Posted on May 30, 2011 by admin
Where does website traffic come from? Most people realise that traffic is an integral part of a websites success but where does it actually come from? Google would be the most common answer to this question, but there are many other traffic sources that sometimes get overlooked. Have a look at the 4 main ways that traffic can get to your website.
Search Engine Traffic
Getting traffic from the main search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) is an incredible way to drive traffic to your business. When a potential client types something into a search engine, they will be presented with a list of sites that are deemed to be ‘most relevant’ to that search term. The trick is to get your business to appear in these results for search terms that are directly relevant to your product/service.
Most people think the only way to do this is via your website, whereas there are actually a number of other ways you can take advantage of search engine traffic.
Blog: You can use a blog to get great results – search engines love original and regularly updated content, which is exactly what a blog is.
Google Map Results: This is only relevant if your have a location based product/service but if you do, it can be an incredible source of traffic. Thanks to some recent ‘local search’ changes in Google, this has become very important. Websites with a well optimised and relevant Google Maps Listing are taking full advantage of this traffic source.
Piggy Back: There are many large websites on the Internet that allow users to contribute and post content within their site. Smart users are able to use the power of these larger sites to get their content rankings in the search engines. A great example of this is finding Youtube videos appearing in the search engine results.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is when someone already knows the address of the website, types it into the url bar and skips the search engines all together. You could also argue that when someone types a companies name into a search engine that this is direct traffic as well. Even though they are using a search engine they already knew exactly what site they wanted to find so you wouldn’t really call it ‘searching’.
Viral/Surfing Traffic
Viral or Surfing traffic can be an incredible way to generate customers and interest to your site. The popularity of Social Media, Email & User Contributed Sites has meant that it has never been easier for something to go ‘Viral’. Surfing the web has become a favorite pass time for almost everyone who has access to a computer and an Internet connection.
People love spending hours browsing the net, yet more importantly there are now so many ways that people can recommend their favorite sites, articles, videos etc to their friends. If you can take advantage of Video Sites, Blogs, Rss Feeds, Email Marketing, Social Media, Bookmarking Sites etc. you can spread the word about your site incredibly fast.
Paid Traffic
Most people don’t realise that when they use a search engine lots of the results are actually paid advertisements. There are many other forms of paid advertising online but the most common one is called ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) advertising. Quite simply you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad. The great thing about this is that if no one clicks on your ad you don’t pay a cent. Gone are the days of paying $20,000 for a newspaper ad only to find that no one who read the paper that day was interested in your product. Unfortunately the ‘Cost per click’ (CPC) has been steadily increasing as more people wake up to the possibilities of online advertising.
How much does ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising cost? The answer changes dramatically depending on what niche you are in.
The CPC for a Hair Salon or Tennis Centre might only be $1-2 per click whereas a Lawyer or Broker might pay upwards of $10 per click. Some high competition keywords can even fetch a lot more than that, which is an incredible amount to pay when you are only getting one visitor with no guarantee of a call or email.