How To Get More Targeted Website Traffic: The Beginner’s Guide

Are you struggling to drive targeted traffic to your website?

No problem. We’ve got you covered.

In this post, you’ll learn how to better understand your target audience and get more targeted traffic to your website.

 Without further ado, let’s jump in.

What is a target audience?

A target audience can be described as a group of people with similar characteristics, behavior and needs who:

• Can get a lot of value from everything your business has to offer
• View your products or services as a solution to their problems and challenges
• Can be converted to paying customers sooner or later

No matter your business type and size, the cool thing is you can find a group of people out there who represent your target audience.

11 facts you need to know about your target audience

Before you can drive your target audience to your website with any degree of success, you need a good knowledge and understanding of who they are, what they do, how they think and behave and so on.

In other words, you need the following facts about your target audience:

1. Age range
2. Gender
3. Geographical location
4. Marital status
5. Level of education
6. Profession / occupation
7. Income level / purchasing power
8. Needs and desires
9. Problems, challenges and difficulties
10. Interests and hobbies
11. Online locations where they hang out

Armed with all these, you’ll find it easier to craft relevant and compelling content that can grab and hold their attention long enough to drag them to your website.

10 strategies to drive your target audience to your website

Now, let’s look at ten steps you can take to drive your target audience to your website on a regular basis.

#1 – Learn more about SEO

If you’re serious about driving more and more of your target audience to your website, you need a good understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and how it helps.

SEO is a long-term strategy made up of many parts and involves the identification of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business, products and services.

These keywords are supposed to be added strategically to your website pages and content to optimize them.

 By optimizing for SEO:

• Your website can show up more and rank higher in search engine results
• Your target audience can discover your website easily while searching online
• Your business can become more visible online.

You can improve your knowledge and understanding of SEO when you read books on SEO or sign up for paid SEO courses, workshops and seminars.

But in addition, there are many reputable SEO websites and resources where you can learn about SEO for free and they include:

• Moz Blog
• Search Engine Journal
• Backlinko
• Search Engine Land
• Ahrefs
• Yoast SEO  

Remember, it’s not compulsory to handle all your SEO tasks by yourself. 

As an alternative, you can explore the option of hiring an SEO specialist or consultant or agency to help you achieve best results. And, these agencies and specialists usually come equipped with paid and free tools like Semrush and Google Analytics to make their lives easier and to save you from buying those toolsets and learning from scratch how to use them.

In short, learn more about SEO so you can make intelligent decisions about it and consistently drive a large number of your target audience to your website.

#2 – Have a user-friendly website

Without a user-friendly website, don’t be surprised if your website visitors arrive, only to turn around and leave instantly.

This is bad for business because you won’t be able to reap any of the wonderful benefits attached to having your target audience engaging with your website regularly.

Therefore, consider the following statistics about website design and users:

• Website users form an opinion about a website in about 0.05 seconds
• 94% of first impressions about a website are related to design
• 75% of a website credibility is judged on account of its design
• 38% of users will leave a website if they find it visually unappealing
• 76% of users cite ease of use as an essential aspect of a website
• Users are 5 times more likely to leave a website if it’s not optimized for mobile

Before you ask, a user-friendly website is one that’s easy to use for all website visitors whether they are reading content or moving around or filling forms or performing any other task.

In addition, a user-friendly website should be attractive and appealing to the eyes.

To cut a long story short, this type of website is supposed to make your visitors feel welcome and comfortable enough to spend quality time on your website.

Ready to make your website user-friendly? Then take the following steps:

• Optimize your website for mobile
• Ensure your website and all pages load quickly
• Have website content that’s easy to read and understand
• Add a user-friendly search bar
• Make your website easy to navigate and move around on
• Give your website a modern and attractive look
• Make all your website content easy to scan and skim
• Put a call to action (CTA) button prominently on each page
• Ensure your website works with all browsers
• Place links to your social media accounts on your website

#3 – Blog regularly on your website

Blogging is one of the best ways to drive your target audience to your website.

