How to Market a Website: 14 Ways to Drive Traffic

Today, it’s often far easier to build a website than it is to get people to visit it. The competition for people’s online attention has never been more fierce. Thankfully, whether you have a massive marketing budget or none at all, there are many ways to ensure that more of the right people find and visit your site. 

Many marketing channels just require time and energy. But almost all of them can be enhanced by advertising. Major social media networks and search engines have built-in advertising platforms, and others can be coupled with traditional online and offline advertising methods. What makes the most sense for your site ultimately depends on the resources you have available, your skill set, your market, your brand, and your site. 

You’ll likely need to try a combination of approaches until you start seeing results. Marketing your website is an ongoing, iterative process, so it’s smart to continuously test different channels and tactics to see what works for you.

Here are 14 ways to start marketing your website. 

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

People use search engines to solve problems, answer questions, find products or services, and explore topics. It’s an information hunt. Google, Bing, and other search engines want to help them find what they’re looking for. So you need to be what they’re looking for.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about turning your webpages into the best results for searches that relate to your site. That work can be intimidating, but it helps to think about SEO as three key components:

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO
3. Technical SEO

On-page SEO is about the quality of your content and ensuring that what you put on your pages actually matches what people are looking for. Off-page SEO is about building links to your pages from other websites, which helps Google see your page as a quality resource. And technical SEO is more about your site’s performance — things like page load times, screen compatibility, and indexing. 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is about making your pages fit peoples’ needs. This all starts with keyword research, which is where you’ll learn about the pages people are looking for. And while there are a lot of advanced (and expensive) SEO tools out there like Ahrefs or Semrush, there are plenty of free options, too. Ahrefs has a helpful list of them here. You can use these to help gauge how many people search for a topic and how they search for it. Then you can start looking into what pages and sites currently show up when people search for those topics, and reverse engineer something better.

For example, as you explore the top results, you may find that some explain what something is, others discuss how to do it, and still others provide real-world examples, but none of them do all three. Maybe your page could be more helpful to more people by filling in the gaps. Or perhaps the information in the top result is just plain wrong or outdated, and you could provide a better result simply by being accurate.

But before you worry about whether your website shows up when people search for some niche topic, you want to make sure that people can find you when they’re looking for you. Your brand. Your business. Your website. Because your site should be the most helpful result for someone looking to learn anything about your brand. 

Then you want to make sure they find you when they’re looking for products or services like yours. After that, you can start looking into the popular topics that are most adjacent to your product category — the things that your target audience searches for that relate to what you do.

Google has their own guide to producing quality pages, and it essentially boils down to their acronym, E-E-A-T. Quality content demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Off-page SEO

When it comes to off-page SEO, link building, or the process of getting other pages to link to your content, is the main action to consider. You’ll want to consider both:

1. Internal link building (interlinking the pages of your site)
2. External link building (getting other sites to link to yours)

Internal link building helps optimize your site for search engines by: 

• Increasing the value your content provides to readers. Every internal link should point them to other helpful, relevant content on your site.
• Helping search engines discover content on your site as they crawl from page to page.
• Passing “page authority” from one page to the next. Your high-status pages can lend a little credibility to other pages on your site by linking to them.
• Signaling which pages are “important” to search engines. For example, lots of internal links to a page about “How to Create a Web App” tells a search engine that, of all the pages on your site, this is probably the one that people should find when they search queries about ways to build web apps.

External link building, or getting other sites to link to yours, works by:

• Signaling authority and credibility to search engines. Links from high-quality sites suggest that the linked content was valuable enough for the referring site to reference it, so it’s probably a good resource on whatever topic it’s about.
• Receiving exposure and traffic from other sites that refer to your pages helps search engines see those pages as better references.

While you have complete control over internal link building, external link building can be trickier. Producing quality content can sometimes be enough, but you’ll also want to think about ways to make your content a more useful reference (and harder to copy).

SEO is an ongoing process, but if you make a significant time investment upfront, it pays dividends later on by ensuring that you focus your efforts on building the pages (and types of pages) that bring the most people to your website.

Note: Your website architecture affects all three components of SEO (on-page, off-page, and technical), so it’s smart to familiarize yourself with how your site’s structure can make your site more (or less) helpful.

