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You will find thousands of pages on how to effectively use SEO, make outreach strategies, bring in new audience, how to rank high in Google so you can get more views, and so on. Yes, this is an important facet of any modern business. After all, the more people see your site, the more potential customers you have. But is “More TARGETED Traffic = More money” that simple?
Search engine optimization of SEO is not all about finding the right keywords. Popular search engines like Google and Bing use different indicators to determine the relevance of your website and website traffic is one of them. If they notice that your website is visited by a significant number of people on a regular basis they will definitely rank your website higher in the search engine results.
Sure, website traffic is important, but this premise comes with a lot of fine print that shows it’s not exactly that straightforward. In order to understand the whole picture, we need to take into account some other factors, so let’s dig in!
Content Basics
When creating your content, you should start by discussing relevant issues in general, and not your product or solution. For example, if your business sells cleaning products, by discussing kitchen cleaning tips in general you can attract the right audience and provide valuable knowledge at the same time. As consumers become more aware of the issues you are discussing, you can start to talk more about solutions (i.e. types of kitchen cleaning products). As consumers move through the buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration to the decision stage, you can finally talk about your product directly and compare it to competitor’s offerings. The natural flow of this process allows your business to be helpful and engage your target audience. With remarkable content, you will attract your targeted audience naturally and build credibility.
Research
Creating remarkable content to get targeted website traffic includes knowing your buyer personas and which stage in the buyer’s journey you are targeting. This knowledge will help you to know who your market is and what they are interested in, and will bring the website visitors that you are looking for. A few ways to identify topics to write about include:
- Keyword Research
- Internet Forums
- Industry News
- Your buyer persona’s goals and challenges
Content Golden Rule
Following the Content Golden Rule is always a good idea. This rule states that you want 80% of your marketing content to be helpful and designed to answer questions your audience may have, and not specifically about your product or solution. This would include blogs, eBooks, how-to guides, and more. The other 20% should be sales related and specifically mention your products and solutions. Something to keep in mind when directly talking about your products or services is to talk benefits and not features. Your message will be more effective when you point out the primary value that your product brings. In other words, focus on what your audience gets more than what you offer
Table of Contents
Getting It Out There
After you have your content written, it is good to set up a system to organize a continual flow of good content to be published often. This will help to draw in your target audience and improve search engine optimization results (how high you rank on Google). As you create, it is just as important to distribute. This can be done through:
- Website Pages
- Blogs
- Social Media
- Landing Pages
- Email Marketing
You want to be intentional not only in your content and distribution, but timing as well. If you show up in the right channels at the right time, your content will reach your targeted audience and be the most helpful.
Unbeknownst to most webmasters, optimal landing pages can generate more income than other pages in a website. Take Moz for example, Conversion Rate Experts made $1M from a single, optimized landing page and some email promotions. This only necessitates having more optimized landing pages for business websites and having quality link building can definitely help as well. The goal is to create more clickable pages with an impressive value proposition.
Here’s a simplified version on how you can optimize your landing pages:
- Choose a long-tail keyword, and create a landing page for it so that you can gain results from search engines
- Add title tags, meta tag description, and keywords
- Use the keywords as naturally as you can, so that you can avoid keyword stuffing.
- The content of the landing page should be 2000+ words because that is the standard on how you can prove to Google that your page is more valuable than others, and that it deserves to be ranked higher.
- Your landing pages should be useful.
- Write the landing page to persuade visitors to take the next step
- Always remember that the perfect landing page contains a headline, secondary headline, bullet points, and CTA’s (call-to-actions)
The primary purpose of your landing pages is to engage with your audience without ever having to meet them. When your landing pages start to rank up for their main keywords, you can tweak the content, or add more CTA’s to increase your conversion rate; while also improving your skills in SEO.
Also, having a beautiful design will help your landing page succeed, because if you have a well-written landing page, but your design is not up-to-par, then the whole landing page will downright fail. This is because the design of your landing page is as important as the content itself. It makes your page unique, and it gives your readers a different experience than just reading the content.
Lastly, build link in your landing pages. Links are an essential part of Google’s ranking factors. Without links, your page will not rank – even if it is full of quality content and unique designs. So, always incorporate a link to all your pages!
