Easily Browse This Article On Optimizing Your Visitors And Conversion
- How Do We Generate Traffic?
- Without Traffic There Can Be No Conversions
- Traffic Is The Gas and Conversions Are The Engine
- Measure The Conversions So You Can Open Up The Traffic
- The Right Prospect Will Convert Much Higher
- Data Helps Your Find The Right Prospect
- Tweaking Your Traffic and Conversions
- Keep It Simple Stupid
- SEO
- Pay Per Click Advertising on Google, Bing, or Yahoo
- Facebook Advertising
- YouTube Video Marketing
- Content marketing (i.e. blogging)
- Email Marketing
- Banner Ads
- Retargeting
It can be argued that in any business, two critical factors come into play. Those two critical factors for your business are traffic and conversion. If you own a retail store, an online business, a bakery, or a successful personal injury law practice, you need to focus in on these two aspects of your business. The answer to this question is a bit more detailed, and we are going to explain why a combination, plus one additional factor, is going to make you more successful as a business.
How Do We Generate Traffic?
For the sake of this article, we are going to focus a bit more on online businesses, but it does relate to every business. If you have a bakery, and you have the best cupcakes the world has ever tasted, you have to rely on traffic to sell your baked goods. There are several ways to do this. You could advertise online; you could send out flyers, put an advertisement in the newspaper, send out direct mail, have yard signs prominently displayed, etc. These promotional efforts come down to getting bodies in the store so they can taste your delicious product.
Without Traffic There Can Be No Conversions
If you think about it, Traffic is the gas that runs the engine of your business. If you are not in front of people online, or you don’t show up when people do searches for your most important keywords, phrases or terms, you are not going to sell anything. Traffic is vital to the success of your business, and getting more qualified prospects is what will explode your business. There are many ways to capture traffic online. Here are a few ways to make people aware of your product or service and drive them to your website:
If you can drive traffic to your website, you then can see how well your site converts visitors into paying clients. Yes, you are going to drive people that are not going to buy from you, and those people can be marketed to know again what you are doing through remarketing. However, the data that you receive from this traffic is critical to knowing how to increase sales month after month. If your traffic increases, then you should be seeing a higher number of sales, if the second piece of the puzzle is correctly placed, which is Conversion.
Traffic Is The Gas and Conversions Are The Engine
Now that you are driving traffic to your site, you want to see how that traffic is converting into paying clients. If you drive 1,000 unique visitors to your website, and you convert 10% of those visitors, you can sell 100 clients on your product or service. The problem is, a 10% conversion ratio is a lofty goal, and many times, businesses see a number closer to 1/2% or 1%. Even a 1% conversion rate is going to get you ten newly paying clients from 1000 visitors. This isn’t bad if you sell a service for $5000, but if your product sells for $19.99, it may be hard to justify paying for traffic.
Measure The Conversions So You Can Open Up The Traffic
You may be wondering….What is the Importance of User Engagement? If you have a poor conversion rate on your website, you may find yourself in the unfortunate position of spending money on traffic that does not convert. If your potential clients visit your website and leave within a few seconds, they were unable to find a solution to their problem. You either are targeting the wrong type of client, OR, and this is the case, your website did not guide them down the proper path to conversion. The website is simply a sales funnel for your business. You pour visitors into the top of the funnel, and the sales come out of the bottom. If you pour more visitors, you should capture more clients. Now that we understand why, both, traffic and conversions matter, now we can discuss how to improve your marketing efforts.
The Right Prospect Will Convert Much Higher
One aspect of traffic that most website owners often miss is the type of traffic that is entering and exiting the site. If you are a local plumber, it doesn’t make sense for you to attract people with plumbing problems on the other side of the country. You want people faced with plumbing problems close to home, in your backyard that are more likely to call your business when the toilet starts leaking. Steven Twomey of Las Vegas SEO told us: “often, we see people trying to optimize their website for a national term when they really should be focusing on the city or surrounding cities they service. Why make things harder for you to succeed? Target the right prospects and your traffic will increase naturally over time.” When you are laser focused on the right prospect, your conversions shoot through the roof.
Data Helps Your Find The Right Prospect
If you are driving traffic to your website, and have conversion metrics setup on your site, you can see when people enter your site, how they interact, which pages they visit, and how long they stayed on your site. If you operate an E-Commerce business, you can even see how many people made it to your shopping cart and didn’t purchase your product. Wouldn’t it be great if you could market to these people again?
It is more likely that someone who has been on your website before, had an interest in what you were offering, and went so far even to put a few items in their shopping cart before they decided to leave, would be an ideal candidate for you to market to again. It is scary how few people know how to sell to these people a second time, and it is even scarier how much money is left on the table by not re-marketing to this group. They almost bought the first time, why not ask them again if they would like what you have to offer.
When you dig into the data, you can see what pages people like on your website, where they spent the most time, and also, what path they took to buy your product or service. As you measure the data and work on improving your conversion rates, you can automate your marketing budget and expect the same results time and time again. There is a reason why some businesses are willing to pay $250 per click on Google Adwords for just one person to visit. It is because that company knows how many visitors they need to capture a conversion. If it costs $2500 to obtain one client, but they make $5,000 off each customer, they see a 2 to 1 ROI on their investment. I don’t know about you, but I would spend a dollar to make two every day of the week!
Tweaking Your Traffic and Conversions
Ok, so this is the part that will transform your business. If you know your traffic, and you know what your conversion rate is, you can predict how much you are going to make for every dollar spent. However, if you pay the same amount of money for traffic, AND INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATE, you are printing money. Using our example above, 1% conversion rate for 1000 visitors = ten sales per month.
Take that same amount of traffic, and increase your conversation rate to 3%, and now you just tripled your monthly sales. If you increase your conversion rate by 1% every month, you are looking at ten new sales per month, and this is with the same amount of traffic you have had all along. If you can increase traffic and conversions, now you are printing money of higher denominations.
Keep It Simple Stupid
The KISS formula is nothing new, but as SEO consultants or business owners trying to optimize our own website, we tend to get caught up in so many things that truly don’t matter. Be sure to make it very clear to your visitors, and from a keyword research and content standpoint, understand the message of your page. With the traffic and conversion scenario, we can focus on two very important aspects of our website, continue to refine and tweak each one, and improve over time. Drive more traffic, tweak your conversions. Drive a little more traffic, continue to tweak your optimization. Over time, you create a well-oiled machine that is supplying you with new potential clients day after day.
To see how well your website is optimized for both traffic and conversions, use our free website test for a detailed breakdown of your site, and actionable items you can take to fix your site quickly. For more website optimization tips, be sure to check out more articles throughout our blog.
