If you’re looking to attract more leads and generate more business from your online marketing efforts, your primary goal should be to drive more traffic to your website. Low traffic means not enough people are checking out what you have to offer. Higher traffic means more potential customers. One way to boost your traffic relatively quickly is to increase your referral traffic. What is referral traffic, and why is it important?
The traffic that comes to your website can generally be categorized into four main types:
Direct Traffic consists predominantly of visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or accessed your website from a bookmarked link. Most direct traffic comes from people who are already aware of your brand. So direct traffic can be increased by boosting your brand awareness, which is a long game strategy.
Organic Traffic is when a visitor arrives at your website by searching terms in a search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Organic traffic can be increased through search engine optimization (SEO), a set of strategies that makes your website more visible in search results. Increasing your organic traffic takes time, effort, and patience.
Paid Traffic is driven to your website through advertising, such as pay per click (PPC) campaigns in Google Adwords or banner ads. Paid traffic requires a budget that covers the cost per click or display as well the cost of an expert to ensure you’re optimizing your paid campaigns effectively.
Referral Traffic includes visitors who arrived at your site by clicking a link on another website. If another website links out to your site as a relevant reference or resource, this can drive clicks to your site and it can also enhance your SEO. If the site linking out to your website is considered authoritative on the topic, the link signals to search engines that you must have quality content. So the potential benefits of pursuing more referral traffic are at least twofold: You’re positioning your website as more legitimate both to the people browsing online and to search engines.
How can you generate more referral traffic to your website?
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