SEO checklist

2. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is about putting your brand where your target audience spends their time. While this can certainly include advertising, which is paying to put your brand in these spaces, this section will focus on how you can market your website by participating on social media platforms.

There are well over 100 different social media platforms you could use to market your website, but different platforms tend to be used to do different jobs and meet different needs. You probably don’t need to market across every social network‌ — ‌instead, it’s smart to focus your social media marketing efforts on a handful of places where your target audience is likely to find your brand presence valuable. (If you’re not sure what communities your target audience tends to frequent, audience research tools like Sparktoro can be a huge help!)

This means if your website is more geared toward people from particular countries, age groups, genders, professions, or levels of expertise, you want to focus on the social platforms that have the most overlap or provide the best access to that audience. Think about how people use each platform, and whether you can market your website in a way that aligns with that typical usage. For example, if you’re going to market your website through TikTok, you’ll likely need someone on your team who’s comfortable on camera. If you’re going to post on LinkedIn, you’ll need someone you can position as a thought leader in your industry.

Whatever platform you choose, know that social media marketing is a long-term strategy that will require significant ongoing investment. Many platforms and external tools let you schedule posts in advance, but if you truly want to grow a brand and market your site on a platform, you have to actually use that platform. And that means interacting more directly with people through comments and messages. You may need to join niche groups and play an active role in them. Some of these groups may allow you to post about your website, but a lot of them won’t, and you’ll simply have to market your site by being a helpful contributor to the group.

Social media gives you an opportunity to publicly represent your brand, and when you want to market your website on a platform, you should treat every interaction as though it’s public to everyone, rather than a private interaction. Every comment and every reply is an opportunity to expose more people to your brand and the value your site can provide, and when people see how you interact with others, it affects their perspective of (and interest in) your website.

Social media marketing checklist

3. Email marketing

When you have an email list, you control how you use that audience. Every email can include links to your site without necessarily decreasing your engagement. They just need to be relevant.

There are three main challenges with using email marketing to promote your website:

1. Getting people to opt in to your mailing list
2. Retaining subscribers by providing value
3. Deriving value from subscribers

The first problem can feel like a bit of a “chicken or the egg” situation, because the best place to grow an email list is often on your website — but you need traffic to do that. If you don’t already have web traffic, one of the most effective ways to grow an email list is through advertising. The key is to have a compelling offer. This could be a free resource, or better yet, value that comes from the list itself. Perhaps signing up for your email list provides exclusive offers for products or services available on your website, or unique insights that come from your data, expertise, perspective, or research.

But you don’t just have to give people a reason to sign up — every email needs to earn people’s attention and give them a reason to stay on your list. For example, let’s say they did sign up for your email list to get exclusive offers. Now you can regularly email these folks with special deals that send them back to your site, either linking them to sale pages or arming them with a coupon code. Then you can see which types of deals get the best engagement and refine your approach from there. Or perhaps people signed up for your expertise. In that case, you can send emails whenever you share new expert insights on your website, or you can share insights more frequently in your emails, and just link to any relevant pages on your site. 

In both of these cases, you provide value to your subscribers and get value from them (by bringing them back to your site).

Email marketing checklist

4. Podcasting

Podcasting may not come to mind right away when you think about marketing a website, but a quality podcast can easily generate interest in your site and drive listeners to specific pages. People are used to hearing detailed ads on podcasts, and it would be perfectly natural to use these opportunities to plug your website. Better yet, make the podcast related to your product, service, or whatever your website does — then it can work alongside your website and regularly refer to what you’re doing there.

For example, if your website helps connect people with niche healthcare services, your podcast might interview professionals who provide that care and can be found on your website. This creates natural opportunities to point listeners to your website and reinforces the value it provides by helping them discover providers like those you interview.

Alternatively, you can use podcasts to market your website without actually producing a podcast yourself! Being a guest on 20 different podcasts (or sponsoring them) will probably be more effective and easier to accomplish than producing 20 original podcast episodes. The key is finding podcasts that serve the same audience as your website.

