SEO
14 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Feeling overwhelmed by the infinite options for driving traffic to your website? You’re not alone.
This article doesn’t list every traffic strategy under the sun. Instead, it lists the tactics we’ve used at Ahrefs.
Let’s get to it.
The Ahrefs blog gets over 427,000 monthly organic visitors.
No doubt, search engine optimization (SEO) can work. For as long as you rank high on Google, you’ll be able to generate consistent organic traffic to your site.
To do this, you need to write about topics people are searching for. Here’s how to find them:
- Enter one or a few relevant keywords into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
- Switch the tab to Questions
Here, you’ll see >46,000 potential topics you can target. That’s probably too many, so you’ll want to narrow the list down by looking for keywords that are:
- High in Traffic Potential (TP) – TP is the estimated amount of search traffic you can potentially gain if you rank #1 for that topic. We calculate it by estimating the amount of search traffic the #1 page currently gets.
- Low in Keyword Difficulty (KD) – KD is how difficult it is to rank for the keyword in the top 10 organic search results.
Use the filters to reduce the list down to something manageable.
Then pick out those keywords that are relevant to your site.
Recommended reading: Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs
A piece of content can rank for thousands of keywords.
Most of them will be different ways of looking for the same thing, but some will be important subtopics you need to cover in your content.
If you can cover these “content gaps”—subtopics you’re currently missing—you can potentially rank higher for your target keyword and get more search traffic.
Here’s how to find these “content gaps”:
- Enter your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Go to the Content Gap tool
- In the top section, enter a few competing pages
- In the bottom section, enter the URL of the page you want to fill content gaps for
- Hit Show keywords
Eyeball the list and see if there are any subtopics you can cover on your page.
For example, if we wanted to update our post on evergreen content, we’d likely have to fill in two subtopics:
- Evergreen ads
- Evergreen content on social media
Guest blogging is where you write for other blogs. In return, the owner/editor will allow you to link back to your site.
The benefits include:
Here’s an example of a guest post I wrote for SmartBlogger:
How do you find relevant guest blogging opportunities? Here’s how:
- Enter a relevant keyword into Ahrefs’ Content Explorer (set it to In title)
- Filter for One page per domain, Exclude homepages, and Exclude subdomains
- Filter for Explicit results
- Add a Language filter for the language you write in
- Add a Domain Rating filter for 30–70 to weed out low-authority sites (and remove “ultra high authority” sites that you probably won’t be able to pitch to… for now)
- Add a Website traffic filter for 5000+ to weed out websites with little or no traffic
- Add a Published filter for the Last 90 days to weed out websites that haven’t published content recently
Look through the results to find relevant sites you can potentially guest blog for.
Don’t worry if they don’t have a “write for us” page or are not advertising for guest posts. Most sites are willing to accept guest posts, even if they’re not explicit about it. After all, free content is free content—especially if it’s good.
Recommended reading: Guest Blogging for SEO: How to Build High-Quality Links at Scale
I recently updated my post on free SEO tools, and traffic shot up:
A major SEO mistake is thinking that SEO is a set-it-and-forget-it task. Even if you’re ranking high for your target keyword, that status is not permanent. Competitors may try and “steal” your spot, or Google may lower your rankings when your content becomes outdated.
So you need to keep your content up to date to maintain your rankings.
The easiest way to find out which content you should refresh is to install our free WordPress SEO plugin and run an audit. The audit will tell you which articles you should be updating.
To find out exactly what aspects you need to refresh, look at the search results to see what the top-ranking posts have that you don’t. Often, ranking drops occur because certain parts of your content are outdated. For example:
- Screenshots
- Process
- Stats
- Links (broken, etc)
- Year in the title
Depending on the target keyword, sometimes refreshing the outdated sections will suffice. In other cases, you may find that you need to do a full rewrite of the article. (Don’t worry, we do this often too!)
Recommended reading: Republishing Content: How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
From new-ish podcasts to a top 100 business podcast, our chief marketing officer, Tim Soulo, has appeared on them all.
There are currently 850,000 active podcasts. And many podcasts need guests. So why not pitch to be one of them? Share your knowledge and, in return, you get brand exposure, referral traffic, links, and more.
The simplest way to find podcast opportunities is to search for “top [your niche] podcasts” in Google.
However, some of them may be out of your reach (for now). So here’s how to find podcasts that are likely within your wheelhouse:
- Find someone in your industry who has been a guest on many podcasts
- Enter their domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Go to the Backlinks report
- Set the search to Referring page title and search for their name
Look through the results and pick out those that are relevant podcast opportunities. Then find the host’s email and pitch yourself as a guest.
For most businesses, there are plenty of non-competing brands with the same or similar target audience. So why not work together to cross-promote to each other’s audience?
That’s what we did with Buffer, a social media scheduling tool.
We arranged a joint webinar titled “How to Build Your Website Traffic With Evergreen Content and Social Media.” Then both brands heavily promoted the webinar on social media leading up to day zero.
Post-webinar, Buffer created a blog post summarizing the presentation, while we posted the recording on YouTube and uploaded the presentation slides on SlideShare.
Takeaway: look for opportunities to partner with brands that solve different problems for a similar audience. That way, you can each gain access to an entirely new user base.
With over 330 million monthly active users, it seems a no-brainer to promote on Reddit.
With one exception: Reddit hates marketing.
If Redditors catch even a whiff of self-promotion, they will not hesitate to downvote your post, delete it, or even ban you from the subreddit. They may even blacklist your domain.