Put simply, it involves creating and publishing engaging content that provides value for your target audience in diverse ways such as:

• Giving them information they need but don’t have
• Answering questions they are asking
• Providing solutions to their challenges and problems

While all these can be in the form of blog posts and articles, feel free to also include videos, in-depth tutorials, infographics, case studies, special reports, white papers and so on.

According to the results of a study done by HubSpot, businesses with a blog usually have 55% more website visitors than those without a blog.

But that’s not all because businesses with a blog were also found to have 97% more inbound links and a whopping 434% more indexed pages than businesses without a blog.

The reality is that with more inbound links and indexed pages, your website stands a higher chance of being found by search engines like Google.

Beyond that, your target audience can also stumble across your website faster while searching online.

Here are some blogging tips and tricks you need for success:

• Publish new posts consistently on your blog
• Write about topics of interest to your target audience
• Create more evergreen content that provides value
• Add relevant images like pictures, graphs, etc to your blog posts
• Publish long form content that’s 1000 words minimum
• Include a call to action (CTA) in your blog posts
• Make your content easy to scan, read and understand
• Implement on-page SEO best practices
• Invite readers to comment and respond when they do
• Promote your content on social media after publication
• Update old posts regularly to keep them current and relevant

#4 – Create videos and upload to YouTube

Video content has become a general favorite these days and YouTube is the most popular video sharing site online, with over two billion monthly logged in viewers globally.

YouTube is also a popular search engine owned by Google where people watch over one billion hours of video content every single day.

That’s why you can drive a lot of your target audience to your website when you create high-quality videos and upload to YouTube.

Recent statistics from Wyzowl reveal that:

• 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website
• 85% of people would like to see more video from brands in 2021
• 87% of video marketers find YouTube to be a very effective channel
• 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service
• 93% of marketers believe video is an important part of their marketing strategy

All these show clearly that you can grab the attention of your target audience on YouTube and gain more customers when you create videos of great value.

Types of videos you can create include:

• Explainer videos to provide more information about your products or services
• Demo videos to demonstrate how your product or services works
• How To videos to answer questions people are asking
•  Webinar videos to teach or educate your target audience about relevant topics 

To drive more and more targeted YouTube traffic to your website, always remember to:

• Use a verbal and written call to action (CTA) to ask viewers to visit your website in each video
• Create a beautiful thumbnail for each video
• Optimize your video title, tags, description and thumbnail for SEO.
• Tell viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel
• Respond promptly to comments
• Put your website link in your YouTube banner and video description
• Consider using YouTube Ads

#5 – Become a podcast guest

Did you know that people’s interest in podcasts have been growing steadily for some years now?

According to Statista, there were around 75.9 million podcast listeners in the United States in 2020 and this number is likely to go up to over 100 million by 2024.

In fact, statistics from a recent study also shows that:

• 78% of Americans are now familiar with podcasting
• 57% of Americans have listened to a podcast
• Monthly podcast listeners have grown 61.5% in 3 years

But what exactly is a podcast?

Similar but different from a radio show, a podcast is an audio show or program that you can subscribe and listen to anytime just by using headphones or speakers.

Podcasts usually focus on a specific niche or genre or topic or theme and are produced as episodes at regular intervals daily or weekly or biweekly or even on a monthly basis.

Many people enjoy listening to podcasts because they can listen:

• At home or while in a car or a train
• During a walk or a run or generally while they are on the move.
• While busy with other tasks or household chores like cooking, ironing, gardening and so on

In most cases, a podcast host will advertise the show and their guest in advance on their websites and all their social media platforms.

After the show, the host will also create transcripts or show notes or both with more information about their guest, complete with links to guest websites and social media profiles, before sharing widely once again.

