The Fundamentals of Website Traffic

If you want to grow your blog or website, understanding the basics of website traffic is an incredibly crucial skill to master. Without this understanding, you really won’t know who is coming to your site or where they’re coming from.

Think of this lesson as the foundation that you’ll build your entire strategy on. We’ll cover the basics of what website traffic is, why it’s important, the different sources from which it can come, and how to measure and analyze your current traffic to set the stage for growth.

Once you master these core concepts, you’ll be ready to move on to conquering the strategies to actually increasing it.

What is Website Traffic?

Website traffic refers to the number of visitors that land on your website. These visitors can come from various sources and perform different actions on your site, from reading a blog post to making a purchase.

Traffic is a vital indicator of your website’s health and performance. More visitors mean more opportunities to engage with your content, share your ideas, and potentially monetize your platform. It’s also a critical factor in SEO rankings, brand exposure, and online authority.

I’ll dive into the specifics of how to measure website traffic and what it actually means later on, but as a general rule of thumb if your traffic is increasing, that’s what you want to see.

As you can see, the trendline is “up and to the right”. The core principal for my agency, Trendline SEO, “Rise up, the right way.” This is a play on a positive trendline.

Different Sources of Website Traffic

There are many different sources of website traffic that I blog can get. These include:

1. Organic Search: Visitors who find your website through a search engine like Google or Bing.
2. Direct: Visitors who enter your website URL directly into their browser or search for your brand directly through a search engine.
3. Referral: Visitors who come to your site from links on other websites.
4. Email Marketing: Visitors who click on a link in an email.
5. Social Media: Visitors who find your content through social media platforms.
6. Paid Search: Visitors who click on a paid ad to reach your website.

Each has their own benefits and drawbacks. But understanding these sources helps you modify your strategies to target specific types of traffic more effectively.

Most high-output bloggers will usually use a combination of all of the sources together, but typically focus most of their efforts on ranking high-quality content for SEO and then promoting it using email marketing and social media.

After all, earning money though passive income streams is an incredible gift that that internet and technology has provided us with.

Direct and referral traffic are somewhat a byproduct of the standard SEO and content marketing efforts. Other websites will naturally link to your site if they find it helpful, so getting traffic through these channels is a bit more hands-off.

Yes, you can do guest posting campaigns and partnerships, but I personally like to make content that people like to link to organically without much effort on my part once it’s produced.

And lastly, paid search is usually most common in the Ecommerce niche where somebody that wants to directly promote a product. People usually don’t run a PPC campaign unless there’s tangible value that can generate an immediate ROI.

Measuring and Analyzing Your Current Traffic

There are many different ways to measure website traffic, but the most common is Google Analytics. This is a powerful, free tool that can give you insights into your website traffic, including visitor demographics, behavior, and traffic sources.

It can track pretty much anything you need it to track. It’ll give you a high-level overview of your site traffic: Or, let’s say you want to see what the referral traffic to your blog is. It can do that too:

While it’s an incredibly advanced tool that can go super-deep with metrics, most bloggers use it to track users, pageviews, bounce rate, how long readers are on their site, and where that traffic is coming from.

• Sessions and Users: Understand how many visits your site gets and the number of unique visitors.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. A lower bounce rate means more engagement.
• Average Session Duration: How long, on average, visitors stay on your site. Longer durations can indicate more engaging content.
• Traffic Sources: Knowing where your visitors come from helps you understand which marketing efforts are working.

Are certain types of content bringing in more visitors? Is there a particular source that’s driving the majority of your traffic? Use this information to refine your content strategy and marketing efforts.

Key Takeaways

Understanding your website’s traffic is foundational to growing your audience. By knowing where your traffic is coming from and how visitors are interacting with your site, you can make informed decisions that boost your traffic and engage your audience more effectively.

In our next lessons, we’ll dive deeper into strategies for increasing traffic from each source.

What is SEO and Why is it Important?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

For bloggers, SEO is crucial because it helps you get more visibility without paying for advertising. By optimizing your posts, you’re more likely to appear in top search results, attract more visitors, and increase your blog’s audience.

When I’m working with a client through my agency, I like to describe SEO as “the gift that keeps on giving”. It takes a considerable amount of time, resources, and investment up front, but once the content starts ranking, it’ll likely stay that way for quite a while.

I use organic SEO as the backbone of pretty much any digital marketing campaign I build. Once that content starts getting traffic, I will add on other elements like email or social media marketing.

Understanding Search Engine Algorithms

The end goal of any SEO campaign is to try to rank content on a search engine. When you hear a digital marketer talk about ranking something, they’re likely referring to Google’s search results.

Search engine algorithms are complex systems used to retrieve data from the search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query.

But these results don’t just appear randomly. The algorithms consider various ranking factors – keywords, site usability, page speed, backlinks, and more – to decide the order in which websites should appear.

