to individuals within your niche and ask for a barter. A barter is when you market another company’s advertisement in exchange for that company marketing your advertisement. No cost is involved.
One issue you can run into with barters is that not every company will be willing to agree to them. Some sites bring in more or better traffic than others. If you can’t provide the same for that company, it’s an unbalanced agreement which can cause issues.
Creating an affiliate program is a great way to drive referral traffic. You’ll have other sites (affiliates) promoting your brand on their websites and driving traffic to your website.
However, this method is not free. You usually have to provide some compensation to the affiliate for them directing traffic.
Usually, you pay out only on a conversion. However, you can also pay the affiliate for a click on your site. You will get more affiliates if you pay out with a click.
Paid Search & Paid Social
Driving paid search & social traffic can be extremely lucrative depending on your traffic goals. If you are looking to drive more traffic to landing pages or product pages where a conversion or data exchange occurs, increasing paid search might be a good bet.
If your goal is to increase brand awareness or traffic as a vanity metric, it might not be a good idea because you will be lots of money without making your money back.
Most search engines and social networks have paid search platforms.
- Google – Google Ads
- Bing – Microsoft Ads
- Yahoo – Yahoo Gemini
- Facebook – Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads
- Twitter – Twitter Ads
- TikTok – TikTok Ads
- Quora – Quora Ads
- Reddit – Reddit Ads
A best practice with paid advertising methods is having enough budget and plenty of creative. You should spend at least $100 a day or $3000 a month if you are serious about using paid advertising. You also need plenty of variations of creative so you can give the platform a chance to find the best performing creative and serve that to your audience.
You also should set up a conversion event or pixel so that the paid search platform can optimize how and to whom it serves ads to. It’ll show ads to people similar to those who have engaged with your paid ad.
You can follow our guide here to learn about getting started in paid media.
Conclusion
Diversifying your website traffic is a great way to not be single-threaded, which puts you at risk of losing all your traffic if that source goes belly up.
The first thing you need to do is access your current traffic situation by looking at Google Analytics.
Then create a strategy to improve the channels that are not performing not as well as your best channel.
Pretty cool stuff!
