Digital Marketing
Through the use of SEO and PPC targeted traffic can be sent to your website. A website on its own, no matter how well designed, isn’t going to generate traffic. Before we continue lets first delve into the basics of web traffic, SEO and PPC.
When someone visits your website, the exchange of data occurring between your website and the visitor’s device, is regarded as traffic. Many companies around the world sell web traffic, however in most cases, what is been sold is junk traffic stemming from exchange networks, whereby individuals visit a website for rewards or credits they can use to have other people visit their website. This type of traffic usually has extremely poor conversion rates, so should be avoided at all costs. What you are looking to put your money in is targeted traffic. This is the type of traffic that will convert to purchases, but how and why? That will be discussed below.
Earlier on we mentioned how simply buying web traffic was an unwise decision due to poor conversion rates, but what is meant by conversion rate? In the context of digital marketing, a conversion is usually when a visitor is converted into a paying customers, however money is not always the agenda. Sometimes a website might aim to collect emails, phone numbers or simply collect data through questionnaires. That being said, some websites may consider an email submit a conversion or the completing of a questionnaire a conversion. The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors who take action beyond simply viewing your website. This action is usually a purchase, but as discussed before, can also be an email submit, the completing of a questionnaire or any other action beyond visiting and viewing the website’s content. In simple terms, Conversion Rate = (Number of visitors who performed targeted action) / (Total visitors) * 100. For example, if you had a new website and bought a lot of junk traffic, say 200,000 hits, but only 3 people made a purchase, you would have a conversion rate of only (3/200,000)*100 = 0.003%!
PPC(Pay-Per-Click)campaigns are a very good way to generate targeted traffic, when used properly. Many mediums can be used to implement ppc, two of the best ones being facebook and google. With facebook for example, one can have ads targeted at specific profiles based on interests, demographics, location, and several other variables. This type of advertising ensures product reaches the right audience. On the other hand you have google adwords, which triggers ads mainly based on search terms. For example, if someone googles “forex trading course” that would trigger ads relating to forex trading courses to appear. This is a very powerful marketing tool. Although not as varied in filtering options as facebook ads, google’s ability to trigger ads on the basis of keywords alone does an excellent job at filtering out bad traffic and leaving only those interested in your products. For example, if you target the keyword “forex trading courses london”, automatically you have already filtered out all the time wasters. Someone who is entering the search term “forex trading courses london” is most likely in london, looking to learn forex trading, hence traffic stemming from that source would have a high conversion rate. There are many more ways to use google and facebook to yield highly targeted traffic. Additionally google and facebook are not the only platforms available. We have worked with a wide range of platforms in the past, which one we use will usually depend on the nature of your website as different niches will fair well in different advertising platforms.
SEO(Search Engine Optimization)is one of the best ways to generate targeted traffic. In fact, for many niches it is the best marketing strategy to utilize. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website in a search engine’s unpaid search results. Often regarded as organic SEO, when performed by experts, websites can enjoy an abundance of targeted traffic at relatively low costs. Someone wishing to target a very competitive keyword might have to pay around £12 per click just to remain visible on google. With SEO one’s website could be on the first page, without the hefty £12 per click fee. More importantly, market research has shown that organic results on google are up to 9 times more likely to get clicked as opposed to paid results(google adwords). This pattern exists due to the stigma spammy ads have created. People are less likely to trust that a paid search result will lead to reasonably prices services, so if given the option, will usually prefer the organic results. This does not mean organic SEO is always the best option. One of the benefits PPC has over SEO is speed and flexibility. With PPC one can see the effects of a campaign taking place much faster. With organic SEO, depending on the niche and keywords being targeted, it could take anywhere from 2 – 6 months to see the effects of it. Depending on your goals, we will sometimes use both SEO and PPC initially, then end the PPC campaigns once our SEO starts taking effect.