By appearing as a guest on podcasts in your niche, especially those with a large number of listeners and followers, you will be able to:

• Introduce your business to members of your target audience who prefers listening instead of reading and drive them to your website
• Create a series of quotes or social media posts from your podcast to post on social media
• Convert your podcast into other types of content like blog posts or infographics and publish on your website
• Get more backlinks to your site from the host website and podcast streaming sites like Apple podcast, Spotify and so on to improve your website SEO
• Boost your credibility and gain the trust of your target audience

Look at how the Strategy Hour podcast advertises their guest in this episode with a picture, a bio plus links to the guest’s two websites, podcast and many social media accounts.

Bottom line, pitch yourself as a guest to podcasts in your niche so you can connect with your target audience who enjoy listening to podcasts and drive them to your website in large numbers.

#6 – Respond to questions on Quora

You can also drive your target audience to your website when you answer relevant questions on Quora.

In case you’re wondering, Quora is a popular question and answer social platform and community where anyone can ask a question on any topic and possibly get an answer from a topic expert or a professional in that industry or even an influencer or celebrity.

On Quora, you can find lots of questions and answers on different topics in various niches from millions of their monthly users scattered worldwide.

As a result, Quora ranks highly on Google and it’s not unusual for relevant Quora questions and answers to show up on the first page of Google search results.

According to SimilarWeb, Quora had over 500 million visitors in August 2021 alone.

For example, Si Quan Ong is part of the marketing team at Ahrefs. He became active on Quora from July 2018 by answering at least five questions weekly relating to Ahrefs, SEO and digital marketing. And before long, there was a noticeable increase in traffic and sales on their website.

Feel free to use the tips below to drive your target audience from Quora to your website:

• Complete your profile and include links to your website and social media
• Focus on relevant questions in your niche and only answer those you know
• Provide actionable strategies and appropriate examples in your answers
• Add relevant pictures, screenshots and videos where possible
• Include pertinent data and statistics to support your points
• Link your answers to suitable content on your site that provides more value
• Avoid direct selling or promotion of your business, products or services in your answers

Check out our post on Quora statistics if you’d like to learn more about this platform.

#7 – Publish guest posts

Another effective strategy that can help drive your target audience to your website is by writing and publishing guest posts on reputable sites.

Also known as guest blogging or guest posting, this involves creating an article or a blog post and publishing it on websites different from yours.

For instance, the team at Groove published a guest post a while back and to their amazement, they received 1000 unique visitors within one hour of the post being published.

As if that’s not enough, more visitors kept showing up until the number increased to 20,000.

To top it off, the post was also shared more than 10,000 times online.

Though guest posts may be paid or unpaid, in most cases, you will be allowed to provide an author bio that has one or more links to your website, social media platforms, special offers and so on.

In some cases, you may also be allowed to link to some of your other content within the guest post.

Take a look at an example of a guest post author bio from Craft Your Content showing links to the author’s website and social media handle.

Here are some guest blogging best practices you need to successfully drive your target audience to your website:

• Identify reputable sites in your niche that has a similar target audience in large numbers
• Study their website to learn more about them and the topics they write about
• Confirm that authors are allowed to include some links in their author bios
• Cultivate a relationship with the website owner or editor or the company by signing up for their newsletter, connecting on social media, commenting on their blogs and so on
• Study their guest blogging guidelines, where available and follow it religiously
• Pitch a valuable and relevant topic not published before on that site.
• Once your pitch is approved, write and submit, taking all their guidelines into consideration
• Still with their guidelines in mind, craft an author bio with links to your website, social media and even a free offer, so interested readers can follow you to your website
• Promote your guest posts online
• Where required, respond to comments from readers once the post is published

When done right, guest blogging will not only drive your target audience to your website regularly but will also give you quality backlinks and improve your website SEO so it pops up more in search engine results.

#8 – Interview experts, influencers and thought leaders in your niche

You can also attract and pull more of your target audience to your website when you interview experts and thought leaders in your niche or industry and publish the interview on your website.

This can be done in two ways:

• Interview one expert or thought leader and publish the interview on your website
• Interview a group of experts or influencers in your niche and publish the interview on your website

Such credible experts and influencers normally have a large number of loyal fans, social media followers and email subscribers.

