Updated on August 15th, 2022
How Do I Get Website Traffic Quickly? It’s a question that’s often asked when people are starting a blog. Let’s say that your website has just gone live. You’ve now got an online presence but how on earth how do people actually find you? In summary:
To get website traffic quickly, share your posts on relevant forums and social media channels. Furthermore, to achieve search engine traffic earlier, create fewer but longer articles for low competition, long-tail keyphrases.
The traditional method of acquiring traffic has always been to just keep relentlessly pushing out detailed, unique high quality content.
Under this assumption, eventually you’ll start to see traction with the search engines as people notice the quality of your posts. Then other sites will start organically linking to you. These inward-bound backlinks are so necessary to boost our page rankings.
Why Traditional Traffic Thinking needs to Evolve
While the above still remains true, what most people have come to realise is that these methods take a LOT of time.
Accordingly, it might be 12 to 18 months before you start to see decent traffic. This can be discouraging to say the least given the blood, sweat and tears that you’ve put into your published content.
We want to see some upward progress in the number of pageviews and visitors to our site as inspiration to keep us going.
Even if the numbers are small, some sign of an upward trajectory in our metrics can encourage us to keep publishing and not throw in the towel.
The danger is that we’ll give up blogging if we’re not seeing any meaningful results for all of our hard work.
Mindset: Long Term vs Short Term Blogging
So we have this balancing act. On one side we have the long-term view where so much of the writing work is front-loaded with little results.
On the other hand, we are wanting to see some indication of short-term results in order to keep us going.
What we need are techniques to get traffic quickly in order to give us the butt-kick to keep going.
In this article we lay out the 6 best methods to get traffic quickly.
So let’s dive straight into the techniques. I’m listing those that I believe will give you the fastest results first.
No. 1 Immediate Traffic Method: Forums, Niche Sites, Social Media Groups
The quickest way to get traffic … I mean the absolute fastest way to get traffic is to promote your blog posts in relevant forums. Quora and Reddit are large, multi-niche forums and there are many other specific sites.
How this Works:
In your niche you should be able to find online forums where people ask specific questions on relevant topics.
I recommend that you join these forums. It really helps you to build community standing as an authority in your niche.
Be helpful and supportive to others on these sites. When questions come up you can use your industry knowledge to help others.
Go ahead and provide thoughtful and helpful answers to forum members. Share your knowledge and help people. Make sure your responses are as detailed and helpful as you can make them. Become an active member of the community.
At the end of a well thought-out answer, consider whether you’ve written a blog post on the same topic which might help the reader. If you have, you might include a link to the post at the end of your answer. “I’ve written an even more detailed analysis of this topic on my blog which you might find useful:” Then add a link to your post.
For example:
Only include links where they are really appropriate to the question and don’t spam any forums. Furthermore, don’t include links on all your forum responses, only a select few where you have a specific and useful blog post to share.
2. How do I get Website Traffic Quickly? – Share posts on social media
We’ve all heard of this one but it’s one of the most effective ways to get traffic quickly.
How this Works:
Identify the social media platforms that vibe with your audience e.g. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest.
There’s no need to be everywhere on social media when you start. Just pick one platform and do that platform really well.
For example, an arts and craft blog may be more suitable for sharing posts on Pinterest. A Tech blog might be more inherently shareable on Twitter.
The main thing is to find out where your audience lives and connect with them there.
You don’t necessarily need to share all posts, as some mightn’t be appropriate. Instead, only include those posts which you think are inherently shareable.
Automating your Social Media Posts
Worried about how much time it’ll take to post to multiple social channels? Use tools like Zapier or IFTTT to automate your social media posting.
You can create an automated Zapier process or “Zap” to post your blog content from once social medium to multiple social media channels. eg:
The free plan on Zapier gives you 5 free “Zap” processes.
Alternatively, use a tool like Later to batch and schedule your social media posts.
3. Optimise your posts for Long Tail Keywords in Organic Search
Many beginner bloggers make the mistake of targeting posts towards super-competitive single-word keywords.
The reality is that you’re never going to be able to compete with the big guns in your niche on short keywords when you’re starting out.
How this works:
What you need to do is aim for a Top-20 position in search results. This will put you on page one or two of Google search results. From there you can optimise your post further using Google search console and other methods to make it closer to position 1.
To achieve this, aim for longer keyphrases in your niche with lower competition.
There might be only an average of a few hundred searches per month on these keywords.
This doesn’t matter as it’s so much better to get more of a smaller slice of pie than nothing from a large slice.