Podcasting checklist

5. Reviews

If you sell a product or service, encouraging people to leave ratings or reviews can help bring more traffic to your website in a few ways. Depending on your industry, Google reviews may play a role in SEO, as Google prioritizes businesses with more and better ratings in relevant search results. Many third-party review sites (like Capterra or G2) also rank in results for some product or service categories, so having lots of ratings on these sites can increase your visibility and drive more traffic to your site.

Reviews that live on your site can be helpful as well. Reviewers may encourage others to read their reviews, but even if they don’t, having these on your site can help ensure that your site shows up first when people look for reviews of your brand.

Some people will leave reviews without any prompting, especially if they had a very positive or very negative experience. For everyone else, you may have to ask. Ideally, you’ll want to time your review requests around the actions people find most valuable — like after they’ve completed a key task or workflow on your site. 

In addition to driving traffic directly to your site, reviews also help build trust. As more people find your site trustworthy through quality ratings and reviews, it makes it easier to earn their attention because your website will stand out more compared to sites they haven’t built trust in yet. This also makes peoples’ attention more valuable, because more of the traffic that comes to your site will come from people who are more willing to accept whatever your site offers.

Review checklist

6. Loyalty programs

A loyalty program can be an excellent way to drive audience behavior and encourage repeat customers. With a loyalty program, you can directly incentivize desired audience behavior, like signing up to your email list, providing personal data, and making purchases. 

Starting a loyalty program means committing to continually provide special perks for your members, but it these can be as simple as a small discount or announcements about new products or services. Some businesses, like Starbucks and Chipotle, use a points-based loyalty program where customers earn points through purchases or other actions (such as referring a friend or joining an email list). Customers can then exchange points for discounts or free items. Others, like Sephora, use tiered systems where customers earn loyalty tiers based on how much they spend, with each tier unlocking better perks than the tier before. 

However you do it, a loyalty program helps you stay connected to your most engaged customers and drives some of the most valuable traffic you can get. Make sure your website has a dedicated page explaining how the program works, what customers can earn, and how to sign up.

Loyalty program checklist

7. Advertising

Advertising is the most sure-fire way to bring traffic to your site. It’s also typically the most expensive. This is attention you pay for with more than labor, but with the right channels, it’s guaranteed traffic.

In general, the more relevant your advertising audience is to your website, the lower your costs will be. Digital advertising can be a great way to learn which audiences are most receptive to your messaging. You can experiment on a smaller scale before putting too much of your budget behind a campaign, but the more you already know about your audience, the more cost-effective your investment will be.

Print advertising is harder to track (since it usually involves creating special URLs or coupon codes for a campaign) and may require more investment to get started. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Print publications often have detailed demographic data about their audiences, which can help you find opportunities for your website to reach more of the right people. Look for specific publications you know your audience reads or prominent local billboards your audience will see.

Since advertising can cost more than other forms of marketing, it’s important to think about the value of acquiring traffic before getting too invested. If you’re testing how traffic interacts with your site on a small scale or need a lot of visitors in a short time frame to meet a goal, it may be worth exploring. But advertising often makes it easy to see what you’re spending per visit, so you’ll need to consider what each website visit is actually worth to you.

Advertising checklist

8. Branding

Building a brand takes time, but when you do it successfully, people start seeking out your website directly, bringing you a steady stream of visitors. This happens passively over time as people use your website and have good experiences with it, but you can also accelerate the process by increasing your brand awareness.

There are two main ways to do this:

1. Defining and expressing your brand more clearly
2. Exposing more people to your brand

It’s hard to say how many brands you encounter on a daily basis — partially because most of them are so forgettable. Clearly defining and expressing your brand makes it stand out more, so it’s easier for people to remember. 

This doesn’t just mean having eye-catching brand elements (name, logo, tagline, color scheme, etc.). Those things are important, but clearly making your brand stand out involves exploring what your brand means. What should people associate with your website and the products, services, or content they find there? If you can pin this down and ensure that your website consistently gives people these impressions, it’ll be easier for people to remember what your brand is. So next time they’re looking for what your site offers, they’re more likely to think of your brand again.

