New websites are launched every single day.

In fact, over 140,000 sites are created daily.

That’s an extraordinary number, but how do all these new domains get web traffic? Real users that read or engage with what is being output. Well, the simple answer is they don’t.

The majority of new sites will not get many (if any) users – regardless how informative it is, or how innovative your product or service is.

How do you get web traffic?
For the general site owner, there are two ways of getting traffic.

You can pay to run digital marketing campaigns (like pay-per-click / AdWords, or social media campaigns), or you can work on setting up your website to be found naturally via search engines (SEO).

Basically, “paid” versus “organic”.

With marketing campaigns, you’ll gain instant traffic. But you still need those users to engage and convert (complete an action) – get users to sign up for your service, read your content, buy your product, sign up for your services, etc. How well that goes, depends on your website.

Depending on your budget though, you may not want to keep spending money on advertising or PPC campaigns to attract more customers.

With natural or organic traffic, there are a lot of factors at play that will increase your site’s authority, and boost your site’s search engine rankings.

So, it doesn’t matter if you pick paid and / or organic – your website needs to be set up correctly. Whether you’re still planning a new site, or looking to improve your current one, this guide can help you gain valuable website traffic.

1) Preparing your website
The first step is to help create the best platform for your content.

As mentioned earlier, there are over 140,000 sites being launched daily. WordPress alone is used to create tens of thousands of sites each day.

With all this competition, it’s important that your site checks each box on the “SEO-friendly” list.

Google Search Console / Analytics
To get a general idea of your site health, create a Google account for your site to set up a few key tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Google Search Console – Signing Up

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is a simple way to see how your site performs, and if there might be issues in how Google “sees” your site.

After creating your account, add your website address in the blank field, and click the “Add a Property” button.

You will be asked to download a small HTML file, which should be uploaded to the main folder of your website (via ftp or through your host account).

After uploading, click on the provided link to double-check to see if that was correctly done. A simple page with one line of text containing the text in your html file, will appear.

Tick the “I’m not a robot” box to show you are a real user, and click the “Verify” button to finish up. If successful, this proves that you are the site owner, or at the minimum you are allowed access to the site files.

Now give Google 2 to 3 days to scan through your site, and report its finding back to you. Especially important will be the “Crawl errors” section, which will show you if there any pages / sections that Google can’t access.