Understanding these algorithms is the first step in mastering SEO for your blog.

This is not as easy as it sounds though and there’s no simple trick to doing it. It’s a highly complicate process and one that you should take the time to understand.

If we could teach you in just one blog post, we would. But it’s not, so that’s why we build our How to Do SEO guide. that guide will go into much greater detail about the tactics and steps involved in SEO, but we’ll just cover the basic tactics at a high level here.

Actionable SEO Tactics That Can Lead To Traffic Growth

There are countless ways to use SEO to your advantage, but the fundamentals are a good starting point. SEO is sort of like a bunch of modular building blocks.

If you master the basics and then use them as a lunch pad, you’ll be surprised at what happens to your traffic when they’re all set up and working together correctly.

1. Keyword Research

What if you could target the right topics that you know people are searching for? You can with keyword research.

This is one of the most powerful concepts in SEO, yet it is one that most bloggers don’t really understand at a deep level. They will either over-optimize for keywords or take the opposite approach and disregard it entirely.

It’s actually pretty simple to do. Start by identifying the keywords your target audience uses to search for content like yours. Free keyword research tools make this process very simple.

Use tools like Googles Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition. Then produce high-quality content about topics you find during this process.

Suggested Resources:

• The Basics of Doing Keyword Research

2. High-Quality Content

Another fundamental SEO tactic is creating high-quality content. This is arguably the most important SEO tip to remember of all the ones listed here.

Google has officially published something they’re calling the “Helpful Content System” which rewards those who create high-quality and helpful content. It also penalizes sites that aren’t helpful which makes it harder for them to get traffic.

It is possible to recover from a hit from the Helpful Content Update, but that’s a completely standalone guide. But the easiest way to avoid getting hit is to simply create high-quality content from the start.

Create content that’s valuable, informative, and better than what’s currently ranking. Content quality is a major ranking factor, and search engines prioritize content that fulfills users’ search intent.

This tip sounds very simple but many website owners get it completely wrong. They over-optimize their posts which end up being written more for the intention of ranking on Google than being helpful to readers.

When I’m explaining this concept to clients I work with through my agency, Trendline SEO, I give them one simple piece of advice: put yourself in your reader’s shoes and honestly ask yourself, “If you got matched with your page after looking for the page’s focus keyword, would you be truly happy you were matched with that page?”

After going through that exercise, the client usually gives me the green light to modify or rewrite the content on the page.

Suggested Resources:

• How To Correctly Write A Blog Post
• What Is Quality Content? Definition, Types & How To Create

3. Optimize Your Posts

On-page optimization is something you’ll hear me talk about quite a bit throughout this site. At the core it’s pretty simple. When you’re producing a post or page for your blog you’ll want to make sure each one is optimized for SEO by including:

• A compelling title with your main keyword
• Meta descriptions that encourage clicking
• Alt text for images using relevant keywords
• Short and descriptive URLs
• Internal links to your other content

Remember your keyword research from the previous step? You should also incorporate this keyword for naturally into your titles, headings, and throughout your content.

SEO tools can help in this process.

I suggest first starting with the Rank Math plugin to identify SEO best practices for the piece of content you’re trying to rank. It lives directly within your WordPress post editor and provides very simple yet helpful information about how to improve your on-page SEO.

You’ll also find Frase.io and MarketMuse in my tech stack. These tools help you understand what optimizations your content can benefit from, such as additional keywords to add and how the post should be structured.

They’re easy to use and most other digital markets don’t use them. I like tools that aren’t widely adopted because the content from those that are usually looks and sounds the same.

For example, Surfer SEO is a great tool that recommends outlines and on-page optimization help. The downside is that most of the SEO community uses this tool to quickly create outlines, so the search results are riddled with the same template, structure, and EVEN sometimes the same headings!

4. Improve Page Speed

Site speed is a ranking factor so taking the time and effort to speed up WordPress should be a priority from the start.

If you’re at all familiar with the tech stack I use to set up my websites, then you’ll be very aware about how much time and effort I put into making my sites load quickly and perform well.

Using a managed WordPress host combined with performance plugins is my go-to way to make sure my sites load quickly. But each site is different and this process does involve a bit of trial and error to see what works for you.

Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to analyze and improve your blog’s loading times. Some eash wins include compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and minimizing CSS and JavaScript to boost speed.

Just by doing these things I was able to achieve passing scores for the Bloggingtips.com domain:

I suggest taking the time to learn this yourself. If you take my recommendations to host with WP Engine, use GeneratePress as your theme, and choose the right plugins for your blog, you’ll probably see super-fast results.

If not, you’ll likely be fighting an uphill battle trying to get an unbalanced tech stack to work together and it’ll take a considerable amount of work to speed up your site.

