5 Key Techniques To Increase Referral Traffic To Your Website

Referral traffic is an essential factor for SEO. With a competent approach, it significantly affects the position in search results and increases the organic traffic on the site. If you want to achieve the effective promotion of the site, the work on increasing referral traffic should be combined with other types of promotion. Together, it will give a tangible result.

In this article, you will find the answer to how to increase referral traffic. Read to the end. It will be interesting.

What is Referral Traffic

Referral traffic refers to the number of user clicks on links posted on third-party resources. The higher the traffic to your site, the more successful it is. After all, the income of the company directly depends on this parameter.

It is important that the traffic is relevant to the target audience of the site. If you use “gray” methods of promotion, most of the visits will be performed by bots. They will not buy the company’s products and will not use its services. It makes no sense. 

If you just attract all in a row, people or bots will come to the site and in a couple of seconds will leave. Therefore, its quality is also one of the most important conditions. The result of an Internet marketing campaign depends on it directly.

Referral Traffic Sources

Referral traffic is divided into several types:

1. Natural. Users follow links that are posted on forums or in social networks. This includes those who click on links from mailing lists.
2. Paid. Users follow paid links posted in promotional articles and guest posts on referral website. 

Natural referral traffic is generated naturally (without your direct involvement). That is, you work on the site, fill it with quality content, make it beautifully designed and publish relevant and interesting information about the products or services. And users who like your web resource and visual content share the link with their friends. 

Users can share interesting content on your site in a variety of ways:

• Sending the exact URL;
• Advise them to look at some products or read interesting publications;
• Repost to their social media account, and so on.
• They can also communicate in forums and other sites, recommending your site.

In this way, natural referral traffic increases. Keep it high and get even more visitors. You need to add quality content regularly to do this.

Paid referral traffic is classic link buying. Here you yourself control the process, so you need to carefully select the sites where advertising articles and posts will be placed. After all, you do not just need clicks, but the clicks of the target audience, which will be interested in the products/services. Otherwise, it will be a waste of money.

How to Analyze Referral Traffic

You can track referral traffic in your personal Google Analytics account. This tool is absolutely free, and anyone can use it. All you need to do is add your site to Google Analytics in advance and wait for some time (at least a month) for the necessary statistics to accumulate.

How to analyze referral traffic of your site:

1. Go to your personal Google Analytics account.
2. Select the Traffic Sources.
3. Find the Referral item in the table below.

Here you will see general statistics: number of sessions, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

The Importance of Referral Traffic

The most important sources of traffic:

• Search (users who came from search results for a key query);
• Directly (users who remembered the URL of the site or added it to bookmarks and came directly);
• Referral (users who came by the links posted on other sites).

Only by using these types of traffic in an integrated way, you will be able to fully reach all users. If you ignore referral traffic, the site will lose a certain number of users. At the same time, referral traffic greatly affects the results of promotion. Even more than search or direct.

First, the number of links placed (natural or paid) directly affects the authority of the site in search engines. And placing links – this is part of the external optimization, which is no less important than the internal optimization of the site.

Second, referral traffic increases site traffic. Referral traffic helps you get even more users and therefore even more customers. It works even when you have already reached a certain resource of unique users from other sources. 

Third, referral traffic directly affects behavioral factors. Search engines monitor the actions of users on the site. It is very important that users follow external links to your site and stay on the pages as long as possible. The longer and deeper users explore your site, the better it will be indexed by search engines. They are beginning to rank better and increase its position in search engine rankings. And because of this at the same time increases search and direct traffic. 

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to keep track of referral traffic. Control this process. This is the only way to promote the site will be more effective, and you can count on a very good return on investment.

5 Key Techniques to Increase Referral Traffic

Techniques #1: Guest posting

Guest posting is posting your information on another site with a link back to your site. Posts posted in this way are called guest posts. This is one of the key SEO tools. You can achieve tremendous success with guest posting. Believe me, guest posting is still effective in 2021-2022. All webmasters use it to attract organic and referral traffic. However, positive results are only possible with guest posting on the right sites. 

You can still create quality links through guest blogging that diversify the user experience by focusing on user intent. The special thing about guest blogging is that you start generating huge traffic through low-frequency queries.

You need to follow the following tips to get the guest blogging technique right:

• Write content in your niche. Research and reviews are most likely to be useful and get a lot of feedback. They take longer to create, but the results are amazing. You can also use articles with news summaries very effectively, as this allows us to provide “links” to other sites, You can use other, less popular types of content, such as podcasts, to attract traffic.
• Sign your content. Content created will have zero value if it doesn’t include the author’s name or at least the name of the company’s blog. 
• Write publicly available content. Some people start small and write in internal correspondence or on the corporate network. This helps build the skill of writing, but it’s not enough. If a company has a forward-looking blog with industry news, trends, research, that’s much better. The niche content you subscribe to should be publicly available.
• Link to reputable sites and authors. When creating content, it’s a good idea to interact with the big companies in your niche. If these companies are reverent about their content policies, they will definitely notice backlinks to their sites in your content. This will be a good way to make a name for yourself.

Also, don’t forget to incorporate Google search operators into your content to improve search traffic. 

Technique #2: Strategic commentary planning

Blog comments are an effective strategy that works. Most blog owners collect statistics on comments left to measure engagement. It’s not the most important metric, but it helps paint an overall picture regarding visitors, content, and your chosen strategy.

You can see for yourself and read this page, which describes the same tools for increasing referral traffic. 

Technique #3: Work with partners and affiliate networks

You can attract a lot of traffic through collaboration work with affiliate sites. However, you can also build relationships with visitors through offline work.

There are several ways for a content marketer to work with partners:

1. Sponsoring local events. You need to keep your finger on the pulse and track events with your target audience. Sponsoring local events is not too costly compared to the benefit of attracting a high percentage of leads to your site.
2. Speaking at local events. This is a good way to go in case you don’t have the funds for sponsorships. This approach of live communication with potential buyers stands out sharply against the ubiquitous advertising that so plagues blogs and the Internet in general.

Speaking at local events is a good way to develop public speaking skills. You can speak for free to promote your name. Eventually, you will become a popular expert in your field and start earning from both referral traffic and speaking engagements.

Technique #4: Posts on forums and Q&A sites

Forum posts are a terrific source of referral traffic. Forum discussions go on for years without fading. If you post links to your site there, it can potentially get you traffic for years to come. In addition, your company could become a sponsor of a particular forum. On Q&A sites, don’t spam users, and the information you post should be really useful. Make sure that you are screening. Answer questions that are viewed by many forum visitors, but do not have many answers. This will keep you from getting lost in the information noise.

Technique #5: Strengthening the brand

To increase referral traffic, strengthen your brand. Be bolder to go offline in addition to guest posting and social media activity. Speak at or sponsor local events. When you start to be perceived as an expert, other sites will start using your content as a kind of reference and will link to your site.

Resume

The described techniques and other cases will help you attract website referrals. Follow them to improve traffic to your site.