As an entrepreneur, you’ve most likely spent countless hours and dollars developing a website for your company. However, the harsh reality is that simply creating a website is insufficient. You must also drive traffic to your website in order to generate leads, convert customers, and increase revenue. Improving website traffic, on the other hand, is easier said than done. It is, however, not impossible with the right strategies and techniques.

We’ve helped multiple brands build their online business primarily through organic traffic growth. The goal has always been to focus on content and look at how we can create sustainable organic traffic for companies to complement their paid traffic.

Can marketing help Southeast Asian startups survive the recession? Terng Shing from SYNC answers the question.

In this article, we’ll look at some effective ways for entrepreneurs to increase website traffic with real-life examples.

Focus on SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practise of optimising your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords related to your business. When done correctly, SEO can bring a steady stream of traffic to your website. Here are some SEO best practises to keep in mind:

  • Perform keyword research to determine the most relevant keywords for your company.
  • Optimize your website’s on-page elements for your target keywords, such as title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and content.
  • As mobile searches account for the majority of searches, make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
  • Create backlinks to your website from trustworthy sources.

One of our clients that we support is Secretlab, who are the largest producers of gaming chairs in the world. We helped develop their main landing page to drive potential customers searching for “gaming chairs” around the world to their website. We identified that as the main keyword driving traffic to relevant platforms and focused our content around that term and derivatives of the phrase.

Social media is still a critical organic traffic tool

Any successful marketing strategy must include social media marketing. It’s an excellent way to reach and engage with your target audience, with billions of active users on social media platforms. Here are some strategies for maximising social media marketing to drive traffic to your website:

  • Share the content of your website on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
    • Depending on your target audience, the platform may change
    • B2B businesses often use LinkedIn as a primary social media platform
  • To attract and retain followers, create engaging content such as videos, images, and infographics.
    • Visuals or documents tend to be better on LinkedIn and most social media platforms
    • Video is still king for driving engagement and views
  • Make use of social media advertising to reach a larger audience.
  • Respond to comments and messages from your followers to engage them.

For brands like Giftee Malaysia and TrueMoney, we focus on LinkedIn as a platform to reach their target audience. It is a great platform to reach a B2B audience or stakeholders and also, has a rather favourable algorithm that increases views for our content. We build content that aims to engage relevant stakeholders such as potential partners and F&B businesses in Malaysia by developing relevant and value-adding content that they want to read.

Quality content matters more than volume

One of the most effective ways to increase website traffic is to create valuable content. When you create content that solves problems or answers questions for your audience, they are more likely to share it, which can lead to more traffic. Here are some best practises for content creation:

  • Conduct audience research to learn about the pain points and needs of your target audience.
  • To reach a larger audience, use a variety of formats such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics.
  • Create evergreen content that will be useful for a long time.
    • This is a critical trick that many content developers tend to miss out on. Building content that is trending and drives a spike of traffic is not as critical as driving a sustainable and regular amount of traffic per month
  • Use relevant keywords and internal linking to optimise your content for SEO.

We have worked numerous clients like ADA, D2L and more to develop long-form content that will remain relevant to their customers for years to come. Developing trending or news-like content is important, but does not sustain inbound traffic for very long. An article about “Conversational AI and how it works” would likely garner more traffic in the long-term compared to an article about “ChatGPT’s latest product update for March 2023”.

Leverage other brand’s platforms

Guest post, get on blogs, do interviews or just ask if you can trade articles on other websites, so that you can reach a wider audience and build backlinks to your website. This is important, because the broader your reach on relevant websites and brands, the more likely the right audience will be driven to your own website. Here’s how you do it:

  • Research websites in your industry that accept guest posts or have a podcast
  • Pitch your ideas to the website owner or editor.
    • Don’t over complicate things – what are you best at and do you have a great story to share
    • Focus on education rather than promotion
  • Write high-quality content that provides value to their audience.
  • Include a link back to your website in your author bio or within the content.
    • For podcasts, share your bio with them and link back to your brand

We do this for SYNC all the time. The number of times I’ve been on podcasts, given talks or written informational blog posts to help promote my brand is far too many to count. But, it helps. From improving our inbound traffic by about 20% per quarter to generating real inbound leads – it is a crucial part of our growth strategy.

Some of the great podcasts, I’ve been on include On My Own Terms, Konsyg Fireside Chats and Daily CMO.

I would love to hear what you thought about what I just shared and also, whether there is anything that you can use from what I shared. Leave a comment and I’ll be reviewing everything and responding.

The article titled “Content hacks to help build your website traffic” was contributed by Terng Shing, CEO and Founder of SYNC PR.

About the author

Terng Shing is the Founder and CEO of SYNC PR, a PR and content marketing startup that uses technology to reduce time wasting and administrative tasks in delivering results. Based in Singapore, Terng Shing has been focused on helping startups and SMEs build their brand story through media and content. Since 2018, SYNC has worked with over 300 startups, SMEs and MNCs to help them scale their business in Southeast Asia and beyond.

His experience includes a decade of work in PR and communications agencies, managing top-tier fortune 500 companies to the leading startups in Southeast Asia. Terng Shing has a passion for innovative communications and is convinced that PR is the next great industry to see positive disruption.

Terng is also the co-host of popular business podcast Business over Drinks and co-founder of travel platform Travel Wanderlust.