Yet, Tim managed to successfully “promote” his link building post:
Reddit enjoys helpful and valuable content. Its users are only antagonistic to spammers. So to promote on Reddit, you can replicate what Tim did:
Take one of your blog posts, strip away all internal and external links, format it in markdown, and share it on a relevant subreddit. Only at the end do you leave a link back to your original blog post.
Notice that even though it was a “tl;dr,” it was still meaty with tons of helpful information for Redditors. The post was valuable on its own, whether or not people clicked through the link. That’s what you should be aiming for.
Sidenote.
Don’t promote every new post you publish on Reddit. That makes you a spammer. Choose only the ones you’re truly proud of.
Recommended reading: Reddit Marketing: How to Self Promote on Reddit and Get More Traffic
People usually have tons of related questions when researching a topic. While you should strive to answer most of them, sometimes it’s just impossible to weave them naturally into your content.
You can solve this by adding an FAQ section at the end of your article. That can potentially help your content rank for more long-tail keywords and get more search traffic.
The easiest way to find these questions is to Google your target keyword and look for the People Also Ask (PAA) questions that appear.
You can also look at the Questions report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
Threads get a lot of engagement on Twitter. Take, for example, this thread from our head of content, Joshua Hardwick:
He hardly even tweets!
You don’t have to do this from scratch. Just take one of your existing blog posts and repurpose it. Paste your content into a tool like Typefully and edit from there.
Then add a link back to your blog post at the end of the thread.
Recommended reading: How to Write a Tweetstorm
Our posts on LinkedIn generate a ton of engagement and clicks.
Yes, LinkedIn may not be the sexiest social media platform. But don’t sleep on it. More and more people are rediscovering LinkedIn’s ability to send tons of traffic.
The good news is that you don’t have to create content from scratch. Simply repurpose your existing content, which is what we do.
Even better: repost what you’re already posting on Twitter. It works really well.
Amplifiers are people with a large audience on email, social, and more. Most importantly, they have the ability to share your content with their audience and send tons of traffic to your site.
The easiest way to find amplifiers in your niche is to use SparkToro. The free version allows you to run up to five searches a month, which should be enough to get started.
From there, you can look at who these amplifiers are following—and pursue the trail to find more amplifiers.
However, it’s not as simple as sending them an email and asking them to promote your website. Not only are they not obliged to do so, but they also get no benefits.
This means you need to give them a reason.
There are two ways to do this.
One, show them something new and valuable. If you have something that’s truly unique (e.g., original data), then they may appreciate a heads-up. For example, Rand Fishkin tweeted about our Google Search Console study (even though we didn’t ask him to!).
Compare that to his response a few years ago, when Tim asked Rand to check out his blog post that was, in hindsight, not unique:
How do you create something unique? Here are some ideas:
- Do you have personal experience with something? If not, can you test or experience it yourself?
- Do you have access to data? Alternatively, you can find someone who has and work with them. Then analyze the data and present your findings.
- Can you interview experts? You can talk to thought leaders in your field and share their expertise and knowledge.
Two, feature them. If your content featured one of their quotes, articles, or even themselves, then it’s a legit reason to tell them.
They’ll be delighted to know they’ve been featured.
One final tip: Don’t expect that they’ll share your content with their following. If they do, it’s cool. If they don’t, it’s cool too.
Focus on building the relationship. It may eventually lead to something more: a link, a partnership, or even a future business collaboration.
Recommended reading: Who Will Amplify This? And Why?
At Ahrefs, we offer plenty of free SEO tools.
Combined, they generate almost 400,000 monthly search visits.
Don’t write this off as a tactic only for software businesses. Other businesses can do it too. For example, Crunch provides accounting services and offers a free “take home pay” calculator.
However, don’t simply go and create any tool. If you’re going to invest time, effort, and money into this endeavor, you want it to do well. So you should create tools that actually have demand.
Here’s how to find such opportunities:
- Enter a relevant keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
- In the Include box, search for terms like tool, tools, calculator, checker, template, report, etc (choose Any word)
Look through the list to find the most relevant free tool you can create that will send you traffic and business.
Meet Sam Oh, our YouTube master. Not only did he help build our YouTube channel to 330,000 subscribers, but he also managed to drive traffic to our videos from Google.
How did he do that?
Simple: YouTube videos rank on Google too.
To rank your videos on Google, you need to find topics that people prefer to watch videos about. Here’s how to find them:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Run this search:
site:youtube.com inurl:watch title:topic - Sort the results by Page traffic
This will give you a list of YouTube videos that currently get search traffic from Google. Look through the list to find relevant topics you can cover.
Follow our resource below to create a video that’ll rank for these topics:
If you have the budget and are willing to invest, don’t forget that you can always buy paid traffic from platforms like Google and Facebook.
In fact, that’s what we do at Ahrefs.
However, you’re not only limited to just Google and Facebook. Given how popular they are—and therefore expensive—you can always consider running ads on other social platforms like Pinterest, Quora, YouTube, or even TikTok.
For example, we run search ads on YouTube, and they only cost us $0.01/min.
We also run ads on Quora and are getting relatively cheap(er) clicks.
Expand your view, consider other platforms, and you’ll realize that online advertising may not be as expensive as you thought.
Final thoughts
Experiment with the above traffic strategies and start generating traffic to your website.
Did I miss out on any cool tactics? Let me know on Twitter.
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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