Raise Newsletter 1.2- How to Drive Traffic

How to drive traffic to your website

So you have spent the time and the money to build a website, now how do you get people to your site?  There are a variety of ways to bring traffic to a website including advertising campaigns, word of mouth and search engine marketing.  Advertising campaigns can be effective, however it is very hit and miss and often goes against what you are trying to do online, be cost effective and track results.  Word of mouth is very effective however it is also the slowest form of marketing and probably won’t bring a lot of new visitors to the site.  Search Marketing is what Raise Interactive focuses on and is the most effective way to bring a qualified audience to your site.  If a visitor comes to your site from the Search Engines it means that they typed in a word or phrase that brought your site up.

To market to the Search Engines it is important to identify some key terms.  People always talk about Google and “googling things” online. It is so common because Google holds over 60% of the market share in search engines.  The other major players are Yahoo, MSN and Ask.  These make up most of the other 40% of the Search Engines traffic.  There are also many search engines that focus specifically on certain industries or verticals.  Almost all of these engines have both natural or organic rankings and paid search.  Many also feature Local Search that might be very important to your business.  In the next few newsletters we will focus on explaining how organic search results, local search and paid search results work in deep detail, but first we will focus on defining what these terms mean.

Natural Search Rankings

Natural or organic search rankings are the results that come up on the left side of the page in most Search Engines, as highlighted in the picture.  These rankings are based on complex algorithms that the Search Engines have developed based on the content of your site and inbound links to your site.  Organic rankings get more than 80% of the clicks on a page and carry the most trust from the visitor.

Paid Search Marketing

Paid Search is generally on the right hand side and possibly the top of the page.   These results are determined by an auction style system; basically clients bid on keywords that they feel will bring qualified traffic to their site. It is more involved, but basically the more you are willing to pay for someone to come to your site the higher you will be in the results.

Local Results

There is a third area of the Search Engines becoming more and more important especially to small businesses and these are local results.   Often these are listed at the top of the Search Page.  These results show as people type in local city names combined with keywords.  It is important that your business is listed there as these are often the first results that people see.  These local results often allow you to put in your business hours and coupons.

In the next three newsletters we will examine these three types of results and how you can use them effectively in more detail.  Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

This is a newsletter article from Raise Interactive, if you would like to receive our newsletter please fill out our contact form.

Comments