Use Free Tools to Optimise your Posts or Keywords
Obtaining free organic traffic through the search engines is a fantastic way to get traffic quickly. To do this effectively, you really need to target long-tail keywords.
Use free tools like Yoast SEO To make sure that your posts are fully optimised for your keywords.
Also use a Keyword Tool like Keywords Everywhere to find long-tail keywords. Keywords Everywhere is an inexpensive Google Chrome extension.
4. How do i get Website Traffic Quickly? Improve Time-on-Page Metrics to Boost SEO
One metric that will dramatically improve your traffic and SEO ranking is Average Session Duration.
Accordingly, you can improve this metric by adding really detailed useful information to your posts. Avoid fluffing out any posts with filler. Aim to over-deliver on the piece of information that you’re sharing.
Write Ultimate Guide posts that literally blow your competitor’s blog posts out of the water. For example, I wrote this Ultimate Guide to Good Blog Names:
Include images, videos, diagrams and anything else you can to keep your reader on the page for longer. The aim is to outdo whatever content the other bloggers in your niche are providing so that your content becomes the ultimate guide.
It’s this combined focus on low-competition longtail keywords and high-quality posting that’s going to bring you the biggest traffic boost.
5. How do I get Website Traffic Quickly? – Backlink Strategy
One of the main ways that the search engines rank your site is through the quantity and quality of your inward-bound links (ie backlinks).
So, accordingly, in addition to a content strategy, it’s a great idea to have a backlink strategy. You should work on implementing actions every day to increase the number and quality of your backlinks.
These actions might include guest posting on other blogs. It might also include writing testimonials for products or services that you use in your niche. You might achieve a backlink with these two methods by including your domain name on the guest post or testimonial.
There are so many ways to improve your backlink profile. It needs to be remembered that not all inward-bound links are created equal. A link from an authoritative blog in your niche will be much more powerful than a link from an unrelated personal blog.
Outreach Backlink Strategy – Write Positive Reviews for Specific Products or Services
If there’s a product or service that you use and genuinely feel like you want to recommend, why not write a glowing review post about that product or service?
Then you can reach out to that company and let them know about your article. You might say something like “Hi, I just wrote this review post about your company which I thought you’d like to see. I’d be interested in your feedback. Here’s a link to the post”
Often you’ll be rewarded with a backlink from the company or they might share your post on social media.
Unfortunately, you can’t really ask for a link. Even if you’re not given a link, you’re still building industry connections and building quality content on your blog.
Another method is to look at other sites in your niche and check to see if they have any broken links using a tool such as Online Broken Link Checker.
If they do have broken links on their site, you can reach out to them and let them know. Who knows, you might be rewarded with a backlink as thanks for your trouble.
6. Fewer Long Posts vs More Short Posts
Conventional blogging wisdom would dictate that success comes through writing as many blog posts as possible. It would also say that you should publish them as quickly as possible.
What we’ve learned however is that blogging frequency isn’t as important as previously thought.
Thus, It’s generally preferable to publish fewer long-form posts targeting less competitive keyphrases. This is where you are going to see the most progress towards the top rankings.
7. Paid Traffic
An alternative that works immediately is to create Pay-per-Click ads using Google Ads or similar to drive targeted traffic immediately to your web pages. You only pay when someone clicks through to your site. To do this, your website is placed at the top of search results above everything else.
Summary – How do I get Website Traffic Quickly?
If you’re asking “How do I get website traffic quickly?”, realise that blogging is a slow-build process. Much of the work is front-loaded when you are building a successful website.
However, there are methods such as forums, social media and targeting long-tail keywords that can deliver short term results to keep you going in the early stages.
In the medium term, work on improving average session duration, developing a backlink strategy and creating longer posts targeting less competitive keywords.
Frequently Asked Questions – How do I get website traffic quickly?
Is it possible to create a blog and have it on the first page of Google today?
Unfortunately the answer is no. While we don’t know exactly how the Google algorithm works, most SEOs believe that Google has a policy of sandboxing all new sites for an unspecified period.
We think this occurs as it takes time for Google to evaluate websites. They want to see how users interact with the site. Obviously, they don’t want spam sites appearing on the first page of search results as it will damage their reputation.
By taking time to evaluate brand new sites, they can dramatically reduce the risk of that happening.
What is Google sandboxing?
From the experience of setting up websites, It seems that Google has a policy of placing new websites into a temporary state of limbo.
During this time the website won’t appear in search results. It’s thought that this happens so that only legitimate & trustworthy sites show in Google search listings.
Sandboxing seems to last for a period anywhere between two months and six months.a
Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash