16 Ways To Increase Your Website’s Visibility

Published in

Digital Marketing Insight

9 min readMay 16, 2018

One question that keeps popping up is, “How can I get more traffic to my site?” Website traffic is a much sought after “commodity” that few can achieve effectively due to immense market saturation and competition; but not all hope is lost for those late to (or simply don’t know how to) play the game.

To address this, we decided to create the most fruitful tactics you can use to bring traffic to your site and/or blog. However, a quick note before we begin; do not view this as an in depth analysis of each tactic.

Let’s begin!

1. On Page SEO

Website optimization (SEO) still plays a very significant role in your site’s visibility and SERP performance. The main areas of focus should be”

Titles
Headers
Website copy
Metadescriptions
Image alt text

By strategically placing relevant and “winnable” keywords of choice in the above areas, you are optimizing your website to be crawlable and indexable by search engines. And of course, the same applies to blogs.

*Winnable keywords are phrases that are relevant to your topic, have a high monthly search volume (typically more than 100) and a low-average difficulty to compete for.

2. Target Long Tail Keywords

SEO is changing, the days of simply finding relevant keywords are long gone. Today, search ranking is superficially tailored to user intent. This means that you need to let search engines know that you are an authoritative website that can offer information (and a solution) to specific pains and interests users might have.

This is where long tail keywords come in, as opposed to normal keywords and phrases, these show a specific intention:

Short tail (typically 1- 2words): “Eggs”
Long tail (typically 3–5 words): “How to make scrambled eggs?”

Source: Visual.ly

3. Internal Linking

When you create a new piece of content, be sure to provide links to previous articles in your blog as it does not only boost your content’s SEO, it also provides visitors with a more user-friendly experience. Furthermore, the more your audience is directed from one post to the next, the more time they are essentially spending on your site, discovering your content and getting educated. This might even result in conversions and more of your content being shared.

A word of advice: This might sound like common sense but many still do it; when internal linking, make sure that the links are relevant and provide further value to the reader. Internal linking just for the sake of doing it can lead to negative results.

4. Increase Referrals

Referral traffic is excellent for increasing your website’s SEO. In addition to providing backlinks from other credible sources increasing your domain’s authority in the “eyes” of search engines, they also might attract more traffic, allowing you to leverage the audience of the site that linked back to you in the first place.

Keep in mind, however, that referrals are earned, they are not acquired. In order to get referral traffic and backlinks to your site and blog, your content must deserve that link. It must be quality driven and aim to solve a specific pain, need, or interest of an audience.

5. Begin Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is another very effective way to increase your visibility. Providing a guest post to another reputable site can increase your authority, expose you to a larger audience, and increase traffic back to your site and/or blog. Just creating a post and sending it to someone to feature on their blog does not work. You will need to build a relationship with them, make sure your audience and content are compatible, and of course always follow guest posting code of conduct when on someone else’s blog.

For more information on guest blogging, check out Niel Patel’s video below for some helpful tips:

6. Invite Guest Bloggers to Your Site

Just like posting your content on others’ blogs is beneficial, the reverse is also true. Guests on your site are likely to share the link with their followers, potentially bringing in a new audience to you. Again, make sure the content you host is quality driven, relevant, and helpful to your readers.

7. Interview Industry Experts and Thought Leaders

Getting an interview with a thought leader in your niche can truly do wonders to your site’s visibility. Not only will it increase your domain’s authority in the eyes of search engines, but similarly to guest bloggers, these individuals are also likely to share the link of the interview with their followers (further increasing your visibility and traffic.)

8. Leverage the Power of Paid Promotion

Organic tactics, while they should be part of any distribution strategy, their performance often falls short in today’s over-saturated market. Social posts alone are only visible for a few seconds until they get drowned in a sea of content that bombards our timelines. So how can we increase the chances of our content being viewed and interacted with? Paid advertising.

With a paid promotion, you can ensure that your content is being shown to the right people, at the right place, at the right time. Due to their highly targeted nature, paid ads not only contribute to higher visibility, they can even increase the amount of monthly leads your business generates.

The topic of paid promotion is massive in itself and goes way beyond the scope of this article. If you are new to the subject and want some additional insight, here is a good article to get you started:

6 Types Paid Advertising You Can Leverage for Your Next Campaign

9. Submit Your Content to Aggregator Websites

This might require some research but it could potentially bear amazing results. Try to find aggregators that focus on specific niches as these will be more likely to attract the type of audience that would enjoy your content (e.g. inbound.org is an excellent aggregator site for marketers.)

If your content is high quality and resonates with the visitors to that site, it will do wonders for your visibility and increase traffic to your site.

