How to Increase Your Website Traffic With a Content Marketing Strategy

What if annoyed customers didn’t shriek and run at the very sight of your company’s name or logo? What if they actually wanted reasons to visit your website? Creating a successful inbound marketing strategy will not only increase your website traffic, it will help your business stand out from competitors too.

Increase Your Website Traffic with Relevant Content Marketing

Content marketing that your visitors will appreciate and enjoy can help increase website traffic for your company -- and the best campaigns will do some of the work themselves over time thanks to the compounding effect. So even if you aren’t a content marketing megastar like Microsoft, Airbnb, or John Deere, you can implement successful practices that take less time and money than you might think.

Content Marketing Is Inbound Marketing (Sorta)

All content marketing falls under your inbound marketing strategy campaign. But not all inbound marketing is necessarily content marketing. Follow us?

Content marketing refers to creating online material -- blogs, social media posts, and videos, for example -- that doesn’t explicitly promote your brand but can help you attract a more specific audience. The content you create should be relevant, valuable, and interesting.

Content marketing strategies won’t make everyone in your company a millionaire overnight. But commitment to a proven, long-term system can make your company one in a million when it comes to standing out and earning website traffic.

If You Blog It, They Will Come

Our first rule to increase website traffic: Stop being so sales-y. (Your campaign tone shouldn’t resemble this.) Pushiness is a turnoff, and the modern buyer knows how to turn you off.

If your website is a giant digital brochure, there’s little incentive for your potential leads to make return visits. Instead, churn out those blog, video, and social media posts. And try these more gentle, hand-holding tactics to nudge website traffic in your direction:

• Provide information and resources. Identify a problem your reader has. Offer potential solutions. Use your expertise to build trust in those who’ve landed on your pages. Don’t be afraid to include inbound links to other websites. They may even return the favor and link to your blog or website, providing web traffic another road into your realm.
  
  
• Be readable and entertain. Even manufacturing blogs about the weldability of different stainless steel types can be jazzed up to provide a modicum of fun. Be witty while maintaining your air of authority and professionalism. Include images and bullet points to break up the monotony. You can even use anchor text to throw in a funny or wow-worthy YouTube link to lighten the mood.
  
  

Optimize Your Content’s Performance

Inbound marketing strategies are about targeting the right people, not just any people. Done correctly, you can not only increase web traffic, but also attract higher-quality traffic that results in lead generation. Optimizing your post is a big part of that.

• Leverage social media. This is a no-brainer. By trumpeting your lovely content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and elsewhere, many more eyeballs will be on your website. You should also include social sharing buttons on your blog pages so traffic already on your site can spread the content to others on their social networking feeds.

• Help search engines help you. Is there a keyword term you wish Google searches would rank higher to increase your online visibility? (Full disclosure: Ours for this post are “increase website traffic” and "content marketing strategy.") If so, content marketing is your chance to drill that into a search engine’s brain with consistent, relevant content. How about that image you attached to your post? Add relevant alt text to it to make it pick up on search engines and create yet another layer of web presence.

This is by no means an exhaustive how-to on web presence optimization. But taking mere minutes each week to tackle a few of these concepts will create a snowball effect for your web traffic.

The Compound Effect of Content Marketing 

And that’s the best part of content marketing strategies: Returns on your efforts can grow significantly over time. The ideal content will stay relevant well beyond its publication date, resulting in continued traffic and lead generation.

Businesses that nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost that's 33% less than leads that aren't nurtured. The most successful B2B marketers spend 40% of their total marketing budget on content marketing.

So try to make the majority of your content evergreen in nature -- just as useful a year from now as it is today.

The second-best part of content marketing? Often, it gets easier as you go.

That blog you wrote last month could be condensed into video form or expounded upon to create a premium offer. All of a sudden, you have more web pages and therefore more traffic. The same goes for social media: Once the appropriate time has elapsed, go ahead and tout that blog post again on Facebook and Twitter … because it’s still useful and relevant, remember? Once again, you’ve scored some more easy web traffic.

If you’re a small-to-medium-sized marketing department, you don’t need to break your back slaving over brand-new content creation day and night. Let your old work do much of the new work for you.

Increase Your Web Traffic Through Enlightenment

Acknowledging or helping to solve your visitors’ issues fosters trust. That’s what content marketing strategies are all about, and the more you do it, the more exciting pages you’ve produced and the more people are populating your site. That’s how you get people running to -- and not from -- your brand.

(Editor's Note: This blog post was originally published in June 2017, but was updated in November 2020.)