Have you ever been stuck in traffic? I know, I have. But unlike that kind of traffic where it is a congestion of vehicles on the road, there is another kind of traffic. One that is invisible to the naked eye. It is called Online Traffic. It is a term that is defined as the number of visits to a website, and it is a common way to measure an online business effectiveness at attracting an audience.
How is this relevant to anyone, one may ask. Let me bring you back to the scenario where you are stuck in traffic on the road, because everyone around you is going somewhere, and what if that somewhere is also the same place! Now instead of a physical location, it is an online website.
If you are an online business owner, and everyone is visiting your site. How awesome is that. Imagine the ‘purchases’ and ‘business’ you will be able to rake in.
But the question is, how do you increase ‘traffic’ to your website, there is these 2 special marketing tools called Search Engine Marketing (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) also known as Paid Search Marketing.
SEO is a structured approach that online search engines will factor in, in order for your website to be listed above the rest and hopefully be in the first few upon a keyword search. Simply put, people do not want to scroll too far down on their devices, for something they can already find right at the top. McDonald has an interesting workbook to help online marketers improve and exercise their skills in developing a hands-on approach to success. In his book The Seven Steps to SEO Success on Google.
Similarly, Moz also has an online crash course to help beginners grasp how does one use SEO or rather also to simply understand it. Both McDonald and Moz has similar 7 steps in bringing the reader to improve online competitiveness. But Moz have so conveniently created his version of Moslow’s Hierachy of Needs, called Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs.
Where Moz starts off with signifying the importance of Crawl accessibility so engines can read the website effectively and efficiently.
But in the current age, SEO is no longer enough to gain sufficient traction and instead would also be recommended to be utilised with PPC on Google to place ads on your site increasing your website ranking almost effortlessly.
Analyzing your site should also be followed as McDonalds labels step 6: Metrics, along with Moz’s chapter 7: Measuring & Tracking SEO Success. This means being smart in designing your website to continually be able to feed you the owner/marketer with information pertaining to the various types of people visiting and also which parts of the site is being neglected and which are being highly viewed.
Engagement is the final piece of the puzzle as shown below.
For viewers to not just visit your site and leaving (bounces) but to stay, linger and interact with the website in the form of commenting, writing reviews. This also leads to higher Word of mouth (WOM) recommendations to people and friends. Ultimately creating more value for consumers.
SEO is an essential part of any website marketing strategy. other than traffic there are many factors we need to take into account as well such as the bounce rate and each page duration etc.
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It is definitely crucial in learning how to keep consumers on your site and to leading them to places in the site that is favourable to you, if not traffic that do not stick will not really be good traffic too! Thank you for your comment!
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Thank you for sharing! Particularly quite agree with the point that SEO alone is no longer enough in today’s context. Especially in a more competitive market, searchers would need significant scrolling before organic search shows up as many search engine users usually access to Google through their mobile devices.
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Yes, that is why there needs to be a partnership with the various social media platforms and apps to help build the brand image as a whole! Just SEO alone would definitely too bare of a structure to be reliable in today’s time. Thank you for your comment!
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Wow! Love your analogy that brings clarity to ”marketing noobs” like me. Getting viewers to stay and spread the word is key, and this article articulated well how technology is in placed to increase traction for targeted outcome.
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You are most certainly welcome for the explanation! Word of mouth is very crucial as the personal aspect brings about more trustworthiness and salience to the Brand. That is why if done right from the bottom, a marketers job could be fulfilling! Thank you for your comment!
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