In the very early days of the internet, right after Al Gore got done creating it, you could put up a simple site, and if you had the right keywords, it would begin getting traffic very quickly.
But that has changed. There millions of websites competing for space, so the search engines (Google, mostly) have to decide which websites to show, and they are pretty picky.
That leaves a lot of new website owners scratching their heads about where they can get traffic (and hopefully customers) to their new website. So in this post, I’ll break down where traffic comes from.
Traffic generation falls roughly into 3 buckets, or categories:
- Direct search traffic
- Pay per click traffic
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) traffic
Let’s break each of those down:
Direct search traffic is where people find out about your business, then look you up online by name. Maybe they get your business card. Or you make a helpful comment on a forum or Facebook group. Possibly you have a list of past customers’ email addresses, and you send them a message letting them know you have a spiffy new website. All of these visitors are direct search visitors, because they are going to either type your business name into Google, or directly go to your URL. This is generally the first source of traffic for any new website.
Pay per click traffic is where you purchase advertising space on Google, Facebook, or somewhere else that your audience exists. These can take the form of offers (like the Facebook lead form you filled out to talk with me about a free logo promo), or product ads. Either way, you pay each time someone clicks the ad, with the goal of some of those people deciding to purchase from you. There’s a lot that goes into making a campaign like this work, but if you want guidance, we help lots of people manage their campaigns. You’re in good hands.
SEO traffic is the holy grail of internet traffic, and while it takes time, it is a grail that is actually findable. This is where your site actually ranks on Google for a search term related to your business. Someone types in a product or service, and Google shows them your website on the first page of search results. It takes a lot of work to convince Google that your site is valuable to people who are searching, but once it’s ranked, you get an endless source of interested visitors to your site. Pretty cool, huh?
Of course, if your site is not user friendly, doesn’t work well on mobile phones, or is not set up in a way to help people decide to work with you, none of these traffic methods will help grow your business.
That’s where we come in. Our May 2020 offer of a free logo and web hosting for all new website customers may be just the thing to help you get ready to turn traffic into customers.
Go ahead and hit us up on our contact form if you want to take advantage of that offer so you can have a fresh site to send traffic to!
