People are paying pretty significant dollars for
website traffic these days. Pay-per-click charges of $1-10 are not
uncommon for top search terms. Multiply that by the 300 unique visitors
per day that my log furniture website gets, and you are talking at
least $300 per day, or $9,000 per month—depending on how many days are
in the month.
“There Must Be Some Easier Way”
While
pay-per-click may be a good business model for your website, there’s
nothing like free traffic to lay the foundation. My log furniture site
used to get 100 unique visitors per day before it started fetching in
200, and now 300 on an average basis. The personal goal here is 1,000
unique daily visitors—but 10,000 would also be welcomed!
Following are some of the best ways we have found to grow website traffic:
#1: Website Optimization
A
local business magazine recently ran an article calling SEO (search
engine optimization) the equivalent of “hocus-pocus”. The author of the
article, who apparently worked for an SEO firm, described optimization
as a somewhat “shady” activity that’s impossible to get a handle on. I
say “Baloney!”
SEO is not pseudo-science. It is a very
tangible and real way to increase website traffic. If you haven’t taken
care of the basics—e.g. making sure your website has a relevant title,
focuses on the right keywords, avoids practices that are disdained by
the search engines, etc., you can be sure that, once found, your website
will not rank as highly (or get as much traffic) as it otherwise would.
Begin your traffic-garnering efforts by making sure your website is
up-to-snuff.
#2: Publish Helpful, Relevant Content
Publishing
helpful articles on the Net with a link back to my log furniture
website seems to result in traffic spikes nearly every time. Notice the
emphasis is on “helpful” articles. There is plenty of useless drivel
out there by people who are being paid $5 to write an article. Not to
insult anyone, but I spend 2-8 hours on the articles I write—depending
on how much research is required and how technical the article is—and
that costs more than $5.
It doesn’t seem to matter what you
write about. My topics so far have included SEO, the simplicity of
Amish life, improving your bottom line, and understanding Google
operators. The key is to make them relevant, short and helpful.
#3: Add more products to your website
Our
experience has been that adding more products to the website helps us
to come up in the search engines more often. A person who finds a
rustic night stand at our site might notice that we have log bunk beds.
Somebody who is shopping for an unfinished pine dresser might not be
thinking of rustic furniture at all, stumble across one our products,
like the whole site, and end up furnishing their cabin. Each product is
like a fishing line cast in the sea. The more well-described bait you
have out there—the more “fish” will bite.
#4: Improve your website conversion rate
Five
years ago, we used to get one log furniture order for every 100 website
visitors. Now it seems like closer to one order for every 300 unique
visitors. Part of the reason for this, we believe, is that the web has
become more competitive. But we also pay attention to our conversion
rate.
We are in the process of making a change right now that
might really help. Someone pointed out that when you click on an item
to buy it within Miva Merchant’s standard interface, there is no
confirmation that the item has been added to your shopping basket. This
might lead some customers to believe that the website isn’t working
properly. They might not be savvy enough to check the shopping basket.
They might even leave the site without ordering (perish the thought!)
These
“glitches” can really hurt website sales. We went to the Miva Merchant
site for third-party modules and found a script that displays the
shopping basket after each item is added. We purchased the script and
install, and are watching to see how it affects website sales and
conversion rate. Our guess is that this will have a positive impact on
sales.
Conclusion
Obviously, there are a lot of other ways
to increase website traffic. The four listed above are a great place
to start. If you’re not into SEO, find somebody who is. If you are
paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars of month for pay-per-click
traffic, it may be wise to divert enough of those dollars to ensure that
your website is the traffic-snagging, profit-generating machine you
intend it to be.