It’s been
said that a website should be your cheapest salesperson—an always on, 24/7/365,
one-stop resource about your company, available products or services,
competitive positioning, and enough tailored calls-to-action to persuade a
visitor to express interest. No human can come close to providing these
services. But how do you get your website to do this? It starts with traffic.

When
thinking about driving traffic to your Website, one question is fundamental: Do you want quantity or quality? If
your business is new (or your product is in beta) and your goal is to get the
word out, then quantity is key. Furthermore, if your product has broad appeal,
quantity is arguably better than quality. Most clients tell us, however, their goal is to increase the number of
qualified visitors to their website. There are a number of ways to
accomplish this goal, but one sure-fire investment that has an immediately
trackable ROI is search engine marketing.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is
about adapting your online presence and web assets to enhance your brand
online, increase website traffic and lead conversion, and overall increase
leads and ultimately sales. Search engine marketing has many facets, including analytics,
data feeds, information architecture, calls-to-action, and landing pages. But
the two most popular are search engine
optimization and pay-per-click
advertising.

Search engine optimization (SEO), also referred to as organic search or natural search, refers to listing results that are produced by
search engine indexing algorithms rather than sponsored links (see image below).
Search engines rank the search results according to your website’s indexed relevance to the search terms. Relevance is determined
by many on-page and off-page factors, and each search engine has its own
unique algorithm to determine relevance. A search engine’s algorithm criteria
changes regularly in a continual process of attempting to deliver credible,
optimal results to its users. The higher a site scores against the
requirements, the higher ranking it will receive in organic results.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), also referred to as paid search, is a
pay-for-performance bidding system that enables bidding for placement within
search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo (see image below). When used
effectively, a paid placement strategy can increase qualified site traffic,
boost sales potential and lower acquisition costs. The key to effective paid
search is in-depth strategy planning, key phrase analysis, expert copywriting,
tailored calls to action, and detailed reporting and analysis.

Other starter tactics to drive website
traffic include:

• Place your website URL in your email signature
  How
  many external emails do you send in a given day? Make sure your email signature
  calls attention to your site.

• Submit your URL to search sites and
  directories
  Doing
  so helps to ensure all of your pages are found, indexed, and available for
  display when a search is performed.

• Email your community to announce the launch of
  your website
  Use
  your eNewsletter (you do have an eNewsletter to
  maintain customer contact, right?) to announce your new site to clients. Be
  sure to emphasize how the site benefits them.

• Issue press releases
  Not
  only do press releases serve as a good link-building activity, but few ways are
  better to generate traffic in a short period of time.

And finally, ensure your site is optimized to cater to different types of
visitors with proper information architecture and calls-to-action. That way, no
matter how a visitor arrives at your site, you can be confident that if they’re
qualified, they’ll respond—the most important end result of increased website
traffic. To do this, and to make sure you achieve the desire results for all
the aforementioned items, make sure you work with a reputable search
engine marketing firm that knows what they’re doing.

Stay tuned–we’ll explore more way to increase your lead conversion in
future posts!