Once you’ve solidified your brand, you can focus on getting more exposure — usually by coupling your branding efforts with your efforts in other areas described in this post. As always with marketing, this brand exposure is more valuable when you concentrate your effort on relevant audiences. But it’s important to remember that in some situations, an audience could become relevant, too. For example, Huggies and Pampers don’t focus all of their brand awareness campaigns on existing parents — because they want people that eventually become parents to already think of their brands as the default choices when they suddenly find themselves in need of diapers.

So as you grow your brand, consider who might find themselves in the market for what your site offers in the future, too.

Branding checklist

9. Word of mouth

It’s hard to beat word-of-mouth marketing. When people talk to their friends, families, and colleagues about your website, their recommendations can carry a lot of weight. Depending on the situation, they may even show your website to someone on the spot. But influencing and encouraging word of mouth is notoriously difficult. 

The challenge is to either do something your target audience feels is worth talking about or incentivize them to share about your site. This could be as simple as creating a piece of content that people want to share, maybe featuring new data relevant to your industry. Or you might try to drive user-generated content (UGC) through a contest. You could also create a referral program, where people share a unique code that earns them rewards for every person who takes an action through their link.

Word-of-mouth marketing can happen organically, but if you find a way to successfully encourage it, you can build a traffic feedback loop. More traffic leads to more word of mouth, which leads to more traffic, which leads to more word of mouth, and so on.

Word of mouth checklist

10. Demand generation

If no one knows about your product, service, or area of expertise, it can be a lot harder to get traffic to your website. You have to fight an uphill battle to show your audience why what you do matters. So when you’re marketing your website, part of your job is to generate demand for what your website does. Maybe you’ve solved a problem that no one knows is a problem. Or you’ve created a whole new kind of tool within an established product category. Perhaps you simply have a unique perspective.

Your website needs to be the definitive source for people to learn about why your offering matters, what it does, and how it differs from more familiar concepts. Then you need to talk about this concept. A lot. In as many different places as possible. Guest articles. Interviews. Conferences. Social media. Sales calls.

The more you can plant the idea that people need or should care about what your website does, the more they’ll want to learn more about it. And if your website is the best place they can do so, then increasing interest in your unique category will drive traffic to your site. And as others begin talking about this topic, your website will be the source they all point to, which will lead more visitors to you.

Demand generation checklist

11. Awards programs

Obviously, winning an award would be great for marketing your website. But hosting an award program is good for your site, too — and you don’t have to earn prestige to get started. The more you can tie the awards to your site, the better, but at the very least, make sure your site’s name is in the award’s name, and that you have pages on your site dedicated to the award.

An awards program helps market your website in a couple ways:

1. People may encourage their friends and coworkers to apply
2. Recipients can share about the award, or even display it on their websites
3. Journalists who report on your industry may publish about the award

Attention on the awards means attention on your website. Whether people link to the award page directly or simply cause people to search for it, it brings traffic to your site.

The more work you put into making the award look and feel meaningful, the more you can expect to get out of this marketing strategy. For example, you may want to do an in-depth write-up or video explaining the selection process and what the award signifies. Ideally, you should interview recipients and share the specific criteria they met to receive the award. This further encourages them to share about the award because it includes their public statements.

People will always be far more interested in applying for (and talking about) an award that involves an actual prize. A free scholarship or trip to a resort is going to attract a lot more attention than winning a digital badge, or even a physical trophy. If you can come up with a prize that’s relevant to your industry or relates to what your website does, even better. Of course, your award should also have some sort of asset for people to display and show off on their own site or any media coverage your program receives.(And of course, you’ll want any physical or digital awards to include the name of your website.)

Note that sometimes awards take time to get attention and feel more prestigious. This may work well for you the first year you give out awards, or you may need to do it for a couple years before people start taking it seriously. The more well-known your site is, the faster this marketing strategy will gain traction.

Awards program checklist

12. Giveaways

Giveaways can be a useful marketing tactic to energize your existing audience and introduce your site to new people. The trick here is to offer a prize that strikes the right balance between being broadly appealing (which attracts a lot of people, including many outside your target audience) and relevant (which attracts fewer people, but the right people). 

For example, years ago, an iPad was a classic giveaway prize, and iPad giveaways could easily attract thousands of entrants ... who’d never interact with your brand again. If your prize is too specific, however, like a free product or service you exclusively offer, you may have a harder time getting people to sign up, but you’ll know that everyone who does is at least interested in what your site has to offer.

