SEO
You're probably already using this method, so we won’t go into why you need SEO, how the search engine optimization works, and other basics. Let's talk about how to increase organic traffic in highly competitive niches — the ones where highly placed search results have long been taken by industry giants.
The first thing you can do is enter top results for low-frequency queries. Large and experienced players are usually focused on high-frequency phrases. Understanding how to use SEO to drive traffic to your website, you can focus on building a semantic core for targeting users with “rare” keywords, those with less than 100 hits per month. Then, all you need to do is post a lot of high-quality content to meet the needs of users visiting your website in order to find answers to their questions.
The second thing you need to consider is website usability. Convenience, page adaptation for mobile devices, cross-references, micromarking — all of these affect the page ranking in search results.
The advantages of this method are free promotion of the website in top search results and sustained organic traffic. Its drawbacks include expenditure on SEO optimizer and copywriter services if you decide to delegate site configuration and content creation to specialists, as well as the time this method takes to get to the top in Yandex and Google searches.
Contextual advertising
Contextual advertising in Yandex.Direct and Google Ads is an option for those who know how to drive traffic from SEO, but don’t want to wait until the necessary pages get to the top. By displaying ads, you can attract visitors to the website straight away. At the same time, it will be high-quality traffic. With a correctly configured advertising campaign, your ad will be shown only to an audience already interested in your product or service.
By the way, there’s a lifehack for those with a low budget for contextual advertising who need to attract visitors in highly competitive niches (where clicks and impressions are usually expensive). You can attract paid traffic from low-frequency and information requests, and then convert it into real deals.
High advertising efficiency, high-quality targeted traffic, and per impression or per click payment options are among the advantages of this method. One of the main drawbacks is the need to replenish your advertising account and pay specialists if you want to configure your advertising campaign in the best manner and attract as many visitors as possible for the lowest price.
Targeted advertising
Targeted advertising on social media is quite similar to contextual advertising. It’s a shortcut to high-quality traffic as visitors will be interested in your product. The key advantage of targeted advertising is the choice of a particular audience segment for displaying ads, for example, by age, gender, interests, and other parameters. The drawback is that in some segments, impressions and clicks are rather expensive.
Social media profile
Warmed-up profiles on Instagram or TikTok, public posts on FB, and channels on Telegram can become sources for driving high-quality traffic to your website. Yes, you will have to work on attracting subscribers first. But there are numerous ways to promote social media pages: mass liking, mass following, commenting, advertising from bloggers, audience exchange with similar pages, promotion by hashtags, and getting to the “recommended” through a strong competency in social network algorithms.
Choosing a profile-warming-up method is a big topic that deserves its own article. Here, we’ll focus on driving traffic to the site from your personal page. Lead magnets are a good working tool in many niches — these are bonuses that a user can get for free after performing a desired action. For visiting your website, you can give a user a valuable checklist, a book, a handy giveaway, a discount coupon, or something else. The main thing is to offer your leads useful and coveted gifts.
Q&A platforms
Knowledge sharing platforms (Quora and others) can help to unobtrusively advertise your site — when answering a question, you can leave a link to your website page related to the topic of the user’s question. When working with such platforms, you must thoroughly study their moderation rules. Some of them require you to earn a reputation before inserting links in your answers, others don’t allow users to leave links to third-party resources at all (in this case, you can always leave a link to your site in the profile description).
Advantage of this method is absolutely free promotion of your site. Among its drawbacks is that you’ll end up spending a lot of time frequently checking such services for new questions and writing answers.
Online catalogs and aggregators
Using warmed-up bulletin boards, marketplaces, and aggregators, you can not only sell your goods and services, but take users to your website as well. Similar to knowledge sharing platforms, you should thoroughly study the rules of these platforms and leave your link only where you are allowed to do so.
In some niches, such platforms can become a sustainable source of additional traffic.
Comments in blogs, on forums, and other resources
This simple and free way to attract visitors has proven itself to be good on social media, but it also works on all kinds of forums and any resources that provide commenting opportunities. You can simply communicate with visitors and give them a link to your resource when it’s appropriate, or you can cheat and additionally insert the link in your nickname and repeat it in the profile description. The latter case will give you even more clicks. But be sure to check whether it is allowed by the website rules in advance.
Native advertising
Media interviews, articles about your company, a service, or a product you offer on a third-party platform with a suitable audience, advertising integration with a blogger or opinion leader — these are all great ways to advertise your offer and drive additional traffic.
Banner advertising
Banner advertising is one of the oldest traffic sources on the Internet and still demonstrates decent results in some niches. You can attract additional visitors to your website by placing an advertising banner on third-party platforms using banner networks or by directly contacting the administration of the resource you are interested in.
Mail-outs
You can attract visitors by sending SMS, messages via social media and messengers, emails, and other channels. The message content depends on your offer. Similar to transferring audience members from social media, lead magnets are efficient in mail-outs, which highlight the bonuses a user can get when visiting your website.
Instead of conclusion
We’ve talked about how to drive traffic but mentioned only 10 methods. In fact, there are far more ways, but these methods are more efficient than the others. By fully understanding how to use them and applying them yourself, you can get visitors to your resource for little or no cost.
