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Converting Your Traffic
| Most SEO guides out there are flawed because they just teach you how to rank in search engines and get free traffic, but they don’t tell you what you need to do with that traffic. I believe that an SEO and traffic guide that focuses on getting visibility on the search engines and getting free traffic from the SEs and other sources is not standing on strong ground because I’ve seen for myself that a lot of traffic does not necessarily translate to profits or growth of an online business or a website. Imagine having a store on a busy location with a lot of pedestrian traffic. Surely you will have a lot of potential buyers from people who walk in, simply because your store is there. Compare this to a website we’ve been able to rank in Google’s Page 1 and is suddenly getting loads of traffic. Now imagine people walking into your store in that busy street and walking out before they buy anything. Worse, they walk out seconds after they enter the store. They don’t simply buy. Now what if this is a website - your website - that gets a lot of referral traffic from the search engines but do not take action on your content.. They don’t click the order button on your sales or product page. They don’t hit the submit button on your squeeze page. They don’t click on your banner or your Adsense ads.. They don’t follow the affiliate links to products you review or recommend. They don’t stay long enough to finish reading your content. They don’t leave a comment on your blog. They don’t do the thing that you want them to do when they reach your page. Or worse, you are not asking them to do anything. Quote Even if you drive a million visitors to your page, you will still not reap the benefits of a good Google ranking or loads of free traffic from other sources if those visitors don't take action on your content. Conversion is the missing piece of the puzzle in your SEO and free traffic plan. In the past, I was able to generate thousands of page views to this one site I created but I did not make money or get any benefits. Sure I had ads on the page, but they don’t convert and I’m not getting repeat visitors. I have a feeling that people are leaving my site shortly after they land on its pages... Then it dawned upon me that to benefit from traffic, you have to make that traffic STAY FIRST, then stay long enough to TAKE ACTION! Success is whatever your marketing goals are. Are you looking to get ad clicks or sales? Tools vary depending on how users are using the site. Remember the 10-second rule... Quote If you are spending time and effort doing SEO and building links to a page that people leave instantly (high bounce rate), then you are just wasting time and energy. You cannot hope to convert traffic that bounces! The 10 Second Rule "If your web page is boring, your visitors will not wait around to look for the information, even if you have what they're looking for" So what makes visitors leave your site? Here are the most common culprits: ■ Unattractive look. ■ Irrelevant content, bad spelling and poor grammar. ■ Information is too hard to find. ■ Long chunks of text without text formatting. ■ Cluttered text and graphics. ■ Too much advertising. ■ Long lists of endless products. ■ Distracting colors that make the text hard to read or focus on. Does your Website attract a steady flow of targeted traffic, build an opt-in list, supply you leads and income from sales of products and services? If it doesn't, then you need to examine your Website content, design and structure. In most cases, websites are designed and built first. Then the business owners try to figure out how to attract visitors. This approach is backwards. Before you have a single web page built or content written you should have clearly identified your strategy for attracting visitors and converting them to leads or clients. Using the web to market your product or services requires a web marketing plan. The web has the potential to be a powerful communication tool, but your Website needs to be designed in order for you to achieve your marketing goals. These goals also have to be measurable. A website built and managed without a clear marketing plan is usually a waste of time and money. Many websites are nothing more than web billboards. These sites generally do not attract clients and provide little marketing benefit. What should you measure? The most obvious category that can be measured is the amount of traffic that your website is generating. The key value is the number of unique visitors that come to the website. There are other values that are important, such as page views and average length of stay. As you measure these values over time the goal would be to have a steady increase in all of these values. Of course, if these visitors are not doing anything when they are on your Website they are of little value. Do you have a call to action? Here’s an example of a website with a clear Call to Action:  Your website should be designed in such a way that your visitors are presented with a call to action. This call to action should be obvious to the visitor. Your call to action is another element that can be measured. How many visitors perform the call to action? The call to action can take many forms. It may be opting in to a email newsletter list, or filling out a lead form. The ideal action is the purchase of a product or service. When a site visitor performs the call to action, you have a conversion. The number of conversions divided by the number of website visitors is the conversion rate. One of the goals of the website should be to increase the conversion rate. Testing Once you have your measurable elements, traffic and conversions, you can test various ways to make your website work. You can test various techniques for increasing traffic. Options here include search engine optimization of your website, pay per click advertising, press releases and article writing. Then you will also want to increase your conversion rates. Split testing is used to determine how various elements within the web page affect the visitor. You can change the elements on the page such as the headline or color of text and graphics, to measure the affect on the visitor. Website Goals You now have the understanding that your business Website should be working for you with a marketing plan. You need a call to action. You need to measure traffic and conversions, and then test to improve the results. With these measurements in hand, you can now set goals for your Website. Source: Google Piranha | |
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