It is important to remember not to be spammy here. No matter how good the quality of your content is, if it is spammed and forced upon readers, it will probably warrant negative effects to your reputation.

10. Host Webinars

Webinars are an interesting, entertaining, and oftentimes engaging tactic to show off your knowledge and build your online authority. Additionally, they are something audiences like sitting down for.

Take yourself for example; what would you prefer? A 7-page article on the secrets of digital marketing or a webinar where you can watch an expert talk about the subject and interact with their audience via questions and chat?

Just like other forms of content, the “build it and they will come” philosophy does not work well here. You will need a good promotion strategy backing your webinar. You’ll need to get an audience signed up for your webinar; using social media campaigns can be a great place to start. Emails, reminders, and “last notices” for registration are also great for getting people signed on.

Note: Your webinar should not be a one and done deal. Be sure to save the recording and upload the video later on for those who could not make it.

Further, you can also create content by utilizing your transcripts. Webinars are truly a 1+1=3 (repurposing) tactic and are more than capable of bringing heaps of traffic to your site, blog, and social channels.

11. Email Marketing

Traditional methods such as email marketing are sometimes (incorrectly) considered to be a thing of the past (especially with social media being a key way to get your message across.) However, it is important to not neglect the power of this tactic. Even moderate email blasts to your list can result in significant traffic, but you will need a strategy. For more insight on email strategies check out the links below:

12. Optimize for Mobile

With more people than ever browsing the internet on their mobile devices, today’s websites need to be responsive. A website that does not load properly, causing visitors to zoom-in, zoom-out, scroll, and adjusts will just be off-putting and will lead to a poor experience. In order to avoid losing traffic (and reputation) from this, be sure that your website is responsive and comfortably viewable on all screen sizes and devices.

13. Fast Load Times

Just as you would find it unacceptable to wait for tens of seconds for a site to load properly, visitors to your site share the same sentiment. In order to avoid massive bounce rates, diminishing traffic, and a blow to your online reputation, be sure that your site is also well optimized on the back end. This includes HTML ratios, image sizes, page structure, and integration with third-party plug-ins.

14. Leverage Social Media

Yes, social media is a truly amazing tool for content distribution and idea sharing, however, it does not stop there. In this day and age, it is likely that your audience is spending a significant amount of time on multiple social platforms browsing, researching, and discussing, so it is important that you interact with them.

Join Facebook and LinkedIn groups your audience might be in and begin conversations, answer questions, and share your insight. (Twitter chats are also a great place for you to participate and engage in.)

If they have been leaving comments on your posts, engage with them. This will definitely require time, a commodity that in today’s world is extremely limited and valuable, but the pay off can potentially be massive.

You will develop a persona of someone who cares about his audience, who is an authority, who wants to interact. In turn this will not only do wonders for your online reputation, it will potentially begin to bring more traffic to your channels, blog, and website.

The power of social media for marketing, content distribution, brand awareness, and traffic acquisition is so grand that it goes far beyond the scope of this article, however, we’ve got you covered in these articles below:

15. Comment

Chances are that you are not only focusing on your own content 24/7. Like most of us, you probably visit other sites that create content relevant to your niche on a daily basis. If the insight they share is good, and the quality of visitors is high, why not join in the conversation?

Now you might be thinking, how can commenting on someone else’s blog bring traffic to yours? Simple, by providing additional insight, contributing to the conversations, and answering questions, you will start to expose yourself to new audience members.

Not only that, you will also begin making a name for yourself, building your authority and slowly attracting more traffic to your site and content.

Remember, however, that simply commenting for the sake of having your name show up somewhere is pointless. You should always strive to provide value. Engage with visitors, see what their pain points are and offer them some insight. You could even share a link to some of your own posts that they might find useful (again without being spammy or irrelevant.)

16. See What Others Are Doing

Oftentimes try as we may, there is that one competitor we just can’t beat. But what are they doing differently? What is the secret to their success? That is where a competitive analysis can come in handy.

Use tools such as Buzzsumo to see what kind of content they are creating and where they are getting their traffic from. This can also help you understand what is resonating best with readers.

Other great tools are SEMrush and Similarweb, where you can analyze what keywords your competitors are using, which paid tactics are working best for them, the kind of traffic they are getting, the origin of that traffic etc.

See which tactics are working best for your competitors and even learn from some mistakes they have made, and incorporate this knowledge into your daily strategies.

And there you have it. Are there any tactics we missed? Do you want us to go over something in a bit more depth? Do you have any questions? Let us know!

As always be sure to check out the articles below for more digital marketing insight: