As marketers, one of the most common questions we get time and time again is, “How do I get more traffic to my site?” It’s a valid question, but let me stop you right there. Why is website traffic so important for your business? For popularity? Sure, it would be nice to be able to brag and say, “I had almost 1,000,000 website visitors last year,” but that’s not the point is it?
Every website needs traffic. If you aren’t attracting the right visitors, your website is destined to get lost in the vastness of the internet, and that doesn’t help you generate qualified leads, more sales, or achieve your goals efficiently.
Fortunately, I’ve got you covered. In my previous blog, I spoke about untapped sources that can drive quality traffic to your website. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out here. In this post, we’ll look at 12 case studies of companies who drove an astounding amount of traffic to their sites by making minor changes that cost little to nothing.
1. Namecheap
Namecheap is a domain name registrar that has been in business for over nine years. When they began back in 2007, they had just two people in marketing with almost everyone else focussed on customer service.
Here’s how Marketing Specialist, Michelle Greer, used Twitter to drive a massive increase in traffic and revenue.
The Strategy:
In December 2007, Michelle set up a Namecheap Twitter account to run a contest. Every hour she posted a Christmas-related trivia question. To win, you had to be one of the first three @replies with the right answer. The prize was a credit for one-year domain registration, and you needed a Namecheap account to receive it.
The contest did have its cost: Michelle’s time and attention for the entire month of December. However, the results were worth the effort. People were competing to be one of the first replies. Some even tweeted and blogged about it. Their follower count increased from 200 to 4000 in less than a month, followed by a steady growth in their follower base. Additionally, The Twitter contest gave them a 30% increase in traffic and domain registrations and almost $1 million in revenue. Talk about a Merry Christmas!
2. Superdry
Superdry is a UK-based apparel brand that launched its presence in India with a set of promotional events. The brand partnered with Brandmovers India to extend their mission online. Together they curated a unique Twitter campaign called “Superdry Tweet Fuel.”
The contest was simple: users had to follow the Superdry India Twitter account and tweet about where they would go for a #SuperDrive if they had the Morgan 3 Wheeler. Their tweets would then get converted into fuel for their car. The best tweets for different levels were featured on the micro site. They also gave out prizes like Superdry apparel and gift cards for the different level of tweets.
The campaign soon went viral reaching an audience of over 1.5 million people, generated over 2600 tweets, and racked up more than 5.4 million impressions within the first five days. On the day of launch alone, the campaign generated 1300+ tweets & 4.5 million+ impressions
With the rising number of young people on Twitter, digital campaigns like this can be beneficial for your business and be a crucial source of traffic for your website. From the above results we can conclude that the campaign with Brandmovers India acted as a catalyst for Superdry to kick-start their business in the Indian market.
3. Back-Linko
One of the most common misconceptions amongst internet marketers today is that simply publishing great content automatically leads to views and people linking to it. If only it were that simple. Publishing great content can generate high-quality links and traffic, but only if you promote it the right way and reach out to the right people.
Backlinko was founded by Brian Dean, an internationally renowned SEO and Content Marketing expert.
Here’s what he has to say:
“If you’re serious about generating high-quality links, you need to be very systematic with how you create and promote your content. Otherwise, you’re taking the ‘cooked spaghetti approach’: throwing a bunch of stuff against a wall and hoping something sticks.”
He follows what he calls “the skyscraper technique” which made the organic search traffic to his website shoot up like a rocket so much so that it doubled in just 14 days.
Take a look at their results below
The Skyscraper Technique is made up of three steps:
Step 1: Finding link-worthy content
Step 2: Making something even better
Step 3: Reaching the right people
He explains these steps in detail in a short and intriguing video. Check it out.
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4. Stellar Data Recovery
With more than two million clients across the globe, Stellar is a trusted leader in the data recovery industry in India. It’s also home to one of the world’s most advanced data recovery labs. Though successfully running in many countries across the globe, Stellar wanted to expand their services to the UK, USA, and European market. So, they decided to make the best use of digital marketing and SEO tools to develop their business organically.
The Strategy
One of the biggest challenges for Stellar was its website wasn’t optimized according to SEO standards. They started and ran an SEO campaign for two months. They began by making a few changes to their SEO strategy like changing and optimizing their web page design and using certain keywords to get more visibility.
Stellar’s marketing and sales teams worked closely together to understand the needs of their clients. They also went through important manuals and help files to get an in-depth understanding of the products. The results of the campaign speak volumes.
Stellar’s website traffic increased by 400%, and 50% of the total site traffic came directly from search engines. Software and manual downloads increased by 10% and sales rose by 75%. The results achieved through search engine optimization gave the company an astounding growth rate and made them reach new heights. Stellar indeed!
5. Square 2
It is said that inbound marketing is the best way to turn strangers into customers. From attracting the right traffic to converting qualified leads, a powerful inbound marketing strategy is crucial. Here’s how Square2, a digital marketing agency, leveraged the best inbound marketing techniques to ramp up their website traffic by 2200% (Yes, that’s not a typo) in less than 12 months!
The inbound approach is all about creating quality content to pull people towards your site and your company. With this strategy in mind, Square 2 started blogging. They focussed on providing quality educational content on a consistent basis. In addition to their blog, they also created a premium content download section where visitors have access to high quality content such as educational e-books, checklists, webinars, and white papers.
As they got their blog and content rolling, Square 2 also made changes to their SEO strategy. They optimized their website, built high-quality links, and guest-blogged on well-known sites. This helped their content be easily found on page one of Google.
Apart from content, they also focussed a lot on link building. Conferences are a great place to build networks and promote your business. The Square 2 team attended as many events and conferences, either as a speaker or an attendee, including JandBeyond in Germany, Joomla World Conference in San Jose and Inbound 2012, the Hubspot Inbound Marketing conference in Boston.
The growth in traffic did not happen overnight. The experts of Square 2 had to spend countless hours creating and promoting their content over the year, but in the end, the results were well worth the investment. One year later, their website traffic jumped from 366 to 8000 visits and their lead count increased from 20 leads each month, to an average of 100 leads!
6. Bardessono Hotel
A strong online presence can be a significant source of traffic for your website. Social media channels are powerful platforms and are a great way to connect with your readers and build your brand. Due to its advanced targeting opportunities, you can appeal to your target demographic with content tailored specifically to their needs.
Bardessono Hotel is a luxury hotel and spa in California’s Napa Valley that revamped its on-site Restaurant & Bar in 2012. They focus on high-quality food and wine, as well as educating consumers about the quality of the locally sourced foods. To achieve this goal and to encourage interaction between the hotel and consumers, they decided to up their social media marketing.
The restaurant created a custom application and added it to the hotel’s Facebook page. The application gave users access to exclusive videos, behind-the-scenes photos of the restaurant, sample lunch and dinner menus, and opportunities to win private cooking classes, dinner for four, an overnight stay in a spa steam suite, and a variety of other exciting prizes.
Aside from the cost of creating the application, the hotel didn’t spend any additional money on advertising. It instead relied completely on their efforts and word-of-mouth advertising. The eight-week long promotions created a lot of buzz about the restaurant across social media.
Here are the results of the campaign:
- 204: number of unique entries
- 26.7: percent increase in Facebook likes
- 49: percent increase in visits directly to the restaurant page,
- 957: downloads of the dinner and lunch menus
- 101.5: percent increase in unique daily visitors to the Bardessono Facebook page (as compared to the previous eight weeks)
By targeting specific social media users with content tailored to their needs, Bardessono hotel was able to build a fan base of potential customers and leads
7. Teusner Wines
This case study is another example of how a robust social media marketing strategy can not only help you get thousands of website visitors per day but also earn serious profit for your business.
