Before talking about referral traffic, you have to know that the performance of a website is important when it comes to achieving the desired results when implementing a digital marketing strategy. This is because your website is literally your own company on the web. Therefore, it needs to have a 24-hour presence, just like a branch office.
Similarly, your website needs to be among the first places in search engines, Google being the most used currently. The user experience is key to your website, as this determines whether they will make purchases and if they will generate more visits to it. This is known as traffic.
The traffic of a website can be measured and for this, there are certain tools to do so. Google offers the most complete one and, if you have access to it, you can see everything concerning the visits that your website generates. This way you can organize your strategies to make the traffic to your site increase significantly.
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What is referral traffic?
The word “referral” is the English word for “referred” or “referral”. It is used to define the action of a link: to take a user from one web page to another, through such links.
Referral traffic can be understood as users who go to your website through other websites via links and not through search engines such as Google, without using keywords found on your website.
It is a metric that becomes important when you are going to implement a digital marketing campaign. As you can see, Google Analytics, Google’s tool for viewing website statistics, interprets referral traffic as the origin of the traffic that comes to your website by other means. These means are different from the aforementioned search engine and also, it is different from paid traffic means.
What can you get from this metric?
To begin with, when you start getting this kind of traffic, it’s because other websites are linking their own content to yours. This is because they are considering it as relevant. This is good because other website and blog administrators see that what you publish is useful, quality and valuable.
Being part of a digital network where you can gain presence and increase referral traffic metrics is great, because you can get more customers for your business and even monetize your own page. All this among other advantages that are not achieved only with organic traffic.
Likewise, it increases your digital presence if other websites relate their content to yours. It is a way to improve the public relations of your business or your blog, just like in real life. When third parties recommend your company or your products, it is something that positively impacts profits.
Example of a referral link. A blog has written a mention in an article on your page and includes a link to our site. In Google Analytics these visits would be identified as referral traffic source.
You should keep in mind that referral traffic is important to optimize your site, since reputable companies and important blogs do not want to have links to other pages that do not generate value and do not contribute anything to their users. Likewise, you can see the sites that are linking to your content and see if they are equally important.
Therefore, analyzing referral traffic correctly gives you valuable information about your content, if it is interesting and valuable to the users who click on the links to go to your page. As well as for the other businesses and blogs that link to your content.
Develops referral traffic
Referral traffic is developed through various channels, which will help you increase this type of traffic and make your site valuable on the web. Possibly, blog comments and social media management are the first ways to develop it, but there are other more effective ways.
The most important social networks are those that have the largest number of active users worldwide. So Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and others are ideal for developing a strategy to increase referral traffic.
If you have your company, business or brand registered on social networks, you have probably realized that they have a global reach and, surely, you have expanded your market niche. So, if you put your company’s links in your social media posts, your followers and friends will visit them and you will be developing referral traffic.
This is because Google’s advanced algorithm recognizes users who have clicked on the links in your posts. By doing this, it is recognizing them as referral. Remember that this type of traffic is the one you generate when users do not search for your blog through the search engine.
For this social media referral traffic strategy to be successful, use some activity monitoring and post scheduling tools. They are important because they will provide you with important information about the times when users are most active on social networks.
In this way, with a scheduling tool, you can leave your publications ready much earlier and schedule them to be published at set times, when social networks report more activity, of course. Likewise, if you actively interact with your followers, you will amplify the reach of your publications and traffic will be directed to your website.
Participates in forums and comments on other blogs
A very effective way to get referral traffic is to write assertive comments that generate value in forums and blogs. In these comments, it is necessary to put the links that you want other users to visit.
You just have to be careful in the way you do it. This is because they may report your comments as spam if you only write posts inserting links and blatantly inviting them to visit your website.
If you do it right, other users will see your comments, interact with you in a natural way and will go to the site you want through the links you posted. But, it may happen that you have not been careful and the administrator of the forum or blog sees you as an intruder or a spammer. If you are detected, this will negatively affect the name of your online business, so be careful.
Another thing you should not do is to copy and paste a comment you made in all the forums and blogs in which you have participated. It is imperative that you make the comments accompanied with the links adapting to the subject matter and discussion of each of the websites.
You have to be an active user and not be seen as a nuisance by the other participants. Therein lies the secret of inserting links in the comments of this type of web pages.
Guest Post or Guest Blogging
The guest post is probably the most effective technique to develop referral traffic to your website. In this way, you will get this type of traffic in an effective, lasting and higher quality way. This is because you will be investing in a direct relationship with another website where you have control of the content and information you want to spread.
- When you are invited to write content on another blog or website, you are doing so in your own name and on behalf of your brand or business.
- Users will see a kind of biography of the author of the article with a direct link to your website.
- You’re going to have links pointing to the content you really want your users to see.
- You will gain a long-term relationship with the sites that are interested in guest posting with you and gain access to their followers.
Work on linkbuilding
This technique offers efficient results, just like guest blogging. This is because, thanks to link building, you must look for a base of links from other pages that appear in the first positions of Google searches. Most of them are the ones with the best metrics and, if you link to them, part of that authority will be transferred to your website.
- You can measure the amount of traffic generated by a website you are interested in.
- Metrics are shown for the country where the most traffic comes from.
- You should look at the content that the site or blog has to generate value to your links when you direct them to your own website.
- It allows you to keep track of the links you have built over time.
Through linkbuilding, you can develop long-lasting relationships with the administrators of other sites that are linking to you. So, if you make quality content that generates value, you will increase your audience, thanks to the fact that other people read what you have published.
How to view referral traffic metrics?
To see your website traffic metrics and, in this case, to see how much referral traffic you generate, Google Analytics is the tool that can help you with this. You just have to access directly to this tool and follow these steps.
First, once you are inside Google Analytics, click Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
You can also view the websites that derive the most referral traffic from your own site. To do this, go to the section Acquisition > All traffic > Source/Medium. There you will be able to see all the metrics about these sites.
How to optimize referral traffic
First of all, you need to be clear that optimizing referral traffic is complex. This is because it does not depend entirely on you, nor on your skills as a webmaster or programmer. However, this does not mean that you cannot do certain things that will improve the traffic to your website in the short term.
- You should suggest that other administrators place your link in the first paragraphs of the article where it will go. This way, users will be interested in what is behind the text that is pointing to your site.
- Stop trying to get pages that have nothing to do with what you write to link to your website. This is because readers of the site in question will not click on your link in the first place. They will not consider it as interesting or important. Secondly, Google crawls this type of links and subtracts optimization points.
- Incentivize users to click on links through calls to action (CTA). If they are interested and read a natural, non-intrusive call to action, they will visit your page.
- Suggest to the webmasters of your partner blogs to mark your links graphically. If there are eye-catching and friendly links with the blogs’ interface, users will be interested in your website.
- Promote through social networks the articles in which your links have been inserted. This is a way that both you and the blog administrator, who is your partner, win in equal parts.
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