How to Get More Traffic to Your Website in 2024

A step-by-step guide for businesses

“If you build it, they will come!”

… Right? …

If only it were that easy.

Getting traffic to your website — especially if it’s newer or hasn’t been updated in a while — is a lot harder than it sounds. Especially without an investment in ads.

But it’s not impossible — not even close.

You just need a strategy.

Hear me out: your website is one of billions. Literally, billions. With a “b.” (Source)

That’s why if you want more traffic (especially good, juicy, relevant traffic) in 2024, you can’t just write sporadic blog posts and cross your fingers.

Let’s dive in and explore what it really takes to get website traffic in 2024.

Step 1: Check Out Your Tank

Let’s start with a car metaphor.

If your gas tank had a big hole in it, would you fill it with gasoline?

Of course not.

If you did, you’d waste time, money, and create a big mess you’d have to clean up. A completely preventable mess, by the way, if you’d just taken a little time to get the hole repaired/patched first.

Now think about your website.

It probably has a lot of little holes. They could be anything from pages that load too slow, broken links, poor contrast ratios, images that display incorrectly, a lack of topical focus, confusing wording, all the way to missing metadata or incorrect formatting.

Don’t spend the time, energy, and money pumping in traffic until you at least take a look under the hood.

That’s why the first step I’d recommend is a quick audit and repair plan.

One that reviews your website for things that make it harder for humans and search engine crawlers alike to decide what your website’s all about.

Step 2: Set Goals for Your Website

Now that your website is cleaned up and ready for traffic, think about the best case scenario. What do you want that traffic to do?

Do you want them to:

• Call your business
• Book an appointment
• Join your email list
• Sign up a free demo
• Download an ebook
• Buy a product

Or some combination of these?

Determine your metrics for success. You’ll use them in the subsequent steps.

Step 3: Create a Website Topic Map

Now it’s time to look at your goal and the ideal type of website traffic you’d like to receive. Who are your customers?

Now put yourself in their shoes.

• Why would they want to join your newsletter, work with, download, or purchase from you?
• What do they need to know before they’d take that action?

Take these answers and work backwards — break them into topics your website should cover. If you’re a boho beach boutique, for example, and want people to purchase clothing from you, your website topics should cover:

• How to wear your clothing
• Places to wear and ideas for wearing and styling your clothes
• Who wears your clothes and why
• The fabrics you choose and why
• How your clothes are curated and/or made and why
• Etc.

You want to make your product slip as easily into a customer’s life as possible by reaching the right people and letting them see how their lives would look with your clothing in it. So your boutique topic map would have 3–4 main topics, (and several subtopics each).

Your boutique topics could be:

• Festival style guides
• Fabrics 101
• And something boutique specific, like “Conscious consumerism,” “Budget fashion,” or “Vegan fashion”

You can probably already picture a few blog posts that would align with these topics — and that’s exactly the point.

Now, I hear you — what does this have to do with getting website traffic in 2024?

We’re getting there, I promise.

Step 4: Fill In the Content + Strategic Keyword Research

Now it’s time to start getting that content together.

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Use a tool like SEMRush* (*this is an affiliate link) to look up your topics and subtopics to find keywords that match your content and target user’s search patterns.

You want to make sure that you’re using keywords that:

• Are within reach for your website’s domain authority (i.e., your competition for the keyword is similar sized websites instead of Amazon, Wikipedia, or Quora, who will push your results down)
• Match the search intent of your content (i.e., if you’re writing an informative article, the person searching for that keyword should be looking for information)
• Are relevant to the competing search results
• Etc.

SEMRush is one of my favorite tools for starting this research.

2. Write Awesome Content

To help you write out your content, I have a full guide to optimizing your blog posts for SEO here for you:

A 10-Step Guide to Freelance Writing for SEO-Optimized Articles + Free PDF

3. Put in a Clear CTA

You also want to make sure you make it easy within each piece of content to figure out what the website visitor’s next step should be.

• If your goal is more email signups, have a form for them to fill in on each blog post.
• If your goal is more sales, integrate products into your content.
• Or if your goal was phone calls, make it easy to get to that next step.

Never make anyone guess what they should do next — because they won’t.

Step 5: Share Your Content

If you won’t share it, who will?

Use any social media presence you have and start sharing your content to get your first bits of traffic and feedback.

An underrated place to find traffic while you’re waiting for SEO to kick in (it takes a few months to start seeing measurable organic traffic results through search) is Pinterest. If your target market exists on that platform, create pins and start sharing your content there in addition to your social platforms.

Step 6: Analyze, Optimize, and Repeat

If you’re doing your keyword research right, have closed all the leaks, and create content that’s relevant to your customers and their search habits, your targeted website traffic will start to grow through SEO.

Because even though there are a billion+ websites, if you’re doing all of these steps together and correctly, there is no website like yours. This whole guide is a differentiation and domination plan to help you stand out, so take it to heart.

It may take a little time, but here are the important things I want you to know about growing traffic:

1. Optimize for Human Website Traffic in 2024

The human experience is more important than the crawler bot experience. If people linger on your page after they click through, your website will get stronger, and the algorithms will rank it higher.

“Time on Page” is a key indication that your website is valuable to the people who find it. That’s why the topics, relevance, keyword research, goals, and “holes” all need organization before you write content.

2. Build out Strategic Content

Think of your topic website map as a guide to your website. As your topics fill with content, you make your website clearer and clearer to humans and bots alike.

Think of the topic clusters as a spider web. Each new piece of content expands your reach to the next layer, adding width and depth to your reach and traffic.

3. Analyze and Repeat

Make sure you have Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster, Google Search Console, and more tracking and monitoring your traffic. This will help you uncover:

• What keywords have increased your visibility (i.e., what your customers are actually searching for)
• Where your website traffic is coming from
• How long people linger on the page, and if they dig deeper into your website (the ultimate goal)
• How effective your CTAs are
• And what types of complimentary content would help your website expand its reach

Closing Thoughts: How to Increase Your Website Traffic in 2024

There’s no shortage of websites, but there’s also no shortage of internet users. By fixing any holes in your website, setting goals, creating strategic content, and analyzing it as you go, you will increase your website traffic in 2024.

Click here to get started with step one.