Teusner Wine is an Australian based boutique winery that specializes in the production and distribution of quality homemade wine. In 2009, head of sales and marketing, Dave Brookes, created a Twitter account for Teusner to promote the business and build relationships with potential customers. To get the ball rolling, he used Twitter to search for wine-related terms. After some digging, he found interesting and influential people talking about the business. He then followed them and started engaging in casual conversations about wine. When he finds these influencers, he sends a friendly message that reads “Thanks for trying the wines, we are happy you’ve tasted them. G’day.”
Apart from chatting with Teusner distributors and customers, Brookes also uses Twitter to post third-party reviews of the company’s wines, share information about wine tastings and dinners featuring Teusner wines, reports on what’s happening at the winery, and get feedback from customers.
Since he started tweeting, the company has seen a significant jump in traffic to its website, along with an increase in the number of people coming to the winery for tours. Their wines soon became the talk of the town and people from various countries wanted to know where they can find Teusner wines at stores near them.
8. Wasp Barcode
Who doesn’t love a good video? Video marketing has become extremely popular and if done right, can generate a staggering amount of traffic to your website. This case study looks at how Wasp Barcode employed a successful video marketing strategy to increase demo lead generation by 63%, while also boosting website traffic by 450,000 visitors.
Even though Wasp Barcode was involved in a range of other marketing activities, they decided to explore video as a tool to deliver content that is educational and entertaining at the same time. This proved to be more difficult than they expected, that is until they understood how to create an effective advertising and distribution plan. Eventually they got the hang of it and reached great heights in no time.
Jeremy Vest, online manager of Wasp Barcode, explained that one of the most successful tactics used at Wasp Barcode was Google AdWords for video. Along with video ads, the goal of the campaign was to generate good backlinks. So they reached out to a bunch of influential bloggers to get their videos embedded in popular blogs.
Apart from this, Wasp Barcode wanted good search results from Youtube. They put a link to the main website in the very first line of the video description, to make sure it caught the eye of the viewers without them having to click “show more.” Annotations were also used at the end of the video. Instead of the links going to related videos, the viewer is presented with options to watch another Wasp Barcode video.
In Wasp Barcode’s case, their entire video marketing strategy is to provide value to its customers and prospects by answering their questions. Keeping that in mind, here are the results of the video campaign.
- Demo leads increased by 63%
- Subscribers rose by 4,190
- More than 450,000 visitors boosted website traffic
- 87.1% increase in view referrals from YouTube
- 9.3% increase direct traffic from mobile apps
Here are some additional metrics from Wasp Barcode’s YouTube channel:
9. Canva
Blog stagnation, or failing to post new content over several days and weeks, is usually followed by decline and then demise. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. A bold new blog strategy can get your blogs back on track. The following case study is about how Australian startup, Canva, completely re-engineered their design blog strategy, making a huge difference to their traffic in just two months.
Marketers need to pay attention to the quality of content rather than the quantity. The marketing team of Canva first focussed on creating the best possible content that would teach and inspire people to design. So they did a detailed competitor analysis to find out what content performs best. The analysis revealed the topics that were most popular within their niche and the type of content topics that works well with the target audience.
Next, they used Buzzsumo to find posts that performed well on social media for any given topic. Another awesome tool they used is Quora. While Buzzsumo helps you find socially favorite topics, Quora will help you get a unique perspective on the topics by reading questions and concerns from real users.
This research helped Canva get a clear vision of what type of content they wanted to write. However, they didn’t stop there. Canva came right out and asked its readers about what they would like to read. They then observed their reading and sharing habits on Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook. Keeping all this in mind, they created a checklist that completely revamped their blog strategy and improved their content quality standard.
The shift in strategy helped Canva produce high-quality content that resonated strongly with its audience and generated real results after two months. Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof.
