A wise man once said that your business does not truly exist until it exists virtually. In other words, your business is legitimized, nowadays, by having a website. In terms of your overall marketing strategy, a website plays an integral role in your business’ branding, positioning, customer engagement and ecommerce activities.
It’s highly likely that you have a website for a reason. Hopefully, you know exactly WHY you have a website and HOW the website can help your business.
If that is the case, you then have a reason to have a website, and therefore should have some goals for your site. While the benefits of having a site are too numerous to discuss here, ALL websites can benefit from getting more traffic.
The Three Types of Website Visitors
In its simplest form, the source of website traffic falls into 3 categories:
- Direct Traffic – this means someone typed your URL directly into their browser
- Referrals – this means the visitor arrived by clicking on a link from another website and arrived at your website
- Search Engines – this means a visitor went to a search engine, did a search, saw a link to your website, clicked it and arrived at your site.
More specifically, search engine traffic can either be from FREE methods or by PAID methods.
Today, let’s focus on the FREE side of things.
Search Engine Optimization
Free traffic specifically comes from implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies on your web pages. Does it really work? How can you know what the search engines are looking for? Those are great questions. You are about to get some answers.
Let’s start by discussing what a search engine is. It is a computer program designed to:
- Find websites
- Read and analyze the content on those websites
- Determine how well the content on the sites matches the searches performed by the search engine users, usually by matching up key words
- Show the most relevant websites in their search results
So, since it’s a computer program, we know that it is designed to look for certain things. In other words, if certain things exist on a website, that website will be looked upon more favorably than those sites that are lacking those things.
That means that an understanding and application of SEO principles on your website will increase and improve keyword rankings. Over time, more rankings will produce more traffic.
What Should I Do Next?
The place to start is to find out how people are currently coming to your site. Hopefully you have some sort of analytics running on your site. If you do, this information is really pretty easy to obtain. If not, Google Analytics is a powerful, free tool that can help. It makes the data simple to understand, like this:
You can drill down and find out which search engines drove visitors from which keywords, and even which of those keywords produced a sale for you. It’s powerful stuff.
Once you have that data, identify 5 of your most important keywords. Check the existing rankings for those keywords at Google.com.
Now that you know how visitors are arriving at your site, and which keywords you want to drive more visitors to your site, you can start learning about SEO and implementing some strategies to assist you in this process.
Sebo Marketing specializes in assisting companies in this process. In fact, for the right clients, Sebo will perform these services on a performance basis. Meaning, if Sebo does the job well, we both make money. If not, you don’t have to pay us. We want to help!
As mentioned at the start of this article, your website drives important marketing tactics that in turn drive your overall marketing strategy. These tactics depend largely on traffic in order to work.
In summary, you need a marketing strategy. We have partnered with Serfwerks to help our clients perform marketing research and establish marketing strategies. You also need to understand the goals of your website and how it can benefit you. Increasing traffic will help increase those benefits. Improving your sites ability to get free traffic from search engines always makes sense. Take the time to understand this and benefit from it.
