So You need to Get Traffic to Your Website?

Everyone who has a website wants more traffic. However, not all traffic is created equal. Many people get so caught up with driving traffic to their website they forget to check whether it is working towards the actual goal of the website.

Different websites have different goals. One may be to build a brand, another may be to sell a product while yet another may be to build a list from leads. No matter what the goal, tracking should be done to see whether the traffic generated from various sources is actually helping to achieve that goal.

It’s always important to be able to see the difference between the alternative traffic sources. Pay Per Click ads are invariably cheaper to buy when placed on a Content Network as opposed to a Search Network. This is because your ads on the Search Network are directly triggered by someone typing in a search term so can be viewed a more targeted.

You will tend to find that most people who click on ads placed on the content network tend to be browsers looking for information rather than people looking to make a purchase. People who type in specific search terms in the search network tend to have done most of their research and are more likely to be ready to buy a product. because of this there is much more demand for the search network which means a higher PPC cost.

Unfortunately, paying for advertising can eat into profits. In some cases campaigns that are generating a good volume of sales can be rendered unprofitable due to the costs of advertising. However, organic traffic, which comes from unpaid listing on search engines, is free and targeted. The difficulty arises in generating sufficient volumes of traffic. To do this requires being on the front pages of the major search engines for popular terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to rank highly for competitive keywords. Unfortunately, many SEO techniques take considerable time to put into place and to affect search engine rankings.

Its very hard to rank highly for more generic keywords especially in popular niches where competition is fierce so aim for long tail keywords or “low hanging fruit”. There are lots of good keyword tools to help you find these and they are much easier to rank for so if you can build a significant list of these and optimize your pages accordingly you will get ranked and also get significant traffic from these.

There are other forms of traffic generation including email marketing, article marketing and maybe doing joint ventures. Keep in mind your objective should always be to avoid paying for any traffic that fails to convert.