10. Trensic Media
Did you know that a significant chunk of internet users obtain information through blogs? Every post you publish is a long-term asset that helps build brand awareness and connect with future prospects. Blogging is the heart of your content marketing efforts. Blogs give your company a voice, and have the potential to drive a significant amount of visitors and leads for your business.
Tresnic Media is a digital marketing agency that understood the importance of evergreen content, and leveraged it to take their business to the next level. Here’s the story.
Tresnic Media already had a top-notch content strategy in place. To gain more traction, they decided to ramp up the frequency and quantity of publications. From blogging once a week for a year the company shifted to an more aggressive blogging effort of 50 blog posts in five weeks. That meant two new blogs every day for five straight weeks.
Disclaimer: No matter how frequently you decide to blog, you must always focus on providing valuable content that people want to read.
Once the articles were live, Tresnic Media shared each article across multiple social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Plus. As it published more and more content, Trensic Media saw a consistent increase in website traffic, improved SEO efforts and higher rankings in search engines. By publishing high-quality articles and sharing them across social media, the search rankings naturally climbed for 496 different keywords.
The results speak for themselves
From start to finish, the five weeks of blogging led to a 438% increase in website visitors. Their last post caught fire and started building more backlinks to the site. The phones started ringing, more emails started coming, LinkedIn messages continued, and finally, they got a 1,000% increase in website traffic.
11. Must Do Visitor Guides
Must Do Visitor Guide Magazine acts as a tour guide and concierge to millions of southwest Florida visitors and residents. It provides visitor information through both printed and online publications. In April 2013, there was a severe decline in organic traffic to their website. It was difficult to determine the exact cause of the problem due to the seasonal nature of website traffic. Even after multiple attempts of trying to resolve the issue by hiring several SEO companies and spending thousands of dollars, website traffic from Google was still down by 43% year-over-year.
So they decided to take a deeper look into the situation starting with a complete website analysis. The analysis conducted by Omen Interactive revealed several technical problems that were affecting Must Do Visitors’ Google rankings, along with several factors that are known to cause penalties in Google Panda and Google Penguin. The experts of Omen Interactive worked directly with the technical team to create solutions to the problems. They updated and revised their meta title and meta description HTML tags, improved their internal link structure and external backlink profile to focus on high-quality backlinks.
Within 30 days of making the first set of corrections to the website the overall organic traffic from major search engines was up by 45.9%, and they started seeing steady gains. Five months after the initial corrections, Google organic traffic is up 313.9%, which surpassed their all-time historical highs from Google organic traffic by 77.9%.
12. Quicksprout
As always, we’ve saved the best for the last. Here’s the strategy used by one of the top influencers on the web and an expert online marketer. Any guesses?
It’s Neil Patel. YES, that Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Kissmetrics. Quick Sprout is his personal blog that focuses on the internet marketing industry. Therefore, the potential to drive traffic is relatively less compared to consumer-based blogs. To improve search rankings and boost his website traffic, he decided to adopt not just one, but several tactics.
January 2013 was a big month for Quicksprout. After six months of hard work, Neil Patel launched The Advanced Guide to SEO, a step-by-step guide to search engine optimization. The traffic spiked on the very same day, with 17,145 visits and the content performed exceptionally well with the audience. Even after a month, the numbers were still around 16,000 to 18,000 visits a day. This is a clear example of how a fantastic piece of informative and evergreen content can do wonders for your business.
As you already know, people and search engines love when websites load fast. So, he had his developers modify all of the code, and remove unnecessary plugins from Quicksprout. The site went from a load time of 1.9 seconds to a load time of 1.21 seconds. These changes resulted in a direct increase in traffic by roughly 2000 visitors a day. By making small but calculative changes to his content and SEO strategy, he was able to get 121,311 unique visitors in a month.
Now it’s your turn
It takes hard work, a lot of patience, and experimentation to create something extraordinary. I hope the above examples have answered all your questions on traffic generation. Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity. By following the right blend of techniques and making calculative changes to your existing strategies, you too can skyrocket your website traffic in less than a year!