Attracting the right kind of web traffic

We’ve heard it time and time again… how web success is defined by traffic. The more “hits” your website gets, the more successful it is, right?

It’s a common misconception that there’s a direct correlation between the number of unique visitors or page views a website gets and how successful that site is. The thing underlying, but often overlooked, truth is that unless you do something with web traffic once it arrives all it does is eat into your monthly bandwidth allowance.

Traffic without conversion doesn’t benefit your business

Unless you can persuade a significant portion of your website visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do when they arrive on your site (your conversion goals), then the volume of traffic your site attracts is a meaningless number. It’s like Brown Thomas counting the people who walk past on the pavement on a Saturday — pointless.

To build a really effective website you need targeted traffic. To get the maximum ROI out of your web marketing investment, attracting people who want what you have to offer is crucial.

Goals, keywords, content, conversion

What do you want to achieve from your website overall? What about the individual landing pages?

Having clearly defined goals is important. If you don’t have a destination in mind it’s impossible to plan the journey, and you’ll never know when you’ve arrived.

Once you have clear goals, you need to choose relevant, properly targeted keywords based on achieving those specific goals

• Pick general keyword phrases and you’ll end up fishing in a bigger pool of potential visitors, so there’s huge volume potential, but there’s also likely to be more competition and a low probability of conversion.
• Pick very specific keyword phrases and your probability for conversion climbs exponentially, your competition falls but the size of the pool shrinks, so potential traffic volume is much lower.

Ideally we need to strike the happy medium between these two extremes, selecting  good mix of relevant goal-focussed keywords. You’ll find a good overview of keywords and how to pick them in an earlier post.

Once you’re targeting the right keywords, the next step is to ensure your >content delivers. Once your highly targeted visitors arrive on your site, give them what they’re looking for (based on your target keywords for the page) and guide them gently (or perhaps not so gently) towards your chosen conversion goals.

Make your call to action clear. If you want them to buy… ask them to buy, and make it easy for them to do so. If you want them to sign up to your mailing list, give them a form to fill in… and ASK them to submit it. Don’t beat around the bush… state what you’d like your visitors to do clearly and concisely, and make taking action easy for them.

Real website success isn’t about traffic volume; it’s about return on investment.

Choose traffic quality over traffic volume, align your online marketing accordingly and focus on improving conversion with more focused content and landing pages. Do that, and you’ll soon see a marked improvement in your website performance.