Referral traffic is traffic that comes to your website via sources other than the search engines. If you have a Google Analytics account, you can easily see which traffic has come from the search engines and which is referral traffic.
Even if most of your traffic comes through Google and Bing, you should still be taking advantage of this other sources of traffic if you run an insurance business online. Who knows, you may even find that it becomes more important to you than visitors from the search engines.
Ask yourself: are you exploring all the referral traffic you could be attracting? The answer is probably not. If so, here are three key areas you could be looking into to generate more traffic to your site.
1. Get your content recommended on other blogs
Some blogs will provide a weekly or monthly round-up of the best blog posts for their readers. If you can find any such blogs in your niche, you may want to recommend your own blogs for inclusion in the round-up.
This requires having high-quality content in the first place because the blog will only want to share the best content with its readers.
2. Native advertising
Native advertising is a form of advertising that is becoming increasingly popular. After you finish reading an article on a news website, you may see a list of other articles, often with images, under headings like ‘related articles’.
You can pay to have your content featured on such sites by signing up for services like Zemanta and Outbrain. Your content will then be displayed on related websites, which could become a source of referral traffic.
3. Guest blogging
Guest blogging allows you to get traffic from important blogs and websites in your industry – all you have to provide in return is free content.
Don’t do this just for the links. Although links from guest blogging can be useful for your SEO over time, you are better off doing it for the exposure it brings and the referral traffic it can lead to.
You are likely to get more traffic from larger blogs that have more readers. However, if you get guest posts published on numerous blogs, this can lead to an increase in traffic over time no matter how large the blogs are.
Boost your referral traffic today
There is no reason why you should rely wholly on the search engines to send visitors to your website. Although SEO is useful, it is not the only way to get traffic and conversions.
Try out these three techniques to see if they work for you. Over time, you may find that they can provide you with significant amounts of targeted traffic, so start experimenting today.
