There is no denying the advantages that social media has to offer. Its a great location to interact with customers, attract new audiences, create a community, forge relationships, and share content. It’s can be a really strong marketing tool.

However, even if you have a large social media following, you’ll have a hard time building a successful, sustainable business without a website. How many of your followers are likely to make a purchase through sending a DM on Instagram alone? If you post about your service on Facebook, do your clients know what to do next when they are want to work with you?

A website is one of the only platforms you own, and acts as a central hub for your business. This means that even when Instagram changes its algorithm again, you’ll still have somewhere to point your followers which is consistent and easy.

Social Media can be an amazing space to promote your business and market to your customers, but to ensure your business’s value isn’t dependent on it, here’s some ways you can use Instagram to increase your website traffic and turn potential clients into paying customers.

4 Ways to Increase Website Traffic using Instagram

For the purpose of this post, I will refer to Instagram but you can use these strategies methods across other social media platforms and persuade your followers to go to your website. After they are on your website, they might then go to your blog, read more about your offerings, or take advantage of your offers.

Consistent posting on social media will increase your chances of attracting visitors to your website.  Let’s discuss various content categories and concepts you may use on Instagram to increase traffic to your website.

Add links to your website in your bio

One limitation to Instagram is that links cannot be added to posts or reels. Since you can’t add links to captions, you should be taking advantage of the one link that they do offer, which is the link in your bio.

Adding a link in your bio on Instagram is one of the best ways to increase website traffic using Instagram. This can be found right underneath your bio description. Keep in mind that you can only point to one link.

As you can only have one link in your bio, many businesses use a 3rd party website such as “Linktree” to help drive traffic to different parts of their website. While there is nothing wrong with this it doesn’t give you the full customisations or functionalities that you could have. Therefore, the best solution is to create an Instagram landing page on your website. Your customer takes a direct route and lands directly on a page on your site without being brought to another website. A landing page can have your own branding and content and CTAs without having to pay extra fees for 3rd party sites to do this. You can customise how yours looks to suit your business needs.

I recommend customising your URL to something like “websitename.com/instagram or websitename.com/links”. You can add as many or as few links as you’d like, photos, or welcome text to this page. But be sure the links are adding value and pointing to where you want your customers to go.

Include links in your stories

Adding links to your stories used to be a feature you could only have if you had above 10,000 followers on instagram. Now its available to every account and every business should be taking advantage of it.

This feature is super smart for sending people to different parts of your website such as specific blog posts, products or booking calendars. In your link in bio, you can keep a link to popular parts of your website where the link in stories you can think about which website page is most relevant to your Story content.

If you have a single post, carousel or reel talking about a specific thing on your website, posting it to your stories and popping a link on the story can be really helpful to your customers to help find what you are talking about.

If you’re launching a new offer or product, using this link feature in your Story could be the best way to drive customers to your website and make conversions.

Add a call to action in your posts

Although videos perform best on Instagram (see below), you will likely also use single posts or carousels to connect with your audience.

Remember to keep your branding and messaging consistent when creating your posts so that your business can be recognised by its colours, fonts and images before anyone even sees your content.

A nice way of getting your Instagram followers to go visit your website is to start a conversation on a post and tell people to learn more by visiting your website. For example, you can see this caption on my Instagram:

If you don’t have a landing page, a lead magnet, like a blog post or a freebie, is a fantastic incentive to drive traffic to your website. Your followers are more likely to leave Instagram to visit your website with a clear CTA in a post.

Utilise Reels

Since Instagram launched Reels in 2020 they are dominating the platform.

If you haven’t started creating Reel content yet, now’s the time to start!

Initially, 15 seconds long, Reels can now last up to 90 seconds. If you use trending audio your Reel may be seen by more people.  You can create original content or hop on the bandwagon for trends that already exist.

Before creating a Reel, think about where you want people to go next. What do you want to inspire them to do? When making a Reel, ensure you have a clear Call to Action (CTA) in your video description. If you don’t new viewers may not know where to find out more about you and your business.

Final thoughts on ways to increase website traffic using Instagram

Ideally, you need to be monitoring both your website and Instagram analytics to determine how well your content is performing. Consider the metrics that are important to you, and keep an eye on the data trends.

You might want to think about optimising your website if you notice that traffic is growing yet conversion rates or bounce rates are low or high. You can decide whether you need to redesign your entire website or just a few pages by talking to a web designer.

If you don’t know where to begin, I work with business owners just like you to build carefully designed, fully optimised websites that highlight the value of their business.

Book a call or send me an email and we can have a chat about your business goals and website needs.

Meanwhile, continue to build your following and engagement on Instagram and use the link in bio wisely.