For practically every website on the internet, a primary goal is building traffic by increasing the number of visitors. This seems like a noble enough and straightforward strategy: the more people who visit, the more people will buy products, subscribe for updates and otherwise convert in the ways you desire.

However, all too many people fail to account for the difference between simple traffic and traffic that is truly valuable. If 100 people are pouring onto your website every minute – but only 1 of them is engaging in any meaningful way – then there’s no meaningful benefit from said traffic.

As such, let’s look at some simple strategies for improving the quality of your traffic and ensuring that it is comprised of people who you’d ideally want visiting your website.

Analyze the Competition

There’s a very small chance that you are the first major brand to target a particular niche or industry. Because of this, you’re having to fight a battle against already-established competitors who have a better idea how the landscape is shaped. Why not use this to your advantage?

Any brand can begin pinging search engines with queries to determine exactly which niches and SERPs their competition is targeting. With this information, you automatically have narrowed down the best choices for your brand to target. In some cases, relevant SERPs may not produce highly relevant traffic; stealing this information from your competition and making it work for you in future marketing efforts is simple yet very powerful.

Utilize Social Media

Many brands have discovered that social media is a perfect tool for refining existing traffic strategies, in large part because you can mine much more information about individual users.

With social media, you can run targeted ad campaigns that promote your products and services to those who have liked your competitors’ offerings, who live in specific areas or who have demonstrated specific interests. This helps produce campaigns that are much more granular in terms of measuring which messages will work best with which audiences. As a result, your ad campaigns will be far more effective – and so will the traffic they drive.

Look to the Past

If your brand has existed for some time and you have a track record of both failures and successes, then why not look to which efforts have produced the most benefit? Many brands have begun using content repurposing to achieve this result.

If you had a particular post that did well last year, why not revive that post in a new format – or even just re-share the old post itself? When combined with effective email marketing and social media marketing strategies, this can produce a much better ROI in terms of traffic quality and will help you better refine future marketing efforts when pinging search engines and users alike.

While increased traffic may generally seem beneficial, it is not always proportionate to the benefits your brand or website will receive. If you’re selective about how you market and which strategies you use, your brand will have more time to focus on driving traffic that is truly meaningful. Whether that’s measured in sales, comments, subscriptions or something else is entirely up to you, but make sure that the traffic you’re driving to your website produces some benefit.