Giveaways can also feed into other forms of marketing. Entrants may have to sign up for a special email list as a condition of entering the giveaway. Or perhaps sharing user generated content (UGC) is part of the requirements. This increases your touchpoints with entrants and helps you get more mileage out of each entry.

As a marketing tactic, giveaways are a short-term move that can get a lot of attention on your site fast, but this doesn’t always make a lasting impact on your site’s performance. So with the work and expense involved in running a quality giveaway, it’s important to make sure the entries are worth the time, cost, and effort.

Giveaway checklist

13. Content team-ups

Guest blogging is a common recommendation for website marketing, but it’s pretty outdated — and we can’t recommend it to you in good conscience. It used to be a popular guerrilla marketing strategy to build backlinks to your website by writing an article for someone else and then including links in the author bios or throughout the guest article itself. 

But it doesn’t really work like that anymore. Most sites that allow guest bloggers don’t let authors include links, because they often see it as helping “the competition” within their niche. And fewer sites are open to guest blogging to begin with — especially when it’s unsolicited. The sites that allow it? They’re often not worth the backlink they provide. And unless you promote your guest article, it’s unlikely to get much attention.

Content team-ups are a much better way to think about collaborating with other websites. It’s a lot more work than guest blogging, but the payoff is far greater, too. 

The idea is that you find people publishing content in your industry and then build actual relationships with them. Follow them on social media, and when they share content, talk about it. Share how their idea relates to your own experience in the industry, or to what you’re doing on your website. When they ask for input for something they’re writing, give it. Pay attention to the types of content or parts of the process that they seem to enjoy, or that they have the hardest time with. See how that aligns with your own strengths and interests. And then come up with an idea that lets you both participate in the process. Perhaps you have some new data that relates to a topic they’ve written about before. Maybe you have some original research they’d be interested in. Or you have years of experience and stories to help support a position you’ve seen them argue before. Maybe you’re just good at something they struggle with.

Instead of trying to simply write a blog post in exchange for a backlink, you invest in a relationship with a publisher who reaches your audience, and then see what content opportunities arise based on what you know about them, their capabilities, their interests, and yours. It may take several conversations about the industry and their content before any opportunities come up. But then you can work together to produce something you’ll both feel good about promoting.

Earn their trust first. Then earn their traffic.

Content team-up checklist

14. Partnerships

You want more attention on your website. Other sites, organizations, and influencers have attention they can send your way — if you can make it worth their while. Partnerships can be a useful marketing strategy that brings traffic to your site through one-off engagements or long-term relationships. It all depends on what you have to offer and who you’re offering it to. Influencers may simply require payment, or they may accept your product or service as payment. Organizations may be more interested in a collaboration effort, access to your data or resources, or an ongoing discount for their employees.

There are a few ways a partner could drive traffic to your site:

• Reviewing your site, product, or service
• Offering a limited-time version of your product or a specialized product configuration
• Announcing the partnership and/or giving the announcement a permanent placement on their website
• Hosting a giveaway

Whatever the partnership looks like, the more relevant it is to their audience, the more traction you can expect it to receive. Just remember: Before you pay someone for access to their audience, it’s important to‌ vet that audience. A big audience isn’t the same as an engaged audience. And while it’s easy to see a high follower count or a big email list and assume a partnership is worth pursuing, you want to be confident that investing in that partnership will actually bring people to your website.

Partnership checklist

Build new marketing webpages faster with Bubble

Marketing your website often requires publishing one-off pages. Sometimes these pages are unlike anything else on your website, with special forms, unique design, new database connections, and other features that you haven’t built on your website before. But even if you have, building these pages takes time and development resources.

With Bubble, you can build custom webpages — even advanced websites, web apps, and mobile apps — without ever touching a line of code. That’s because Bubble is a leading no-code development platform. Experienced developers can build websites and webpages faster, and even non-technical people can create professional custom sites with all the capabilities they need.

Whether you just want to expand your site with convenient marketing pages or you need to revamp the entire thing, Bubble is a full-stack solution that makes web development quick and easy.