Not All Web Traffic is Created Equal
Sure, everyone who has a website wants more traffic. However, not all traffic is created equal — by far.
Many get caught up with driving traffic to their website they forget to check whether it is working towards the actual goal of the site.
Different sites have different goals. One may be to build a brand, another may be to sell a product while yet another may be to build a list from leads and perhaps even other sites are simply to provide links to your various related ‘money pages.’
No matter what the goal, tracking should be done to see whether the traffic generated from various sources is actually helping to achieve that goal.
In some cases, it is easy to see the difference between various traffic sources. For example, it is usually much cheaper to buy Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for a content network than for a search network. On a content network, ads appear on related web sites while on a search network they appear as the result of a user keying in specific search terms.
People who click on ads on the content network tend to be browsing other websites for information. In most cases, the mindset of a content network clicker expects to get information for free. On the other hand, those searching on key terms, especially product names, are more likely to be looking to buy. Because of this simple mindset change, between two similar, but very different traffic sources, conversion rates are typically much higher on the search network. This leads to more demand which, in turn, leads to higher prices for these ads.
Unfortunately, paying for advertising can eat into profits. In some cases, campaigns that are generating a good volume of sales can be rendered unprofitable due to the costs of PPC advertising.
Enter organic traffic, which comes from unpaid listings on search engines. Organic traffic is free and targeted. If your site is properly optimized and has been ‘voted for’ (ie linked to) by other relevant sites, the various search engines of the world will give you free traffic. Organic traffic is, by far, my favorite method of getting traffic to my own sites.
The difficulty arises in generating sufficient volumes of organic traffic from the search engines. To get reasonable volumes of traffic requires your site(s) being on the first couple pages of the major search engines for words that people type into the ’search bar.’
What I am talking about here is Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of trying to rank highly for competitive keywords. Unfortunately, many SEO techniques take considerable time to put into place and to affect search engine rankings.
One technique to overcome this problem is to aim for the ‘low-hanging fruit’ or those keyword phrases that have less competition, but have some search volume. While these phrases tend to generate lower traffic, it is possible to build up considerable amounts of traffic by building up a huge list of less popular keywords.
The way I come up with these ‘low-hanging fruit’ keyword phrases is a service from Jim Morris (et al) called Nichebot.
Nichebot will give you great information on those previously searched keyword phrases, to which you can use to seed your website with content that will allow your site to rank within the shortest amount of time.
However, in my opinion one of the best forms of these ‘low-hanging keywords’ are from your own server logs. Once the search engines start sending you traffic, they will send along the specific keyword phrase that was searched on. Not everyone is going to search using the same words, phrases or logic. This means there are an almost unlimited amount of longer keyword phrases that have very minimal competition, but obviously have some search traffic.
By collecting these longer keyword phrases that have generated you at least one click, you can then create (generate?) content that contains these keyword phrases. The search engines then will see these new keyword phrases on your site and know they have sent you at least one click from a particular phrase before… in turn they may rank you higher, at least that is the goal, right?
Brandon Hopkins has a great article on why he tracks rankings and traffic. If you know what keyword phrases your site ranks for and where your traffic comes from, you can make very quick, educated guesses as to the next step(s) to improve not only your rankings in the search results, but also the quality of your web traffic.