Website traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. It allows you to measure your marketing efforts, improves search engine credibility and provides a host of valuable audience insights and conversion opportunities. Yet many businesses struggle to get more visitors to their site. The good news is that there are a variety of methods you can employ to increase website traffic, including SEO, social media and content marketing.

Create high-quality, informative content. Posting unique, interesting and helpful content can help your website rank higher on search engines and position you as an expert in your industry. It can also drive repeat visits. In addition, you can create landing pages that guide visitors to key pages of your website such as product offerings or lead generation forms.

Use free tools to analyze and track your website’s performance. For example, the free tool Google Analytics will show you your top referring sites. This will tell you what types of websites your visitors are coming from and where they’re going next. This will help you plan and execute your marketing strategy.

Guest blogging. Find complementary businesses whose audiences are your target market and ask to contribute content to their blogs with a link back to your website. Be careful not to be spammy or overtly self-promotional. Your content should add value to the blog or conversation and encourage readers to visit your website for more information.

Optimize your meta title and description for the keywords that are most relevant to your business. For example, if you’re a local roofing company, optimize for “roofing contractor” or “roofing services.”

Publish and promote blog posts on your Facebook and Twitter accounts to reach new audiences. In addition, you can use a free tool like Buffer to schedule your posts for the best times to publish on each platform.

Create retargeting ads that are based on the pages people visit on your site. These ads are effective because they are targeted to a warm audience that has already shown an interest in your product or service.

Promote sales and events on your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts to generate traffic to your website. This will help you increase sales outside of your regular operating hours, during temporary retail events and after your brick-and-mortar or pop-up shop has closed for the day.

Grow your Messenger subscriber list and share links to pages on your site that offer more information or a call to action. Messenger ads have a 90%+ open rate and a 50%+ click-through rate, so it’s a great way to boost long-term traffic.

Get listed on free online directories and review sites that allow you to add a link to your website. Many of these websites have a strong domain authority on Google, so actively updating your listings can help your business rank higher in relevant searches.

Publish press releases and syndicate them through services like PRNewswire to generate website traffic. This can help you build brand awareness, especially if your press release is about a product launch or a community event your business is involved with.