Referral
Referral traffic is a very important metric in digital marketing, since it measures the traffic that reaches our website when other websites mention us, and not from the search results returned by web search engines such as Google or from SEM campaigns.
Having a high volume of referral traffic is a sign that we are on the right track to becoming popular, and that we have interesting links on other websites that are bringing visits to our website and thereby improving our SEO organically.
1. How to improve referral traffic?
To gain referral traffic and increase your website’s popularity which, in turn, will improve your search engine rankings, you can make use of the following tips:
- Work on social media. Create a community of loyal followers and offer them interesting content that your fans can share, this will help you to reach more people. Likewise, share articles from other websites where you have links, so you receive more visits from those websites.
- Comment on blogs and forums. It is a simple and cheap way to place links that will help you improve referral traffic, but make sure the content you post is related to the topic being discussed and respects the moderators’ rules.
- Collaborate on other blogs. Thanks to guest blogging, you can set up collaborations with the owners of other websites where you write for free as a guest author, and include some links in your contributions to improve your website’s popularity.
- Work on linkbuilding. Just like with guest blogging, you should try to place links to your website on other websites through agreements with their owners, but you also need to look after the internal linking on your website, for SEO.
- Create persuasive CTAs. Try to create calls to action (CTAs) that are as effective as possible so that, in a non-intrusive way, the people reading naturally click and head to your website.
- Place links in images. Whenever possible, try to get the webmasters of the blogs you partner with to place your links in the related images, as this makes it easier for visitors to reach your website.
2. Where to see the referral traffic metrics?
With Google Analytics you can easily see how much referral traffic you are generating. To do so, just open Google Analytics and, once inside the application, click Acquisition >> All traffic >> Channels. Here you will find all the available channels and you have to look at the one called: referral.
Here are some of the traffic channels from which a website can obtain visits and which, together with referral, are of special interest in Google Analytics metrics:
- Organic: visits from users who have clicked on a search result, where those links are not paid.
- Display: shows the visits that come from advertising campaigns on other blogs or websites.
- Email: visits that come from email marketing campaigns or mass email sends.
- Social: shows the visits that come directly from social networks.
- Paid: visits that come from advertising campaigns, Adwords or social ads.
- Referral: as we have already explained, these are the visits that come from other external websites that have placed a link to our website.
- Other: these are the visits from the remaining channels, i.e. campaigns or visits that could be categorized in the other channels.