Increase your Site Traffic?
Drew Harris
Getting traffic to your site is important.
Getting the right traffic to your site is even more important.
Delivering a site visitor with a pleasant experience that calls them to action is most important.
Let's look at each of these things separately because each one flows into the next.
Getting traffic to your site can be done a number of ways
There is PPC (Pay Per Click), Directory Listings, General PR, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and other ways.. Each of these may yield some traffic to your site. However, with each of these there is a cost, whether it be your time or your money. Of course everything in business has its cost.. It is important to establish some measurables, benchmarks, metrics.. whatever you want to call them that you will use to measure the worth of your efforts. The point of any business is to provide you with a good ROI (Return on Investment).
Therefore, you must carefully measure your investment and your return.
- PPC will cost you money for click-throughs to your site. The value of these (if through Google) can directly be measured through setting up and monitoring site goals with Google Analytics, there are several other options, tools and services out there, but, Google is the king and it's tools are free and provide you with a good starting point and you can always diverify your efforts after you have famiarized yourself with the way Google works. PPC provides you with very valuable data on who's looking for what, and want key phrases translate into sales for your business. This data can be used to tweak your site content to provide better natural Search Engine results.
- Directory Listings specific to your industry can be extremely valuable and are easy to manually track results. The best ones are the ones that will provide you with real leads and opportunities. Online "yellow page" listings may not be the best idea for your directory listing efforts.
- General PR can cost you time and or money, you can hire a PR firm to help get your business on the television, radio, etc. or, you can try to work your network of people and get it done yourself which will cost you time. These results may be the hardest to quantify. If you are looking to build your brand and name recognition, this is a good option for you.
- SEO will cost you time and or money, you can spend your time and do it yourself or hire a firm to help you manage it. This is very important and can provide you with some very positive long term results if done right. This will optimize the content of your web site to be easily found by those seeking what your site offers.
There is a science to each of these options that should be taken into account. It is our opinion that each option should be used and carefully measured. No one method used alone can provide the complete result that all methods used together can provide. Remember, that measuring your ROI is critical and not to be discounted.
Keep an eye on our blog in the coming days for posts about getting the right traffic to your site and delivering a great experience for your site visitors that encourage them to do business with you.