Every website can benefit from increased traffic, as more visitors to your pages lead to more leads, sales, and conversions. But wanting more traffic and getting more traffic are two very different things. With so many strategies and tactics out there to boost your site traffic, it can be tough to know what works and what doesn’t.
We know that Semrush is one of the best ways to increase traffic organically. It’s packed with features for keyword research, on-page and local SEO, link building, rank tracking, and more. You can even use it for competitor analysis and PPC keyword optimization.
What Are the Best Tools to Increase Website Traffic?
Below you’ll find our Golden Eggs. These are our most highly recommended SEO tools to help you increase website traffic.
Semrush is an excellent SEO tool that’s feature-packed, versatile, and easy to use. Try Semrush for free with a seven-day trial, and save up to 17% with an annual plan.
Google Search Console provides valuable analytics related to your site traffic, performance, and search engine results. Sign up for free now to create your account.
Answer The Public is a social listening tool perfect for small blogs and businesses that want to compete for targeted keywords. Try it for free to get started.
More Top SEO Tools
Our research team here at Crazy Egg has narrowed down the best SEO tools on the market today to a crop of top performers. Check out our in-depth research and reviews and discover when it makes sense to invest in SEO tools and how to find the best options for you and your specific needs.
How Do I Get Started With Semrush?
Semrush is one of the best and more popular SEO tools on the market today. It’s trusted by more than 10 million marketing professionals and 30% of the Fortune 500. Semrush has a massive database of more than 22 billion keywords and over 43 trillion backlinks that you’ll have access to when you sign up.
There are tons of features that you can take advantage of. But, if you’re just getting started, you should start small and focus on the ones that specifically help you increase website traffic:
- Keyword research
- On-Page SEO
- Rank tracking
- Link building
Even with just those four focal points, we’re talking about several different tools in Semrush that help you attack them. For example, there are six features in the platform that help with keyword research alone.
You can start with something super easy, like the Keyword Gap tool. This is a quick and easy way to discover new keyword opportunities related to your domain that you’ve been missing out on.
Next, you can use Semrush for a full site audit. The process should only take a few minutes, and you’ll get an in-depth report with actionable steps to help you fix any technical issues or SEO problems on your site.
These two tools alone will help you build momentum and start increasing your site traffic within weeks instead of months. But give yourself time to play around within Semrush and get acquainted with all that this SEO multitool can do.
How Does Website Traffic Work?
Website traffic is the term for the number of users landing on and browsing a website at any given time. It’s measured in terms of visits, often referred to as sessions.
A site visit can come from a wide range of sources, including:
- Direct traffic: When a user goes straight to a website (often by entering the site URL into a browser)
- Organic search traffic: Users start with a search engine like Google and click one of the search results, which brings them to a website
- Paid traffic: Someone clicks on a paid advertisement on a search engine, social media site, another website, or any other third-party source
- Referral traffic: Visitors land on a site after clicking a link within another website, also known as a backlink
- Social traffic: Users click a social media post or element that brings them to a website
- Email traffic: Someone clicks a link within an email that brings them to a website
All of these actions result in a “site visit” or a “session.”
It’s important to understand that not all website traffic is created equally. From a marketing standpoint, it’s critical that you separate your traffic sources to see where the majority of your traffic is coming from. That way, you can confidently apply attribution to spikes or dips in your website traffic.
For example, let’s say 90% of your traffic is coming from paid sources. You can expect a significant drop in website traffic the second you stop running paid ads.
That’s an easy example. But good SEO tools help you understand why more organic sources like direct and search traffic are rising or falling.
How Do I Check My Website Traffic?
There are lots of different ways to check and monitor your website traffic. You can find site traffic metrics within Google Search Console and Google Analytics, which is an easy, free way many people choose.
But it’s generally easier (and better) to use a website checker tool like Semrush. The level of detail you can glean from this platform is massive. Use its dashboard to view all of your traffic and segment it by region or source, then dive into the wide array of other metrics you can view.
Even if you don’t want to pay for the tool, you can sign up for free and take advantage of ten site checks per day.
The Semrush traffic analytics report takes your website traffic knowledge one step further by giving you additional insights, including unique visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration, bounce rate, and more.
Your unique visits are an important KPI to measure against your total site traffic.
Here’s why.
Each time a person visits your website, it counts as a session. So a single user could be responsible for dozens or hundreds of site sessions by themself. To increase both the volume and quality of your site traffic, you want to see the number of unique visitors growing as well.
There’s only so much you can do to earn money if the only ones visiting your site are the same people over and over. That’s why it’s so important to use a website traffic tool that lets you view multiple metrics beyond just total sessions.
How Do I Check My Competition’s Website Traffic?
Monitoring the traffic of other sites in your industry can be useful for benchmarking what success looks like and even finding inspiration for improvements to your site and content.
It’s really helpful to see which competitors are getting the most traffic on keywords and in general and then try to mirror some of their strategies or target similar keywords to steal their traffic.
Semrush has four different competitive analysis tools to assist with these strategies:
- Traffic analytics: Benchmark your site traffic against competitors, estimate their total traffic, and see other KPIs
- Organic research: Discover opportunities to beat your competitors using organic keywords
- Advertising research: To beat competitors in paid ads
- Social media tracker: Monitor and analyze the social engagement of your competition
To get started on any of these, sign in to your Semrush account and create a new project. From here, it’s easy to add domains to your list of competitors, then quickly reference those domains when you’re diving deep into these tools.
