Traffic Strategies

The 3 Types of Website Traffic

Organic traffic can be leveraged by optimizing your website and your external party listings (such as Google My Business) so that your website shows up highly ranked in the search engines.

Often visitors are  not looking specifically for YOUR business, but when your website shows up first in the search rankings, people are generally going to click on it..     

While it does take time, energy and/or money to get your website to a point of optimization where organic traffic is abundant, the point is that that initial investment is well worth it as the “organic” visitor traffic trickles in day after day.

Direct Traffic comes about when someone clicks a link that takes them directly to your website.   Once again, this traffic is not the result of direct paid advertising.   This traffic is the result of time, energy and/or money invested in creating worthwhile content, and many external relationships with other content and service providers that allows for the website to be referenced around the internet.

Maintaining an email list for your business can also be a source of direct traffic.     Emails can be used to promote special events and sales in order to bring recent customers back to your business.

Paid Traffic can be an incredibly powerful source of customer acquisition.  However, this strategy should only be used after the website and direct traffic links have been optimized, so that when a new visitor does click on an ad they are “wowed” by the experience they have.

For a local business of a reasonable size, advertising with Google could be seen as a  priority, as it is “their” search engine everyone seems to be using these days.  When you take out an ad with google, your business will appear at the top of the search results page.   However, this strategy does cost money, and many of the clicks you end up paying for you might have gotten anyway.   Most customers scroll a little further down the page and look at multiple options when choosing what to click on,  and if your listing shows up on page 1 organically, you may be paying for clicks you don’t need to pay for.   

Facebook ads are great to alert people to things like seasonal specials and sales events.   Especially if many of your local followers and customers are active on Facebook.   The wonderful thing about Facebook advertising is that you can create a target audience that is most responsive to your ads, so that you don’t waste time and money showing your ad to people who are not interested.  Creating a “specific audience” does take time, money, and a bit of trial and error.    But, once formed, that audience can be used over and over again.   In the end that audience can be considered an asset, much like an email list can be considered an asset.

There are other places a business can take out ads.  Local directories and local media sites are often offering advertising opportunities.  For a larger-sized business it make sense to pursue a number of different avenues and monitor the results from each.  For a smaller business, it is better to focus your advertising dollars only on the activities that will bring the best results.    Each strategy take time, money and energy to implement.  It is therefore a good idea to only pick one or two to start, and really perfect that.

10 Things You Can Do to Improve Website Traffic:

1:  Claim and Optimize Your Google Listing

The most important place to start is in harnessing your organic traffic.    There are many things you can do within your website, and within you Google listing, that can make it that much easier to find you.   

When you have a local product or service, most customers, at some point, look up your website if only to find out your hours and exact address.    The cleaner and fresher your listings look, the more compelled people will be to choose your business over a competitor listed on the same page

2.  Optimize Your Website Load Time

When your website loads quickly, it will show up higher in Search Engine Rankings.

Compress your pictures, and minimize your use of bulky plugins.    Also, use caching to save your website pages in a compressed format for quicker load times.

3.  Make sure you use SSL

Has your website been updated lately such that all the pages and images are secure?  (https:// instead of http:// )  In the past, very few websites used SSL.  But now, every website is encouraged to provide some form of encryption between the hosting service and the end user – Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

Pretty soon, a website that does not employ SSL will not show up in search engines at all.   Many hosting companies offer SSL for free now when you sign up for a hosting package.  Make sure your website host does the same for you. 

4:    Keep Your Content Fresh

 

Websites are actually more successful if they are more dynamic than many would perceive they need to be.   Visitors appreciate new content.   And Google rewards websites that post new material often. 

Write a post.   Update your information.  Re-visit your home page and make sure all the information on it is current. 

5.  Maintain a Consistent Identity

When you look up your business around the internet, do you spell you name slightly differently?  Do you type your address in a different way each time?

The search engines take your business listing quite literally, and treat each different spelling or format as a “new” or different entity.  In order to get more traffic to your website, it is important that you appear larger and unified as opposed to being “scattered around”.   Take some time to update all of your listings in data bases and social media sites around the web.

6:   Monitor Your Business Reviews  

The power of monitoring website and social media reviews should not be underestimated.   Dedicate some resources – or a bit of time each week – reading various reviews and responding to them.  Ensure issues are addressed, and perhaps reward glowing reviews with discount coupons or other surprises.  Show your customers that you care.   

7:  Collect Customer Emails

Pursue an email policy where the majority of your customers are happy to hear from you.  Use your email list to make special announcements, offer coupons, and remind customers of special sale events.

If you develop a reputation for offering value every time someone clicks on your email, they will seek yours out from the bunch and open it first.  This is a quick easy way to increase your traffic.

8:  Create a Facebook Page

Facebook pages are free to create, and many potential visitors look up businesses on Facebook in order to get information.    A few things you might want to consider once you have created your facebook page:

1. Spend some time optimizing pictures, descriptions and links so when people find your page your information is readily available
2. Launch a “like” campaign to acquire a little more social proof
3. Set up a regular posting schedule so that content remains fresh.  The posts don’t have to be overly complex.  In fact, a few (neutral, non-political) jokes here and there are great to get distribution, likes and a few chuckles.
4. Post new website blog posts or new videos on your facebook page to increase exposure

9:   Take Out Some Ads

Once all the “structural buildout” and “optimization” is complete, and traffic that arrives to your site as a result of advertising will immediately be able to find what they are looking for.

Paid advertising strategies are often the most effective, but they must be set up properly otherwise it can feel like money is simply going down the drain.  Basically, advertising is a three stage process that must constantly be monitored and “tweeked”

• The first thing that must be done is to create well-crafted content and show it to a smaller, loosely defined audience.   The objective of this stage is to really hone, or narrow, the potential audience to a very targeted set, or “type”, such that advertising dollars are not spent showing ads to people who really could care less about the product.  The more time and effort spent on the stage the better the results will be for stage 2 and 3.

• Stage two, once the audience “type” is appropriately identified, the advertising can be scaled to a meaningful size, and will start to produce some results.

• Stage three – retargeting customers who showed interest in the products, is where the advertising dollars really begin to pay off. Usually customers need to be shown something up to 7 times before they make a purchase. This means more than one ad, and a time gap between impressions. This takes time and coordination to implement, and is not recommended on a smaller budget.  

10:  Start a Blog

 

Blogs provide yet another reason for people to visit your website.    Well-written and/or well-researched articles can also  provide additional credibility to your business.  You don’t have to blog every day, or even every week.  Monthly articles are generally sufficient to keep a constant flow of traffic coming to visit. 

When visitors come to your website to read your blog, if they are interest and want to learn more they will often click on the “Home” or “About” page to find out what your business is all about.  Sometimes they will even sign up for your email list if it is relevant to them.   

Even if a visitor simply reads your blog post and moves on with their day, they have been exposed to you and, if it is something they enjoyed, this will make it easier to get them to look at more content you create and over time this will build a familiarity.  Over the long term this will lead to plenty of likes, shares, referrals, and even customer sign-ups.  

Do you want to know how your website stacks up against the experts?   

Send us your website address and your phone number and we will run a Free audit report on your website and send you the result.  We will also spend some time with you discussing how you could improve them.

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