How to Increase Targeted Website Traffic

Targeted traffic is the most valuable traffic you can get to your website. Targeted visitors come to your website for a specific reason, increasing your chances of converting them into leads or customers.

In this guide, you’ll learn what targeted traffic is and the steps to follow to get more targeted website traffic.

What Is Targeted Traffic?

Targeted traffic is the term used to describe people visiting a website intentionally because they believe it can satisfy their intent. This can be an answer to a question or a solution to a problem through a product or service.

The difference between targeted traffic and normal traffic (non-targeted) is that targeted visitors have a specific goal in mind, while normal visitors are browsing the web without having a particular objective.

In other words, targeted traffic refers to people who visit a website to perform an action.

Let me give you a couple of examples to understand the difference between the two:

People who visit Amazon.com searching for “buy filter coffee machine” are more likely to convert (i.e., make a purchase) than people who enter Amazon because they want to view the latest offers.

Likewise, from my experience on this website, people searching for “digital marketing courses” are more likely to sign up for our course than people reading the blog posts.

Why Is Targeted Traffic Important?

There are many reasons why targeted traffic is important for a website. The most significant are:

Increase in conversions - Targeted visitors are more likely to convert, and this means:

• More qualified leads - Websites can get the leads and convert them into customers through email marketing, retargeting, or one-to-one communication.
• More sales - The conversion rate of targeted traffic is higher compared to normal non-targeted traffic.
• An increase in email subscribers - If you can manage to keep targeted visitors happy through your content and website experience, then most probably they will visit again and also subscribe to your email list.

A decrease in customer acquisition costs  - The cost of acquiring a new customer will be less, which means you can get more customers without increasing your digital marketing budget.

Increase advertising revenue - targeted visitors are more likely to click an ad for a product they are interested in, which translates to more ad revenue.

Increase in social media shares: Targeted visitors will share something on Facebook or Twitter if they really like it.

How to Get More Targeted Traffic

The best ways to increase targeted traffic coming to your website are:

1. Optimize your website for SEO
2. Run paid search campaigns
3. Run targeted social media campaigns
4. Optimize your website for mobile traffic
5. Create a native mobile app
6. Invest in content marketing
7. Retarget visitors with social media ads

1. Optimize your website for SEO

Search engine traffic, whether it is paid or organic is highly targeted because people use search engines for a purpose.

In fact, organic traffic is the best type of targeted traffic you can get.

To take advantage of this, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions of the search results, and the way to do this is through search engine optimization (SEO).

Why do you need top-page rankings? The reason is simple: most search engine traffic goes to websites appearing in the first 5 positions, so if you want to get a portion of the targeted traffic, you need to have a presence there.

Furthermore, it’s not enough to appear on top; it has to be for search terms related to your business offerings.

How do you optimize your website to appear high in the SERPS for the keywords that matter for your business?

By combining the different types of SEO together and by providing the right type of content to both search engines and users.

Here is an overview of the SEO process:

Step 1

The first step is to ensure that search engines can access and index your pages without problems. In the SEO world, this is known as technical SEO.

The way search engines work is by crawling the web and adding the available pages to their index so that they can be taken into account by the ranking algorithms.

If your website is not optimized for the technical SEO phase, your pages won’t be part of the search engine’s index, and they won’t appear for any searches.

Step 2

The second step is to ensure that search engines can understand the context of your content. This is achieved by sending them various signals through your content.

This process of writing SEO-friendly content is known as on-page SEO.

Step 3

The third step is to get references from other related websites on the Internet. By references, we mean links pointing from other websites to your website. In the SEO industry, this is known as off-page SEO.

Why are backlinks important? The Google algorithm considers incoming links as ‘votes of trust’ and this can positively influence the position your website appears in the SERPS for a given keyword.

So, if you want to get a tiny share of the overall traffic generated by Google and other search engines, is to make sure that your website is SEO optimized.

2. Run paid search campaigns

Besides SEO, another way to get targeted search traffic is to use platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads. These platforms allow you to run paid campaigns and show your ads in Google and Bing's search results for specific keywords.

Unlike SEO, which can get you traffic for free, in the case of paid search advertising, you pay the search engine a fee every time someone clicks on your ads. In digital marketing, this is known as pay-per-click advertising.

PPC campaigns are the fastest way to get targeted traffic. It’s a method suitable for new and established websites, with immediate results.

The downside is that, in many cases, the costs are high and won’t leave you any margin to make a profit. In addition, it’s a bad business plan to be 100% dependent on paid advertising.

So, if you’re starting an online business now and want to get targeted traffic fast, you can start with PPC ads, but at the same time, you also need to start working on your SEO.

Your goal should be to reach a point where you can get more free traffic from search engines and gradually minimize your paid advertising spend.

3. Run targeted social media campaigns

Until very recently, traffic from social media was considered non-targeted, and while this is not completely wrong, things have changed dramatically in the last couple of years.

All major social networks (think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn) have improved their algorithms to make social networking more targeted.

To get targeted traffic from social media networks, utilize their advertising platforms and run paid campaigns.

While you cannot use keyword-based targeting (like Google Ads), you can show your ads to a very specific set of people using other targeting conditions like the location of the user, device, age, gender, educational status, and interests.

This flexibility offered by social networks allows advertisers to segment the audience into groups and show them different ads, simulating the steps and groups of a typical sales funnel.