Suggested Resources:

• How To Increase Page Speed On A WordPress Site
• Best WordPress Speed Optimization Services

5. Backlink Building

Backlinks are links from other websites to your blog. They’re crucial for SEO because they act as a “recommendation” from other websites and signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.

The main SEO benefits from backlinks include:

• Authority and Trust: Backlinks from reputable sites signal to search engines that your content is trustworthy and valuable, which can boost your site’s rankings.
• Referral Traffic: Besides the SEO benefits, backlinks can also bring in traffic from other websites, directly contributing to your site’s visibility.
• Network Building: Acquiring backlinks often involves reaching out to other bloggers or websites, helping you build a network within your niche.

Backlinks are still one of the most powerful elements of SEO but they take a considerable amount of time and effort to build. Tons of website owners get lazy and try to hire link building services only to find mixed results.

My suggestion it to try the best link building strategies that have proven to work consistently over the years:

1. Increase Domain Rating Using HARO: I’ve found an easy way to quickly increase domain rating is by earning relevant links from HARO. It’s an easy way to get matched with reporters looking for information.
2. Create Shareable Content: Content that is informative, entertaining, or provides value is more likely to be shared and linked to. Infographics, how-to guides, and original research are examples of content types that often receive a high number of backlinks.
3. Reach Out to Influencers: If you mention influencers or businesses in your posts, let them know. They might share your content, linking back to your site.
4. Participate in Online Communities: Engage in forums, social media groups, or Q&A sites like Quora. When relevant, share links to your content as resources to help answer questions or provide value.
5. Broken Link Building: Find broken links on other sites that are relevant to your content. Contact the website owner to report the broken link and suggest your content as a replacement.
6. Guest Blogging: Write articles for other blogs in your niche. This not only gives you a platform to share your expertise but also allows you to include backlinks to your blog.

Again, link building takes time, but once complete, it acts as a moat around your site. Think about it this way… something that takes you a ton of time to do, yet provides huge results, is worth doing.

Do you think a competitor is going to spend the time to build links? Probably not, so investing that time now will pay off in the long run for your website.

6. Monitor Your SEO Performance

As the saying goes, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. This couldn’t apply more to SEO.

Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website’s traffic and performance. Monitor your rankings, understand which keywords bring in the most traffic, and refine your strategy based on data.

There are tons of different rank tracking tools that you can use to automate this process, but I really like the Ahrefs rank tracker. It makes tracking keywords really simple but it is an incredibly powerful tool.

For a better idea of how it works, watch the video walkthrough the company produced to show you how it works:

Key Takewaways

As you can see, by focusing on the core principles of SEO, your website stands to see traffic gains. But don’t forget to ensure the content meets both user needs and search engine guidelines in the process.

How To Increase Website Traffic Using Content Marketing

Content marketing is an incredibly powerful tool that many website owners don’t fully understand. After all, the phrase “Content is King” continues to ring true. But that’s what I’m here to teach you in this lesson.

I’ve been many different online businesses in the past decade. Almost every single one was built with content marketing at the core. For example, this is a service-based business that I’ve been working on over the past year:

So far, we’ve produced roughly 250 niche-specific blog posts that provide a huge amount of value for our readers. And it shows, because they’re not only coming back to read our content again and again, but they’re booking meetings with our team to learn more about what we offer.

This growth was achieved through simple – yet strategic – content marketing. And that starts with defining your audience.

Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs

The foundation of a successful content marketing strategy is understanding who your audience is and what they need. If you get this wrong, your readers will quickly bounce off your site.

This could be an entire course in itself, but the point I want to highlight here is to figure out the demographics of your audience, find out what they’re interested in, and then figure out how to creatively (but quickly) solve the problems that are having.

Once you figure that out, spend some time researching their needs, preferences, and content consumption habits in greater detail.

The end goal is to find out what content they like and then produce it. It’s as simple as that.

Creating a Content Calendar

Next, you’ll want to create a content calendar.

This tool helps to is essential for planning, organizing, and scheduling your content marketing efforts. It ensures a consistent and strategic approach to content creation that aligns with your marketing goals and audience needs.

Your content calendar should include:

• Topics and titles
• Content format (e.g., blog post, video)
• Publication dates
• Distribution channels
• Responsible team members

You can create one using something simple spreadsheet like Google Sheets, or you can go more advanced and use a task management system like Asana or Monday.com.

I use Google Sheets for most of my content-related templates if I’m working alone, but use both Asana and Monday.com while working with others. I find Google Sheets to be fairly limiting when collaborating with teams when this much detail is needed.

Using a content calendar helps in maintaining a regular publishing schedule, avoiding last-minute rushes, and enabling you to strategically time content releases around key dates or events in your industry.

Once you have the keyword research, you understand your audience, and you have a content calendar created, you’re ready to begin producing content to share with your audience.