When businesses start a website, the first question that pops up is how to bring traffic to the site. This is a perennial challenge that never goes away. You either struggle to reach essential people or feel you could do more in increasing footfalls to your site at any given point in time. But growing traffic in 2022 is not as simple as a decade ago. Thanks to SEO, backlinks, and hundreds of other factors, marketers and business owners often find themselves in a sea of disparate opinions. 

We have decided to bring order to the chaos by listing the essential steps you need to follow. These strategies should be a good starting point for driving traffic to your site and increasing backlinks in 2022.

1. Pay attention to on-page SEO 

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing your website content to improve search engine visibility. It includes technical and not-so-technical factors to help web crawlers identify the content. Since we're focusing only on points that matter the most, here are five things you need to include in your on-page SEO checklist:

• Keywords: Keywords are still the first thing Google notices when identifying search results for a query. Keep the keywords in URLs and titles and mention them at least once in the first 200 words. Optimize your content for keywords with Surfer SEO, Clearscope, or similar tools. But remember to avoid keyword spamming.
• Meta texts: Meta titles and meta descriptions are the texts that offer readers necessary details in SERPs before they click on a link. Meta titles should be 60 characters, and meta descriptions should be less than 160 characters. Meta descriptions should tease readers about the value of the post and encourage them to click through. Don't forget to add keywords in meta texts. 
• Internal links: Internal links help search engines identify the topical authority of a website while ranking it for related keywords. You should carefully link to other articles, product pages, and resources that offer additional details for the topic cluster. 
• Page experience: Ever since the core web vitals update, websites have focused on improving readers' experience. Create a fast, responsive, mobile-friendly website without spammy ad practices to ensure readers enjoy browsing your posts. 
• Write content that helps: With so much focus on gaming SEO, businesses tend to forget that the readers decide which websites to visit. Include authoritative, helpful, and visually delightful content with clear structure (H1, H2, etc., and white spaces) in your content marketing strategy to make people glued to your site. 

2. Invest in software that will help with Page Optimization

Having the ability to make edits to your backlinks is an integral part of increasing your website traffic.

Unfortunately, too many systems make it difficult for non-technical users to make these adjustments.

Thankfully, with Agility CMS, editors can seamlessly add and edit links, create backlinks, and produce URL redirects.

3. Write guest/ blog posts 

Guest posts follow a simple philosophy: get mentioned by sources who command authority in that space. Google uses the same philosophy to detect which websites mention you or link back to your website. By writing guest posts on these authoritative sites, you get backlinks to your website. This hugely improves trustworthiness and domain rating and encourages Google to rank your posts. 

You can use Google search operators to search for websites accepting guest posts in your niches. A couple of popular queries would be:

• {Keyword} {"submit a guest post"}
• {Keyword} {intext:"guest post guidelines"}

Alternatively, you can manually browse the websites in your industry that you are interested in and see if they have guest posts published on their blog.  If so, don't hesitate to reach out and pitch your topics. Guest posting services can also take your curated list of blog targets and help make acquiring placements easier.

4. Get listed in review directories.

People have something to say about you if you're offering a service or selling a product. Getting listed in review directories doesn't just help you build social proof; it's also one of the most effective ways to increase backlinks and bring potential traffic to your websites. People will rate your business and talk about it if you're listed in G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, or Clutch. You'll have a separate business page with inbound links to your site in many cases. If you're doing a good job, this will attract problem-aware visitors looking for similar solutions. This way, you'll build quality traffic and close deals faster. 

5. Share your content in an email newsletter.

When you're looking to build traffic, email newsletters can surprise you in many ways. By sending weekly or monthly emails, you're constantly conversing with your audience, encouraging them to visit the embedded links to your website more frequently. In general, traffic coming from emails is more qualified than SERP traffic and improves audience engagement rate. This may sound like a good idea to retain an existing customer base, but email sign-ups can also be attributed to personal branding. For example, if you're a popular thought leader on LinkedIn, you can nudge your followers to subscribe to your newsletter, which eventually talks about your business. This way, you attract new traffic to your website. 

6. Improve your site's SEO by refreshing outdated content

SEO is a continuous process — businesses cannot have a "set it and forget it" outlook toward website traffic. Imagine this: you create a pillar post or a top-of-the-funnel content for your primary keywords. You hit publish and find it ranking number one within a week. You are happy to move on to the following article and quickly forget about this one. It won't be rare to find the same article dropping to the second page within a few months or years.

It's good to refresh old content and repurpose it across platforms to gain an SEO boost. For instance, a 2018 article should look vastly different in 2022. You can add new data, insights, interviews, case studies, and videos and trim old content to bring it up to speed. Occasionally revisiting old content and updating them is a nice little trick that most marketers miss out on, but this can do wonders for your evergreen posts. 

7. Reach out to bloggers 

Influencer marketing is all the rage today, and bloggers form a significant part. Bloggers running popular blogs attract a sizable and dedicated readership to their sites every day. You can tap into the opportunity in two ways:

• Reach out to the bloggers in your niche to include backlinks to your website or specific pages in relevant articles. They can even create a dedicated report to spread the word about your business.
• Invite the bloggers to your podcast or for a Q&A on your website to share their knowledge. The influencers will bring their audience to your channels and offer unique insights to your audience. 

Both of these approaches will boost your website traffic, improve your backlink profile and help you foster partnerships in the industry. 

8. Create an active YouTube channel

Not many marketers or business owners look forward to investing in a YouTube channel, but the results are surprisingly good. According to Similarweb, YouTube gets over 35 billion visits a month, and the visitors usually stay for around 20 minutes. You can repackage existing content as video scripts and run webinars and interviews to gain viewers. 

Visual content like videos has greater retention power, so if your videos are of high quality, they'll lead viewers to your website. 

9. Advertise on Google

SEO will not be the ideal strategy to gain traffic if you have a reasonable budget but are short on time. Since SEO it's often a long-term game, suitable old digital ads might take you there faster. 

You can race ahead of your competitors with PPC ads. Google Ads for SERPs and Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/LinkedIn ads for social media channels should get you immediate traffic. The goal here is to be incredibly precise in your channel of choice. Create an unavoidable offer and ad copy, tweak campaign settings, language and locations and be willing to spend! 

We have covered all the essential steps you need to follow to bring visitors to your site. The above steps should help you strengthen your SEO strategy and backlink profile, boost traffic and gain brand reputation with time. If you're looking for short-term gain, go with Google Ads, but if you're in it for the long haul, invest in SEO.