Gianluca Ferruggia is the General Manager at DesignRush, a B2B marketplace that connects agencies to businesses.
If you’re hoping to skyrocket your company’s website traffic overnight, I have some bad news for you: It’s unlikely to happen. For many businesses, this fantastical ideal to surge traffic suddenly is a surefire way to experience disappointment. It’s not a realistic or sustainable approach, and it could mean sacrificing the real value you can bring to users.
How do I know? I’ve been there. At my company, we’ve worked for years to scale our traffic as a business-to-business marketplace. In June 2024, our site hit 1 million monthly visits—a hard-earned achievement. From our time scaling to hit this achievement, I learned:
• Big traffic wins are the result of deep audience understanding.
• Quality content, press, search engine optimization (SEO) and strong relationships are key traffic boosters.
• Growing traffic is a process that requires a solid team and steady habits.
For other companies looking to scale their website traffic smarter and for sustainable growth, there are nine lessons I recommend keeping in mind.
Nine Lessons On Expanding Your Reach
1. Know who you’re talking to.
Conducting customer research is a crucial first step in the website traffic scaling process. In fact, 82% of marketers who responded to a 2022 Hubspot survey said high-quality customer data was key to their success.
Being a company that connects businesses to service providers, we researched our ideal clients by asking:
• What kind of businesses were they?
• What did they want from an agency?
• What kept them up at night?
The answers to these questions guided our content strategy and ensured we matched real needs with the right SEO keywords. If you’re not sure where to start, you can use research tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics and LinkedIn to collect data.
2. Build a community, not just clicks.
We learned early on that real traffic growth comes from a community of returning users. When your efforts turn clients into advocates, you can generate trust, repeat visits and backlinks—or links from other websites that lead to your company’s page and support SEO.
My advice? Listen to your clients. Treat their feedback as a valuable tool for answering key questions about your business. Use it to fuel growth, spot content gaps, improve onboarding, tailor services and create resources like FAQs that address common client needs. This can help build not only traffic but also lasting partnerships.
3. Let long-term relationships do the heavy lifting.
Once you build those partnerships, it’s important to keep investing in them. In doing so, your content is more likely to spread. To do this, look for ways to provide real client value and genuinely spotlight your clients. For example, you can start by creating assets your clients will want to share, such as case studies that highlight their success, branded badges for milestones or press-style features that showcase their expertise. At my company, this simple strategy has helped us earn backlinks, grow our visibility and build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.
4. Use press as a traffic strategy.
Press is more than branding. It’s a traffic strategy that can pay dividends. Media coverage of things like awards and agency recognition can boost your credibility and create reference-worthy content that earns lasting attention. I like to think about it as “visibility compounded” because press coverage may also lead to backlinks.
5. Prioritize content quality.
Ensure each article your company publishes solves user problems and does it better than competitors. Your content should also be accurate and relevant, which is why at my company, we update existing articles regularly.
I recommend setting a plan to update all articles at least once per year, especially since Google uses content quality and relevance as some of its top ranking factors. Additionally, follow Google’s guidelines on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, known as “EEAT.” This helped us build authority.
6. Don’t skip technical SEO.
Even the best content can’t perform without a solid tech foundation. Here are four key areas to aid growth:
• Site speed: Ensure your pages load swiftly. In 2016, Google reportedly found that 53% of mobile users leave if a site takes more than three seconds to load.
• Schema markup: This refers to structured data designed to help search engines understand content, which makes this an important feature to tap into.
• Mobile optimization: With the majority of web traffic coming from mobile, ensure your site is fully responsive to any device. Our team, for example, scrolls through our site weekly to make it mobile-first.
• Internal linking: Interlink old and new related content for better site navigation.
7. Establish topic clusters.
I found SEO topic clusters, or groups of related interlinked content, can also help build topic authority and improve SEO. As part of our SEO strategy, we targeted interlinked topic clusters, such as web design, branding and AI, to increase traffic by signaling our B2B expertise to search engines and users.
8. Hire builders, not box-checkers.
It might sound cliché, but our team is our secret sauce to scaling. Don’t just chase impressive resumes. Hire people who think independently, practice teamwork and take ownership. I also recommend looking for creativity, intelligence and kindness.
9. Build brick by brick toward traffic goals.
Before hitting 1 million visits, we spent seven years iterating. When building traffic, there’s no silver bullet. It’s a brick-by-brick process.
Each article was a brick and every backlink the mortar. Together, they built a foundation for lasting traffic, trust and visibility. Track small wins—such as backlinks, keyword jumps and traffic milestones—to stay motivated as you scale.
What’s Next For Website Growth
Where’s website traffic headed? Here’s what I expect to see:
• AI will speed things up, but human insight will still make your content stand out.
• SEO will continue getting smarter. It’s about full experiences, not just keyword stuffing.
• Content is (and will remain) king. Google’s all-in on trust, and so are your readers.
• Consistency wins. Brands that show up with value again and again are more likely to grow and last.
We didn’t scale overnight, and you don’t have to either. With consistency, customer insight and a focus on value, hitting a million visits (and beyond) could be within reach.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here