Example of how you can get targeted traffic from Facebook

For example, let’s say that you want to use Facebook to promote your online courses to the US audience, your campaigns could look like this:

Campaign #1 (General) - Target people in the US between the ages 25-55 interested in ‘Digital Marketing’ topics.

Campaign #2 (Targeted) - Target people who interacted (shared, saw your video, liked, commented) on your previous ad campaigns.

Campaign #3 (Highly targeted) - Target people (from campaign #2) that visited your sales pages because of a Facebook ad.

4. Optimize your website for mobile traffic

While this is pretty much the same as search engine traffic explained above, it is worth noting that if you are after targeted traffic from mobile visitors, you need to have a mobile-friendly website; otherwise, you will not be able to reach users on mobile.

Google is very serious about mobile search, and if your website is not optimized for mobile, it will not be included in the Google search results or, to be more precise, it won’t have any chance of achieving high rankings on mobile search.

A website optimized for mobile has the following characteristics:

• It’s easy to use and looks good on all devices
• It loads fast (less than 3 seconds)
• It allows users to perform the same actions as the desktop
• It has the same or closely related content as the desktop
• It has no vertical scroll bars
• The text is easy to read and the buttons are large enough to be accessible by hand

If any of the above conditions are not met, you won’t rank high in search and your PPC and Facebook campaigns are likely to fail since the majority of users on all networks in using mobile devices and not desktop.

So, if you want targeted traffic, follow a mobile-first approach when designing your website and landing pages.

5. Create a native mobile app

For many, this may be a surprise but native mobile apps can drive targeted visits to a website and let me explain why.

A native mobile app (either for Android or iPhone) is uploaded to the mobile markets and in order to download it, users have to perform certain actions (search for it, find it, and download it).

The fact that users are searching for something specific makes them targeted and if you can manage to satisfy their needs, you can win customers (if you are selling something) or new readers (if you are a content publisher).

How can you drive targeted traffic to a website through a mobile native app? In practice, this is a bit more complicated than creating an app and uploading the app to the mobile markets.

You have to think about what type of app to create, how to promote your app so that it is not lost in the millions of apps already available in those markets and most importantly how to make mobile app users visit your website and perform an action.

The application should offer useful and valuable information to users so that there is an incentive for them to download.

Depending on the type of website the application can either take full advantage of the device capabilities and offer users a different experience or give them an alternative way to access the website content on their mobile devices.

How to get more visits from the app? Through the app notification system. Whenever new content is published on your website, mobile app users will get notified.

If you take into account that the average person checks their phones 110 days per day, some of them will click on the notification and visit your app and some of them will follow a link or internal banner and visit your website.

The number of visitors you can get using this method is not comparable to search engine traffic or paid ads but it is highly targeted.

6. Invest in content marketing

One of the digital marketing channels that can generate highly targeted traffic to a website is content marketing.

Through content marketing, you can set a strategy to create content to target a specific audience.

The way this is done is by doing keyword research to find out what the users are searching for on Google and build SEO campaigns to target the keywords that are relevant to your business.

To make sure that you’re targeting the right audience with your content, you need to go after keywords that have a high level of intent. These keywords are generally referred to as long-tail keywords.

Here is an example to understand this better. Let’s assume that you have a product that helps people plant beautiful red tomatoes.

While doing your keyword research you’ll notice that keywords like ‘tomato plant’ or ‘when to plan tomatoes’ have a high search volume.

This is great, but it is more likely that these people in the early stages of planting tomatoes don’t need your product. So, even if you manage to achieve high rankings for those terms, you’ll get a lot of traffic, but you won’t make a lot of sales because the traffic is not targeted.

If, on the other hand, you create content around ‘why are my tomato plants turning yellow’, you’ll probably make a lot of sales since the traffic is targeted. People have a very specific problem and you have a great solution for them.

So, to use content marketing to drive more targeted traffic to your website, you need to consider the intent of the user and not the popularity of a keyword.

7. Retarget visitors with social media ads

It is normal that the majority of users visiting your website will not perform the actions you want. Most of them will come and go, others will spend some time on the website and then leave while others will become customers or subscribers.

One of the ways to win users back and eventually turn them into customers is through retargeting campaigns.

As shown in the diagram above, through retargeting you can show ads (on Google or Facebook) to people that already visited your website once.

This method works because people are already aware of your brand, so when they see a relevant ad while on Facebook or Google, they are most likely to revisit your website. This is also the reason why these people are considered to be highly targeted.

One way to improve the performance of your retargeting campaigns is not to target everyone who visited your website but only those people who performed a specific action.

For example, you can segment your audience to only include users who visited more than one page or spent more than 60 seconds on your website.

Key Learnings

Targeted traffic is very important for a website's or online business's long-term success. Users visiting your website with a specific intent in mind, are more likely to perform an action (becoming customers, subscribing to a newsletter, sharing on social media) than ‘normal’ visitors.

Search engine traffic, whether it is organic or paid, is the best form of targeted traffic you can get.

In order to get organic search traffic from search engines, you need to do two things:

1. Ensure that your website is optimized for SEO
2. Target long-tail keywords through your content.

Besides SEO, you can also utilize paid search campaigns, paid social media campaigns and mobile native apps to target users that are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

Last but not least, to maximize the results of all other campaigns, you can use retargeting to get people to re-visit your website and perform an action.