Investment by small companies in their websites and in online marketing has grown swiftly in the past five years. Owners of businesses are realising that with the increase in consumer reliance on search engines, online marketing can offer low cost, high returns, and low risk.
Marketing’s solitary goal is to achieve an increase in sales. To attain this in the online space, Sydney web design company Magicdust explains “your business website needs to attract traffic that can be converted into a sale or into a lead”. As such, this should be the first priority of your online marketing strategy.
Here are five reasons why website traffic is of key importance to your business, as well as the best means to obtain it, and how to assess a return-on-investment (ROI).
1. Website Traffic and Conversion
Website conversion gauges the rate at which visitors to a website conclude a specified desired outcome, such as submitting a query or purchasing goods. To have a real impact on your bottom line, you must comprehend that traffic and conversion rates go together. You cannot make conversions without traffic, and without conversions your traffic has no point.
2. Traffic Sources
Here is a rundown of the four main kinds of web traffic:
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic gives companies access to prime locations on the internet, and is intended to be greatly relevant to audiences. Paid traffic examples are Google AdWords, Social Ads, and numerous remarketing companies. As there is a cost for each visitor, there is a stress on generating an effective conversion rate that provides a cost-effective ROI. The excellent thing about paid traffic is that you can obtain accurate data in order to measure success. With some paid campaigns, the cost-per-click (CPC) can be fairly high, so it is worth figuring out the ROI to determine if it is a feasible choice for your company.
Organic Search Results & Search Engine Optimisation
The aim of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to better the natural position and rank of a website’s listing on the results page of the search engine. With all SEO campaigns there has to be an initial investment of both money and time in order to achieve results. If executed well, organic traffic and SEO can often be a more rewarding and effective long-term solution. Rather than competing against pay-per-click (PPC), SEO may be utilised together with PPC. As explained by SEO Image: “Gaining a presence in both the natural and paid sectors will often double the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign”.
Content Marketing (Referral)
Content marketing is often utilised to improve organic SEO rankings, but, if done well, this content can also be a plentiful source of links and of referral traffic. A blog is an excellent place to begin with content marketing. According to Hubspot, businesses that have a blog obtain 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links. By featuring high value content you are likely to be referred to by others or you may even have the chance to guest blog and grow your back-link profile.
Social Media
Not to be mixed up with paid advertisements in social media, social media itself as a traffic source is about having a presence on social media that incites a certain community to come to your company’s website. In contrast with search engines, social media lets you establish relationships in a targeted user network, often leading to better-qualified traffic. A terrific thing about social media is that the larger your network becomes, the larger your potential audience can become. As an example, if your marketing efforts in social media for a month produce a 10% increase in your followers and your audience was 1500, that is an increase of a further 150 viewers, but if your followers was 150,000, then that is an increase of 15,000 viewers for the equivalent amount of effort.
3. Qualified Traffic
Incapsula states that “bots accounted for 56% of all website traffic in 2014 and for smaller websites, bots can make up 80% of all website traffic”. There are many means to increase website traffic quantitatively, but without that traffic being qualified, then it is likely that you will witness a sharp decrease in conversion rates, as well as little impact on your bottom line. It is therefore crucial that you attract traffic that is qualified, using a strategy of online marketing that is in alignment with the intent of your consumers.
4. Conversions From Traffic
Despite businesses having the ability to monitor their website traffic, they often fail to analyse this in regards to their rate of conversion. According to recent research by Infotrust, “34% of businesses that collect data on their website traffic don’t know what to do with it”.
Successful strategies for online marketing have one basic aim at their core: to obtain qualified traffic and convert this traffic to sales. It is therefore important that once traffic is obtained it also converts, otherwise your ROI will be negligible.
5. Find A Balance
The effect that traffic and conversion rate optimisation have on an online marketing campaign’s success cannot be refuted.
Once you comprehend how acquisition and conversion operate on your business website and how to project their impact on your ROI, you will be able to evaluate the online channels used to obtain traffic in a more effectual manner.
The key to generating large amounts of quality traffic that results in conversions is to concentrate on being relevant, and on increasing the channels utilised. Multi-channel marketing means combining in one overall strategy a number of sources that will be complementary. By concentrating on enticing qualified traffic firstly, you can then use multiple channels to touch a greater customer quantity. This will position you for a steady rise in sales over the long term.
