The 3 Best Channels for Driving Traffic to Your Website

So, you have a beautiful website, a few fully optimized landing pages, and some enticing offers that your audience is sure to love.

Now all you need is some traffic.

A few months ago, we surveyed Leadpages users and asked them some questions about their business. One of those questions was “where does most of your website traffic come from?”

You may be surprised to learn that Google, Facebook, and other paid ads didn’t crack the top three.

So, what did? Here are the results:

1. Organic Search

Organic search is far and away the winner, with 27.6% of respondents saying it was the number one way visitors came to their website.

And really, unless you’re a brand new business this should be your top traffic source. In an ideal world, you don’t want to have to pay for all your traffic. Potential customers should find you organically because you have something they need.

But how do you start getting organic search traffic? Here are a few tips:

• Create quality content. Sure, there’s a bunch of technical stuff you can do, but first and foremost you need to create content that’s better than the competition.
• Do keyword research. Figure out what terms your audience is searching for and create content around those keywords.
• Use a website and landing page builder that’s optimized for SEO (like Leadpages). If you’re not a developer or an SEO expert, you can save a lot of time by using a platform that already follows SEO best practices.

For more SEO advice, check out our article on SEO Tips for Beginners.

2. Organic Social

Coming in second was organic social, with 19.7% of the vote. With businesses continuing to increase their social presence, it’s no surprise that it’s this high on the list.

However, it might surprise some that organic social, not paid social, is what’s driving traffic. It just goes to show that once you build up a large enough audience you don’t have to pay to play.

Wondering how to get more organic social traffic? Try the following:

• Focus primarily on informative, fun, and engaging posts, rather than sales pitches. Provide value first, then once you have your audience’s trust you can start occasionally promoting your products.
• Hold contests and giveaways that require users to follow you in order to enter. Not all of them will stick around, but assuming you follow our first tip a good number of them will.
• Post more videos. Video content is easier to consume and generally results in more likes and shares.

3. Email Marketing

Email might be one of the oldest channels out there, but it’s still very relevant. And our survey proved it, with 14.8% of respondents saying it’s where they get most of their web traffic from.

The advantage of having an email list is you own it. It’s not controlled by Google or Facebook, so you don’t have to worry about an algorithm change suddenly tanking your traffic.

Want to build an email list for your business? Here are a few steps your can take:

• Create gated content that users must submit their email to access (known as lead magnets). Examples of lead magnets include cheat sheets, PDF guides, and ebooks.
• Promote your email list on your website, in your blog posts, and on other pages visitors might land.
• Run contests and giveaways that require users to subscribe to your email list in order to enter. Then deliver them email content so good they have to stick around.

Check out our 11 Ways to Build an Email List for even more ways to increase your email subscribers.

Ready to Boost Your Web Traffic?

Use the tips above to drive even more traffic to your website and landing pages. Remember, more traffic means more leads, and more leads mean more sales.