Referral Traffic: 7 Ways to Drive It (And Get More Leads!)

Referral traffic is a powerful and often overlooked way to give your website a competitive edge.

In the never-ending quest for more traffic, marketers turn to search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), blogging, and social media marketing.

The problem is that SEO takes time to work, PPC is expensive, Google is oversaturated with blog content, and it’s tricky to prove ROI with social media. That’s where referral traffic comes in.

So, what is referral traffic, and how can you use it to generate more leads? Today, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know — why it’s important and seven steps you can take to improve yours.

What is referral traffic?

Why is referral traffic important?

7 Steps to Generate More Referral Traffic

1. Publish Your Website To Online Directories

2. Get Published On Review Websites

3. Publish Guest Blog Posts

4. Leverage Social Media

5. Comment On Blogs

6. Be Active On Industry Forums

7. Publish Infographics

Next Steps

What is referral traffic?

When visitors land on your website from sites other than the major search engines, that’s referral traffic.

When someone clicks a link on a website or social network, and it takes them to another site, tracking software, such as Google Analytics or HubSpot, counts that visitor as referral traffic.

The originating website is the “referrer” since it refers to traffic from one website to the other.

HubSpot’s marketing analytics tools can provide you with insight into your referral traffic. You can isolate this traffic from other categories and determine your best referral sources.

With this information, you can measure the effectiveness of your strategies to boost referral traffic.

Get started with HubSpot’s traffic analytics.

Why is referral traffic important?

Referral traffic is valuable to inbound marketers because it sends potentially qualified visitors to your website. This, in turn, gets your content in front of new people, giving your website the opportunity to convert that visitor into a lead.

Your sales team will take it from there, as they then have the opportunity to convert that lead into a new customer.

That’s not the only reason referral traffic is helpful, however. Referral traffic also has SEO benefits. When someone visits your website from another site, they are usually clicking on a link or completing some type of social activity.

Google and other search engines consider these links and social signals as positive ranking factors — as long as they are coming from trusted websites.

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Sounds pretty good, right? Well, let’s get started on getting you some juicy referral traffic so you can brag about all the hot leads you have rolling in.