There are many techniques that Search Engine Optimisation firms use to increase search engine rankings. Some are ethical, some are not. Some convert to sales, others don’t. Here is the lowdown on how you can significantly increase traffic to your website without having to be an SEO guru.
Quality of the traffic
It is important that you understand increasing visits to your website doesn’t necessarily mean more sales as a result. If a website visitor is searching for your product or service and finds your website, then your chances of converting that visitor into a customer is higher than if you are seen when the visitor is NOT specifically looking for your products or services. It is important to have a good mix of traffic in this regard. Often, untargetted traffic can lead to conversions and regardless, it should still help in making your company ‘front of mind’.
Low Quality Traffic
If you want thousands of people visiting your website with no real intention to purchase (but perhaps you can convert a handful of these visitors anyway) then there are many services out there offering thousands of visitors to your site for very little. This is handy if you want to be seen to have a lot of traffic, you want many people from a particular region to see your site, whether they are interested or not, or just for vanity’s sake. The going rate is usually around $50 per 10,000 visits, which can be delivered over a period of time, or as quickly as possible. If you wanted to be seen by, for example, a million people in Australia, you would expect to pay around $2,000 for this service.
These ads are normally delivered as ‘pop-unders’. This means that as someone leaves another website, a browser window pops under the current window, as if to say ‘If you liked this site, then here’s another you may like’. Not all that effective for making sales, but certainly a fast, easy way to bring people to your site, whether they look at your content or not.
Medium Quality Traffic
If you want many people who are at least ‘interested’ in your industry to see your website, then Blogs and Articles are the way to go, just like the one you are reading now! You may not need a web designer, but you may have an interest in what a designer has to say. And perhaps you feel that we can help you. If, by spending time giving out free advice and writing informative articles it leads to a handful of extra sales, then great! If not, blogs help to improve your search engine ranking anyway, so it’s worth giving it a go. Setting up a blog can be a little difficult, but a web designer can help you there to at least configure it to run under your domain name and get you started. It’s also more fun than you might think to write articles that can benefit others!
In addition to blogs, syndicated articles are also very popular. If you have some skill at writing, why not submit your articles to places like www.ezinearticles.com . It’s free, easy and with a few good articles you can be an Expert Author in no time!
Social Networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin are also very popular and will add to your overall business image. It’s great for word of mouth (when you have friends of your friends contacting you about your product or service) and also has the added benefit of giving you some social interaction.
High Quality Traffic
If you want highly targetted traffic to your website, you can’t go past Google Adwords. Adwords will deliver ads that link to your website to website visitors that are searching for your product or service (based on the keywords you select). You choose how much you are prepared to pay per click and per day, what keywords you want to list for, what regions you are targetting and in some circumstances you can even choose the demographic of your visitors (age, sex, location, income, etc). Check out our Adwords page on our main website for more information.
With a combination of these traffic sources, you should see an exponential number of visitors to your website within a short space of time. Just remember that, at the end of the day, no matter how high you list in search engines or how much traffic you can generate, if you don’t have a good website, a good product and good service, no amount of traffic is going to help your site. Get the basics right, then get your business out there!