And their opinions and comments usually carry a lot of weight in their niche or industry because of their credibility and reputation.

As a result, their fans, followers and the general public are always interested in whatever they have to say on any topic.

For example, when Adam Connell interviewed 43 experts and published it as a blog post sometime ago, not only did it receive a few thousand shares within a few days but it also attracted around 5000 visits.

Once you interview such individuals or groups, publish it on your website and promote the link online.

Most likely, the link will be shared over and over again and direct a lot of your target audience to your website.

Also, the expert or thought leader or the entire group interviewed may also share the interview link with their own huge network of contacts, fans, email subscribers and followers on social media.

At the end of the day, this will advertise your business widely online and drive a huge number of your target audience to your website.

#9 – Be active on relevant social media platforms

In 2015, just a little over two billion people were using social media worldwide but this number rose to 3.69 billion in 2020.

By 2021 however, the number of people using social media worldwide has gone up to over 4 billion.

When you consider how popular social media has become plus its increasing number of users globally, it’s more likely your target audience is not left out.

And that’s why becoming active on relevant social media platforms is an effective strategy to drive your target audience to your website.

But remember, different types of social media platforms exist such as:

• Personal & business social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and so on
• Social audio platforms like Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse and Spotify
• Social video platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Stories & Reels
• Social shopping platforms like Pinterest product pins, Facebook shops, Shopify, Instagram Shops, TikTok and so on
• Discussion forums such as Reddit and Quora
• Private social media communities like Slack, Facebook Groups and so on

According to Statista here are the most popular social media networks worldwide, ranked by number of active users (in millions) as at July 2021:

But get this, you don’t have to be on all social media platforms or many of them before you can drive your target audience to your website successfully.

Instead, use everything you know about your target audience to identify one or two social media platforms where they can be found and focus on those.

To drive targeted traffic from social media, take your time and study each platform carefully so you can identify best practices you need to implement.

If you’re struggling for time, use of a social media scheduling tool will help to streamline the process.

And in addition:

• Post valuable content when your audience is active online
• Add call to actions to your posts
• Respond to questions and comments on time
• Organize contests, quizzes and polls for further engagement
• Join relevant groups where your target audience can be found

#10 – Provide attractive freebies, gifts and incentives

Raise your hand if you enjoy getting free gifts and offers that provide value. ????

To be honest, most people do and it’s likely your target audience also feels the same way.

Therefore, you can drive more of your target audience to your website when you provide value adding freebies, incentives and special offers they can enjoy once they land on your website.

Remember, only a freebie that provides extraordinary value can drive traffic and the definition of value can vary from one niche or industry or target audience to another.

To come up with relevant gift ideas for your target audience, think of freebies that can:

• Teach or educate them on topics and subjects they have interest in
•  Make their lives or businesses or jobs easier
• Provide solutions to the challenges and problems they struggle with
• Answer questions they keep asking

Examples of free gifts you can customize for your niche and target audience includes the following, among others:

• Free trials
• Special discounts
• Webinars
• eBooks
• Short courses
• Video tutorials
• Email series
• Infographics

To advertise these gifts to your target audience, simply add a link to your freebie in:

• Blog posts on your website
• Your video call-to-action
• Your YouTube banners
• Your guest post author bio
• Your Quora, social media and podcast profiles
• Show notes and transcripts of podcasts where you were interviewed

As an example, check out this author bio from Freelancer FAQs that has a link to a free offer.

Start driving your target audience to your website

From everything you’ve learnt so far, you’ll agree that it’s possible to drive your target audience to your website in mouth-watering numbers on a consistent basis.

First, increase your knowledge and understanding of your target audience, learn more about SEO and make your website user-friendly.

Next, use some or all the strategies you’ve learnt above to drive your target audience to your website regularly

Before you know it, there will be more quality traffic on your website.

And you will be able to sell more, boost profit, grow your business and also achieve more of your business goals faster than you ever imagined.