How Much Does It Cost to Increase Website Traffic?
Boosting website traffic can cost as much or as little as you’re willing to spend. And there are a lot of ways to accomplish this, as we’ve mentioned.
Here’s a breakdown of some common costs you’ll incur to maintain your site and take steps to increase its traffic:
- Web hosting: $2 – $200 per month
- Domain registration: $10+ per year
- SEO tools: $50 – $500 per month
- PPC ads: $2.50 per click, on average
- Social ads: $5 – $100 per 1,000 impressions
Those first two options are things you should already have locked down before considering SEO tools. Quality web hosting keeps your site’s load times low, preventing visitors from leaving your site before they’ve spent much or any time there. While you can secure shared hosting from some providers for as low as $2 per month, you’ll need to pay for the appropriate grade of web hosting to keep your visitors happy.
And a quality domain name can lead to increased traffic, both because it’s easier for potential visitors to remember and because it can help your site rank higher in search results.
Beyond those two, the other costs come from extra efforts to improve your site (SEO tools) or market to potential visitors (PPC and social ads).
Some sites pay significantly more to increase traffic. For example, hiring an SEO agency can range anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 (or more) per month. This isn’t something every website needs to do to increase its traffic, though.
You also need to factor into your content marketing costs what you’ll spend on blog production, social media management, email marketing, and other attendant costs to running campaigns or improving on-page SEO.
But beyond the must-haves—like web hosting and a domain—you can start to increase your site traffic with a modest budget if you’re investing in the right tools and strategies. By spending wisely, it can just cost a couple of hundred bucks per month to see a meaningful boost in visitors.
Can You Increase Website Traffic for Free?
Paying for traffic is not a requirement. In fact, most website owners try to avoid having to do so. You can increase your site traffic for free by focusing on organic strategies, technical SEO, and evergreen content.
Start by running a free website audit from an SEO checker like Semrush. You can get an idea of your areas for improvement without spending a dime.
This report will give you an excellent starting plan of action. For example, something simple like optimizing your website’s images or adding meta tags to your pages can give you a quick boost in search result rankings, which will ultimately help boost your traffic.
From there, you could focus on long-term growth through keyword research and content marketing.
Make sure you’re producing and publishing high-quality blogs on a regular basis to stay high in search results for your target keywords. Just keep in mind, too, that unless you’re writing all these posts yourself, this isn’t truly free. But it doesn’t require you to spend extra on pricey web advertisement channels, either.
How Do You Increase Website Traffic Organically?
Prioritizing organic traffic is the best way to ensure an increase in sessions in the long run. Unlike paid ads, which provide short-term traffic growth, organic traffic continues after you stop investing in paid strategies.
You need to be patient if you’re taking the path of organic traffic, as you won’t see results overnight. It could take several months for you to notice trends moving up and to the right, and it may take years before you can double or triple your visits.
Effective keyword research is the best way to boost organic traffic. From there, you can plan your content strategy around the keywords that drive the most results.
Publishing blogs on a consistent basis has proven to be one of the best organic traffic strategies over the last decade, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down in the near future.
You also need to ensure the technical aspects of your site are running smoothly. Running an SEO audit will help you determine what needs to be addressed immediately, as these site changes can improve the way search engine bots crawl and index your site.
How Long Does it Take to Increase Website Traffic?
This is the magic question. Some websites see results in three to six months after they start taking steps to increase website traffic, but the timeline will vary depending on a lot of things.
The strategies you’re using, how much money and effort you’re putting into those strategies, the comparable efforts of your competitors, and even Google algorithm updates can all affect whether your endeavors to boost traffic pay off slowly or quickly.
For example, if you’re just publishing one blog per week and doing nothing else, you probably won’t see a significant boost in organic traffic over the next three months.
But if you’re doing heavy keyword research, publishing blogs five times per week, growing your social media presence, building high-quality backlinks, getting referral partners, improving your technical SEO, and running paid search ads, you should definitely see an uptick in traffic within a shorter span of time, say six to eight weeks.
Website traffic often gets exponentially easier to boost. So, newer websites might have a tougher time growing from no traffic to 1,000 visits per month, but it becomes easier with maturity to move from 3,000 monthly sessions to 10,000 monthly sessions.
In the end, all you can really control is how hard you’re working at the strategies you’ve developed to improve your website’s content, SEO quality, and reach. Keep at it and don’t get discouraged if it’s not paying off as quickly as you’d like.
What’s the Fastest Way to Increase Website Traffic?
PPC and referral campaigns are generally the fastest way to increase site traffic. With that said, these aren’t necessarily the best strategies for most websites.
Buying traffic is useless if you’re not turning those visits into leads or conversions. Paying for people to land on your site and then just leave won’t make you any money.
That’s why it’s in your best interest to have a good mix of both paid and organic traffic strategies.
So, when you decide to pull your ads, you’ll still have a steady stream of traffic coming from organic sessions.
Paid traffic is generally better for sites selling products or services online. You can easily track the ROI of paid campaigns, and using ad campaigns can work masterfully when you’re running a sale or launching a new product.
But if you’re just running a blog or a personal site, fast-tracking your site traffic through PPC campaigns likely isn’t as worth your while. Stay focused on organic traffic-boosting efforts through content and social media presence, be patient, and watch your daily sessions count rise day by day.
