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How to Drive Web Traffic to your Online Business

By: Yolanda Torrisi

One of the most common questions I am asked is: How can I drive more traffic to my online business? It comes about largely from not having a strategy for their online business before they build their websites. Another reason is the lack of knowledge of online business, so they prefer to launch a website and see how it performs before committing additional resources.

I am no longer amazed at how often I come across this question (because it is so often). Most retailers understand the importance of attracting visitors to their shops and would not dream of building or leasing a shop without considering the impact of position on passing traffic. It is this traffic that they attract into their shops to sell products and services. That is why the cost of leading in high traffic areas is considerably more expensive than others.

The internet is still relatively new to business and in most cases the level of awareness of what the internet has to offer is low. Up until now they may not have felt the need to learn because business has been working just fine as it is. What most business owners are now beginning to realise is that their customers are shopping around online and if they do not have an online presence that can easily be found, they will lose prospective customers to competitors.

Others have already invested in a website. However, most did not design the website to position strongly in search engines - where they now know their prospects are looking for suppliers of products and services such as theirs. So, in effect, their web properties are not working for them. They "ticked the box" of having a website and pint the web address on business cards and stationary but it brings little traffic.

So I normally advise them to begin by taking two courses of action simultaneously. The first is to establish a pay per click campaign with the major search engines and advertise their products and services in sponsored links. This is easy to do on most search engines but it is also easy to waste money. So I advise them to seek professional help to research niche keyword phrases that will bring in traffic but at reasonable prices and to ensure that bid management strategies are delivering positive return on investment.

The second suggestion is to begin optimising their website for organic search. Strong organic search rankings can drive considerable traffic and it is all free! Of course, nothing is free in this world. There is the cost of developing and executing an effective SEO strategy.

The reason I suggest doing both search engine advertising and search engine optimisation simultaneously is because each has different cost/benefit profiles. Pay per click advertising can be up and running quickly for hundreds of relevant keywords whereas organic SEO takes much longer to achieve and typically for only a fraction of the keywords.

A common reaction to this is approach is the question should I shut down my pay per click keywords once I am ranking highly organically? My answer is no. If you are still making a positive return on investment from paid search, why stop it? Most people will probably click on your organic search results but there may be some who elect for the sponsored link. By having both you have all bases covered.

In future articles I will talk more specifically about how to undertake each of these approaches to driving traffic in more detail.

In summary, it pays to plan for positioning your online business in search engines before it is built. However, it is never too late to start and the two most effective ways are to be seen where your customers are looking, and that is typically the search engines. So get a pay per click campaign underway and measure the results while simultaneously taking the relatively slow path to optimising your site for organic search.

Article Source: http://www.thecaymanhost.com/articles

Roger Billing has been working on strategies to drive web traffic through SEO and search engine advertising strategies.

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