By John Hogg
So, how do you go about increasing traffic and boosting visitors to your website?
I’m sure this isn’t a surprise to you… but without customers your business is nothing! If you’re a retailer you are probably concerned with footfall and getting plenty of people into your shop. The same rules apply with your online store as you need to make sure you attract enough interested visitors to your website in the hope they ultimately convert into a sale.
In plain terms you have three main options:
1) Do Nothing - built it and they will come
This isn’t really an option to be honest, but you would not believe the number of companies who throw up a website and then wonder why they aren’t making sales. We can’t shout it loud enough - A website is not a panacea for all ills! Like anything in life if you want to see good results you have to work at it. Leave the ‘Built it and they will come’ line for the movies and let us concentrate on the real world and get some high quality traffic to your website. Sorry Kevin!
2) Organic Traffic - free visitors from search engines!
Organic traffic is effectively traffic you don’t pay for and finds your site through the search engines such as Google or Bing. Organic traffic is often lauded as the best type of traffic as visitors are clicking on your link because they want to and are presumably interested in your business (although in fairness, you could also argue the same reasons for why they click on your advertisements as well...).
Two of the main ways to influence organic traffic to your website include:
High Quality Content A well thought out and executed content strategy will attract visitors who are interested in consuming your content and learning more. Whether you develop quality text, images, reports, PDFs, infographics or video, you need to establish what it is your chosen market wants - what are they interested in? what pain points do they have that your content can help them resolve? Once you know this you can develop an editorial calendar to keep you right and help organise your ‘content engine’ as it develops. Understand what your audience wants, write it, optimise it (more on this next!) and then get it out (be that on web pages, your blog, as a sign up offer, or on social media), as this will begin the process of getting your message out and start to attract your audience to you.
Search Engine Optimisation Optimising your content and your website so the search engines can find you will help push your website up the rankings. If 33% of traffic goes to the number one spot on Google and another 18% for second place, that means over 50% of organic traffic is going to the top two places on Google!!! Don’t you think you should do everything you can to try and feature higher up the rankings? Getting your SEO in check and having a well thought out SEO plan that, amongst other things, understands your keywords, optimises your content, populates your meta data, builds quality backlinks and integrates with social media will certainly help to increase your search engine rankings for the better.
3) Paid Traffic - well targeted paid-for-advertising will direct relevant visitors to your website
Another option to consider to drive traffic to your website is paid traffic. Online advertising is growing all the time and if used correctly can bring new visitors to your site who otherwise wouldn't have heard of you. Some of the main types of online advertising include:
- Online Banner Ads - e.g. an ad on a high traffic site such as The Wall Street Journal
- Social Advertising - e.g. Facebook Ads, Promoted Tweets, LinkedIn Ads, etc.
- Search Engine Advertising - e.g. Google Adwords
The purpose of your online ads is to attract the interest of potential visitors and entice them to click the link and visit your website. Its up to you to try and entice them with whatever compelling offer you have and get them to click, however, where online ads differ from offline ads is the manner in which you can target your audience. Facebook ads, for example, allow you to target your audience by selecting quite specific demographics and interests. Facebook also allows you to create Custom Audiences and upload the email addresses of customers/ prospects you already have so that only these people will see your ads now. How clever is that? Online advertising opens a whole new world of targeted advertising and allows you to test different ads to see which ads generate the most click throughs.
The old adage used to say that only 50% of traditional advertising worked but since no-one knew which 50% of the advertising was working you had to keep paying for the 100%. Well, here's some good news for your marketing budget - you should be testing and measuring everything you do with your online advertising and refining it as you go to make sure your budget is being spent as efficiently as possible. The best way to go about this is through split testing and running two campaigns against each other. Running two virtually identical campaigns with only one slight difference allows you to see which of the two variables is the most popular. If you continue to run tests such as this across all the main aspects of your online ads you will soon be able to determine your most popular ad (however don't just leave it at that - keep an eye on it and make sure it continues to produce the best results!)
Split testing is a very methodical process and you need to be very consistent in how you approach it. It is worth the effort though as it is a very important driver of online advertising success and shouldn't be ignored! It is also very useful when used on other aspects of your website. (note to self - we must blog about Split Testing soon! Sign up to our RSS Feed to keep an eye on our latest ramblings…)
We don’t propose to go through all the various types of online advertising in this blog, but suffice to say, if you want to generate specific traffic to your site in a relatively short period of time then Paid Traffic is the way to go. Just make sure you treat it as an ongoing process and not a one off. In the old days you decided on your message, designed your creative, chose your ad placement and let your campaign run. That was the way of the Mad Men of old, nowadays though we’re more like Crazy Men (and Women!) as no longer can we ‘launch & go’! We need to continually review the performance of our ads and revise them where necessary and reallocate budget to the best performing ads as we go. So make sure you stick at it! Manage it! Work it! and you will soon see results!
4) Use Both Organic & Paid!
Ok, you’ve got us sussed. We’ve gone and snuck in another option. We sold you three and here we are about to dump a fourth on you! But it’s an important one…
Like most things in life there is no simple way of doing things. Nothing’s cut and dried. If it was, we’d all be out of a job (gulp!). Why shouldn’t you be doing a bit of both? If your budget is a bit tight you should at least consider some paid at the beginning to get yourselves established and to get that critical mass you need to get going. We often call this the ‘Credibility Gap’ You want to start but think no-one will take you seriously if you’ve no following - its a catch twenty two as you're not going to get a followng until you start! So, why not give paid for advertising a blast to build up your audience and then ease back and focus on great content and SEO? Of course if you have budget you should continue with both to keep building and attracting your audience.
In Summary - attracting the right visitors to your website
In simple terms, the best way to attract high-quality, high-value visitors to your website is to keep building great content, keep working at your SEO and at the same time having a systematic approach to Paid For Advertising. Whether it is ongoing ads on social media, banner ads on a relevant site or even just the odd promoted post on Facebook, set aside some budget and then keep looking at the results and refine where necessary.
So that’s the secret to successful traffic - work out what you want to achieve, work out who your audience is and what they want to hear and then build a programme of activity to give it to them. But always remember to keep testing and checking what is working and what isn't. Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet - just plenty of hard work. But it's worth it. Keep at it and you will soon see your visitors start to rise.
If you like this blog and would like to read more, why not check out our free guide on how to generate leads from your law firm website for lots of useful hints and tips?
Let us know below what’s working for you and how you approach building traffic for your website. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Google Images
John Hogg
John is managing director of Enlighten IC and has been involved in legal marketing and technology marketing for over 25 years. He is passionate about how an inbound approach to marketing can help firms to drive leads and grow their business.
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