There are mainly two types of traffic namely:

Organic traffic: This is where a visitor lands on your website as a result of unpaid search results. Think of it as going to a search engine such as Google, and entering what you are looking for. There will be a long list of results returned. Most of the returned searches are a result of related content fetched from external websites.

Paid traffic:  This is the opposite of organic traffic. It is where visits to your website are generated by paid ads. In this case, you pay a search engine to put a link to your website on top of search results.

To understand website traffic beyond the basics, read What is website traffic and why is it important?

There various techniques you can employ to help readers find your content online and here are a few ideas you can begin with to increase traffic to your website:

Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO): By optimizing your website for search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing, you can improve your ranking in search results and attract more organic traffic. This type of traffic is free since the results that are displayed are fetched directly from content on websites. To leverage this kind of traffic, it is highly recommended to periodically post blogs about your services or products or any information that is relevant to your industry. By doing this, your site will always have new content for readers.

Use social media: Share your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to your website. This is very appealing for organizations or startup companies that do not have a big enough budget to run paid ads. Well done, this will help you generate more traffic from readers who come across content that is linked to your website to find out more. The good news is that social media is free and anyone can leverage its power for marketing services or products.

Engage in guest blogging: Write articles for other websites in your industry or niche and include a link back to your own site. This can help expose your website to a new audience and drive traffic. Wait, isn’t this creating content for another website? Yes, you guessed it. This will in turn help your website appear on another website where someone reading the post can click on a link that goes straight to your website. It would be great to write for a website that receives more traffic compared to yours or one that is more reputable in the industry.

Use paid advertising: Consider using paid advertising platforms like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to reach more people and drive traffic to your website. In case you can foot the bills and pay for ads, just go for it. If you can optimize your website and pay for ads at the same time,  it will not just make you rely on organic traffic but also on paid advertising. This is a strategy that is often employed by established companies that can easily afford to pay for them.

Create high-quality content: By consistently creating valuable, relevant, and engaging content, you can attract and retain a loyal audience and increase traffic to your site. Readers are constantly looking for new material to read. It is often said that quality content is hard to come by these days but with a well research content, readers will always come to your website for new perspectives regarding a particular subject. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website because of the reduced bounce rate on your website.

Conclusion

By following these tips, you can effectively increase the amount of traffic your website receives and attract more visitors to your website. The more traffic you receive on your website, the better your website will rank on search engines. As a side note, SEO is a game that one can easily play if well understood. You don’t need a very big budget to improve your website’s ranking and compete with the old household names in your industry.