Your Competitor’s Keywords
Researching your competitors is a move that is widely acted out in the business industry, and it is also common in the online business platform. You can research your competitor’s keywords that they are ranking for, then you create much better content for those keywords that will be published in your own website. Also, knowing which keywords that your competitors are using is easy, here’s how:
- Go to SEMrush
- Input your competitor’s site URL
- Set the country to wherever you are located in, or the country your target market is in
- Click search
- Analyze the live keywords that pop-up
- Verify the ranking of the keywords by doing a quick Google search, and inputting the keywords that you have researched
After doing all of these, you can now create much better content for the keywords that you have researched, and you should also build link in that particular page to boost its capability to rank. Also, it would be helpful if you research the sites that link to your competitor’s site.
Then, contact the sites that you have found, and tell them about your article that is closely related to your competitor’s. There is a high possibility that they will link to your page as well, which will give you additional referral traffic.
What Works Best?
Lastly, analyze everything. See what is working, what isn’t working, and optimize based on your results. This is where using a helpful tool like Hubspot can allow you to see everything in one place and make the analysis process easier.
Based on these methods, you now have a system of creating remarkable content that is helpful and will attract your targeted website traffic. Keep it up, and over time this can really pay off as part of an overall inbound marketing strategy.
You can get ranked better in Google, generate more traffic, and build a new following, by simply being active on an authoritative platform. Authoritative platforms are websites wherein millions of users visit, and sites that rank for whatever keyword they target.
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are not authoritative platforms but are helpful in user engagement rather than being direct ranking factors. Examples of authoritative sites include: Quora, Slideshare, Blogger, and Docstoc; these websites helps you engage your followers while directly affecting your ranking factors. Here’s an example of how you can improve your rankings using authoritative sites, in this instance, Slideshare is what we are using:
- Find a trending topic or idea that you can use as your presentation topic
- Create an outline for your intended presentation
- Find images that you can use to support your content
- Study and use successful Slideshare presentations to improve your own presentation
- Finally, create your Slideshare presentation
Another thing that can help you establish your authority in search rankings is to share your presentation to websites like Docstoc, scribd, and animoto. You will attract fresh, younger audience, and boost your link through the use of SEO service tools.
Many people think that visitors, views, visits are all same thing but that is not correct. It’s important to know the correct meaning of all the terms from the start so that you can correctly check your traffic data and make informed decisions.
- Page views: Whenever a browser loads your website, a page view is recorded in Google Analytics. It means even if a single user reloads the same page of your website, then that would be recorded as two page views. In simple words, whenever the tracking code is loaded in the browser, a page view is recorded. This metric helps in understanding the behavior of users on any site.
- Visits: A visit is something which is recorded whenever someone visits your website from a referring source and even if the user visits multiple pages of the site, it will be counted as only one visit. That is why usually pageview counts are higher than the visits count.
- Conversion – the point at which an activity or response to a call to action fulfills the desired outcome (i.e. subscribing to a newsletter or purchasing a product)
- Sessions: A session is the period time a user is actively engaged with your website. All usage data (Screen Views, Events, etc.) is associated with a session.
- Average visit duration: This is the total time spent by users on your site or the average length of a Session. And higher average visit duration is always better as it means that your users are more interested in your site.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.
- Impression – the number of times a piece of content (like an online advertisement) is seen; the views.
- Keyword – in search engine optimization, the particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a web page. Keywords serve as clues or shortcuts that summarize the content of a page and help search engines match pages with searches.
- New visitor – visitors who have reached a site for the first time. This is important in comparison with return visitors as an indication of loyalty and site value.
- Organic search – describes search that generates results that are not paid advertisements
- Pageviews – the instance of an Internet user visiting a particular page on a site. A pageview is recorded whenever a full page of your website is viewed or refreshed.
- Pageviews per visit – the average number of pageviews per visit over a given time period
- Returning visitor – a visitor who can be identified with multiple visits, through cookies or authentication
- Unique visitor –the number of distinct individuals who request pages from a website during a specific period, no matter how many times they visit
- Visitor – also called a unique visitor; an individual visiting a website during a period of time
- Visits – the number of times a site is visited, no matter the number of unique visitors that make up those sessions
- Web analytics – the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage; the study of web usage behaviors
- Pay per click (cost per click) – a model where a company that has place an advertisement on a website pays a sum of money to a host website when a user clicks on the advertisement.
- Redirect – making a web page available under more than one URL address. Redirecting too many of a website’s pages to other pages wastes crawler resources and can result in lower search engine performance.
- Click through – a click on a link which leads to another website or section of a website
- Click through rate – the percentage of people who access a hyperlink (usually an ad) online. The click through rate is calculated by taking the number of clicks your link/ad receives divided by the number of times your link/ad was shown (impressions).
- Direct referral – visits to a site by visitors who typed a website’s URL directly into their browser. This also refers to the visitors who clicked on links saved as bookmarks or untagged links within emails.
- Minutes per visit (time on site) – the average length of a visit to a website during a selected time period
- Referral – visitors referred by links on other websites
- Related links – other sites that are related to the site you are interested in. Related sites may receive traffic from similar keywords, have a similar audience, or are frequently cited together on web pages. (read more)
- Session – a record of a single visitor browsing a website during a given time period. This can include multiple screen or pageviews, events, or ecommerce transactions. Sessions end at midnight on the day a session was initiated or after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- Social referrals – a count of all referrals from social networks during a selected time period
- Top viewed pages – pages that were most viewed during a selected time period
- Visits by country – visits to a website over a selected time period, broken down by the country of the visitor
- Returning vs New Users: A new user is someone who has never visited your site before while a returning visitor has visited your site in the past. (Google Analytics uses cookies to track this so, this report is not very accurate as if a person visits your site from desktop and then on their mobile phones, then they will be recorded as new visitors and not as returning visitor).
Advantages of having a high website targeted traffic
There are millions of active websites present on the Internet today and if you want to get results from your websites like business leads or sales, earning more money etc. it’s very important to have traffic on the website and high traffic means more leads, sales or money.
Note: What are the three most important things a website needs to be successful? “Traffic, traffic, and traffic”.
If your site is not having traffic then it just cannot survive for too long. That being said, there are many advantages of having a website with high traffic such as:
- More traffic means more revenue.
- Targeted traffic or people who are interested in what you are offering through your website are more likely to stay with you and/or your business and also refer your website to others as well.
- More traffic means more brand awareness and more exposure for your website.
- Other than making money, more website traffic, in the long run, can allow you to expand your business and your business profits, hire more employees, increase your offerings (products or services), open new locations etc.
- If you have a blog then with higher website traffic you can get sponsored posts, direct advertisers, and ultimately more profits.
- Conversions, sales, and traffic are related. You just cannot get more sales or conversions without traffic so, with high website traffic, conversions and sales both increases.
However, higher traffic itself is no guarantee of increased sales or more revenue. Website Traffic must be targeted or at least related to what your website is all about. Generic traffic cannot make even a small dent in your earning. 200 targeted visitors are more powerful than 1000 generic visitors. So, always try to get targeted traffic only by whichever method you use.
Conclusion….
Your content pages, or blogs, are powerful marketing tools that can help you significantly improve sales, lead generation, and conversion rate. However, it is not easy to produce content on a regular basis, and you may even have the urge to give up at times.
But, the most important thing to remember is that nothing ever comes easy – especially when it comes to the online landscape of your business. Knowing these advanced SEO techniques will significantly help you gain traffic, and in establishing your brand.
Let’s take a look at the other side of that advertisement coin. For you to earn money from advertisement, there must be someone willing to pay for it. In the most general case a company wants to increase its traffic, so we come back to it.
The reason for this?
The amount of money they spend on online advertising doesn’t measure up to what they potentially earn from all these new customers. But again, traffic doesn’t guarantee purchases, which is why conversion is important.
Conversion simply means how many of your visitors you convert to paying customers (in one way or another). In the case of ads, it is usually measured through your click-through rate, or CTR, which shows a percentage of people that actually clicked on the ad, after seeing it.
So, what’s better for you?
To have 100 visitors with 20% conversion rate, or have a 1000 visitors with 1% conversion rate?
Simple math says that the first one will bring in 20 paying customers, and the other one 10. Of course, this doesn’t discredit the importance of high traffic at all, it just underlines the importance of convincing these people to do what you need them to do, be it click on the ad or to buy your product.
Another important thing to have in mind is your audience retention. If you build loyalty to your brand and have a lot of satisfied customers that can have a better impact on your revenue in the long run, than trying to swindle your audience with some misleading ads or cheap marketing tricks.
Satisfied customers become returning visitors and customers, and they might even become the promoters of your brand if they are really satisfied. Whether they are people that are simply satisfied with your products or content and recommend you to their friends, or full-on fans, they are worth their weight in gold.
This all means that you have to be active online and interact with your audience. You need to have a strong presence in social media, build your e-mail lists, ask for their opinion in the comments, and so on.
