Traffic: Not Just An English Rock Band

by Shaun Oakes

What Shaun does in the evenings. (Image via Flickr, by mistress_f under CC)

Traffic is a vital component to the success of your website. You need to attract visitors to your site where they can either be exposed to your brand or be converted into an enquiry, lead or sale.

The overriding principle is to generate traffic to your site which is relevant and to get that traffic to interact appropriately with your site, convert according to your site’s goals and give your brand suitable exposure.

Traffic can be split up into two main camps - Organic and Inorganic.
Let's take a look at these groups and highlight their potential pros and cons.

1) Inorganic Traffic (Paid Listings)

Inorganic traffic refers to "unnatural" forms of traffic i.e. traffic that is bought or paid for. This is a quick and effective method of sending almost instant traffic to your site, via the use of paid listings or sponsored links.

The most common forms of paid traffic are usually secured through banner advertising or paid listings. 
For example: Google's Pay Per Click campaigns have paid listings running down the right hand side of the SERPs. These advertisers bid to have their adverts positioned there and will pay a predetermined amount whenever someone clicks on their advert. The most typical costing used here is CPC. For banner advertising the payment model is usually CPM which is based on how many people view the advert. New trends for CPA are emerging where you pay for a specific action such as a form being filled in.

Relevancy is key here. You don't want to highlight used cars in your adverts when you're actually selling scooters.
If done correctly, paid listings can prove to be incredibly cost effective, driving targeted traffic to your site within a matter of hours.

Besides Google, you can also drive paid traffic to your site using:

• Yahoo!,
• MSN and
• Facebook paid listing options.

2) Organic Traffic

The broadest category of traffic as there are various options available.
Organic traffic refers to visitors who have arrived on your site through "natural" free avenues such as via search engine results pages (SERPs), Social Media sources or conventional linking from 3rd party websites.

2.1) SERPs

In terms of traffic volumes, visitors deriving from organic SERPs (i.e.: the left hand side of a search results page) can be just as effective as paid listings.
The difference here is in the quality of the traffic obtained.

While you have complete control over paid listings and banner advertising (you can dictate anything from which key phrase your advert appears to which page the user will then land on) this is not really the case with organic SERPs. You are at the behest of the search engines and how they choose to index your site. The best you can do is adopt positive SEO (search engine optimisation tactics) to maximise the chances of the search engine bots indexing your site favourably.

Through correct keyword optimisation we can have greater control over which pages on our site appear on the SERPs for certain key phrases, but we never have full control over what is being indexed or how users find us.

For example: A restaurant review post you wrote may contain a throw-away line about drinking a brand of tea. Users looking to buy this brand may end up arriving on this page via the SERPs and will then probably leave just as quickly as it's not really relevant to what they were looking for. So, although a strong presence on organic SERPs will drive a continuous stream of "free" traffic, the quality is not always of the highest order.

2.2) Social Media Sites

These include:

• Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Muti  and Reddit.
• Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The amount of traffic received through these sources is closely linked to how active and influential you are in online social communities (something we will leave for another post altogether).

Assuming someone is heavily invested and influential on these sites (in which case they probably won’t need to read this article), traffic generated through these sources can be considerable (i.e. a submission reaching the first page on Digg, posting a link on Twitter to your thousands of non-bot followers etc.).

The nature of Social Media however - with new content being added and discussed continuously - means that these methods tend to provide short-term spikes in traffic, rather then offering any significant long term benefits. Traffic quality also tends to be low, with most visitors arriving through the "curiosity factor", before quickly moving on to the next link which grabs their attention.

2.3) Referral Links (Blogging, 3rd Party Links etc.)

Much like Social Media sources, links from blogs or influential sites can see a considerable spike in traffic, depending on the nature and scope of the link in question and the originating site.

For example: A throwaway "click here" in an arbitrary paragraph may see a short term spike in traffic and nothing more. However, an external blog post or web page dedicated to your website can generate a steady amount of traffic. The quality of the traffic derived from this method also depends on the site or link in question. A link from a restaurant directory site to your restaurant review blog is likely to lead to repeat visitors. whereas a link from a tea-lover's blog to your post where you made a vague reference to a brand of tea would be less likely.

Conclusion

Through the use of on-site keyword optimisation, an advertising budget, active participation in Social Media sites and the creation of quality content, a site can generate both organic and inorganic traffic.

In planning your SEM strategy you should determine, through tests or experience, which traffic generates the best results, ROI and exposure for your site or target market – and pursue traffic tactics which get you an optimal amount of that traffic.

The key is to make sure the traffic coming to the site is healthy and relevant, so that it converts at a cost effective ROI to justify the initial investment made to create the traffic in the first place.  

2008/11/25 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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