Website Traffic Acquisition Strategy 101: How to Get More Traffic to a Website

Getting more traffic to a website is the lifeblood of any online business, and increasingly important to bricks and mortar business, too. In the past, it was all about SEO, and sometimes over-optimising a web site in the process, just to get a jump on the competition.

These days, however, there are many different options:

• Organic traffic (i.e. basic SEO and keyword research);
• Paid traffic (i.e. AdWords and/or Facebook ads, paid inclusion, banners, etc.);
• Social traffic (i.e. Twitter / Facebook / YouTube / Instagram ...)

In the spirit of keeping things simple, we're going to assume that traffic can only come from one of the above sources. It will give you plenty of options to get started.

However, the first question to ask is...

What Kind of Traffic do you Need?

If your answer to this is 'any traffic is good traffic', then think again.

The relentless pursuit of traffic at any cost is bad for the nerves, and bad for business. Usually, getting the right kind of traffic is a much better strategy than the hit-and-hope approach of old. Even for mass market products and services.

The focus should be on getting traffic that comes with an intent that is in line with your customer acquisition strategy. That's not always about money; sometimes it's about taking some kind of action.

Often, different strategies can be used to bring in different kinds of traffic.

For example, if your goal is to get people on your mailing list so that you can later send them a message with a different call to action (CTA), your strategy will be different than the one you use to pull in paying customers through online advertising.

Then again, if brand visibility is at the core of your customer acquisition strategy, then pulling in traffic that is hungry for information, and firmly in your target market should be the priority.

Not just any traffic at any cost.

Are You Willing to PAY for Traffic?

Let's get this one out in the open: paid traffic is not a dirty concept.

Here's an adequate cliché to go with it: sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate.

Payment, however, can take different forms depending on how you want to get your traffic. The traffic source is also closely aligned with the kind of traffic you would like to attract.

When you think of paid traffic, you usually associate it with various forms of direct advertising;

• Paid search inclusion;
• AdWords / banner advertising;
• Etc.

However, it's also possible to buy traffic that has been redirected from domain names that are no longer in use, and pay people to create forum posts that link back to your site; not to mention paying people with loads of followers to plaster their timeline with your advertising message.

A lot of these actions you could also do yourself. Or, to put it a different way: pay yourself to do.

But, the investment in time that is involved will often mean that the opportunity cost of building up a following of fans just to sell them a single product during the holiday season isn't going to work out.

It would be a better investment to hand that off to someone else, someone whose actual calling is in creating a stream of traffic for you, while you get on with actually running the business, and delighting your customers.

How Will You Know If It's Working?

Let's pull these together.

You need traffic, you'd like organic traffic, but are willing to pay if it is demonstrably profitable.

If your traffic goal is instant sales, then advertising bubbles up the list a bit, because it is very easy to divide the cost of acquiring sales by the value they generate in order to determine the return on investment.

Likewise, it's also very easy to track the conversion rate (how many sales for how many visitors) in order to improve it by fiddling with the sales message.

Modifying the landing page, and acquisition channel (including the wording on the sidebar ad, paid inclusion summary or AdWords advertising panel) all give you the opportunity to improve these ratios.

For those taking a longer term view, relying on instant sales data is meaningless: if you are trying to attract visitors to your content, in order to get them on a mailing list, and sell them a hefty annual subscription, for example, the lifetime value of a customer is much more important.

However, the basic ratios are still the same.

Here are some tips for maximising your traffic acquisition success:

• Do your keyword research properly, or get an expert to do it for you: keywords aren't just for organic search and SEO, they're a method of communication -- your buyer's intent towards you, and your value towards them;
• Never be afraid to experiment with new messages and ways of delivering those messages, but make sure they remain in line with your core values;
• Track everything by using metrics reflecting how you acquire traffic, and what component of your strategy is delivered by that traffic;
• Track the metrics.

To get started, I recommend taking the Free Keyword Research Tutorial from The Keyword Coach: it will not only help you appreciate SEO more fully, but also has some great processes that you can use to determine audience intent: are they clickers or buyers?

Website Traffic Flipping : The Traffic Acquisition Cookbook

This is one of the more expensive, but potentially one of the highest return, methods for increase quality traffic flow to a web site. It's lifted from the forthcoming Keyword Cracker Traffic Acquisition Cookbook, which contains (at the present count) eleven separate strategies for generating high volume, high quality traffic.

There are three steps to website traffic flipping:

• acquire the website;
• convert the traffic;
• integrate the site.

It's important to note that this is much like a company takeover in which a rival is purchased for the customer list, and other assets, and the two are eventually amalgamated. I don't personally like the term asset stripper, but if you're familiar with it, try to think of this as something of the same.

Acquiring the Website

This requires research, and verification. Low priced sites, such as Squidoo lenses can be found on the open marketplace, and I daresay that there are Wordpress blogs for sale as well.

They need to have a high volume of traffic, be turning a profit, and have high conversion rates. The high conversion rates are important, especially when measured for pages that rank highly for the keywords that your traffic acquisition plan is targeting, as you're paying for engagement rather than raw traffic and conversion.

Other assets include mailing lists and backlogs (pipelines) of un-published, quality blog posts. Be prepared to offer a bit more for these, as they are very valuable in the right hands.

Converting the Traffic

Sounds easy - all you need to do is put a link to your website in their list, right?

If that's all there was to it, then a simple Joint Venture would suffice. However, the reason that we're buying the site rather than just doing a JV is to have the control to be able to convert the traffic in a consistent and controlled manner.

It's a gradual process of re-education (of existing customers) and gently diverting them to the new site, where they are promised better quality resources and content, and better deals on purchases.

Integrating the Site

At a given point, all the existing affiliate links will be converted to yours, and the various back-links will have been upgraded to point to your own site; and the customers will be educated.

The final stage is to ensure a consistent look and feel by redirecting the URLs so that they point to content on your site, and gradually phase out, or move across, the acquired content.

This final stage is, in fact, optional, as you could choose simply to dispose of the acquired site, having converted the customers and re-deployed the key assets. This is the online equivalent of the asset stripping I spoke of earlier, and as I said, I'm not 100% keen on it.

But it does work, probably better online than in the real world.

SoLoMo, Google In-Depth and Video : Improving Traffic Acquisition

Modern traffic acquisition techniques are no longer merely based around getting the word out and doing a bit of search engine optimization or PPC campaigns. These days, any strategy has to integrate high quality content, social marketing and multimedia aspects.

The so-called SoLoMo approach (read SoLoMo Minded SEO Strategies from Websitemagazine.com) for example, embraces [So]cial, [Lo]cal and [Mo]bile aspects of modern organic SEO. We can also leverage this approach. For example, Social traffic acquisition might include anything from active tweets to maintaining high-quality social profiles on Facebook.

Local traffic acquisition may prove to be a harder nut to crack, especially if your target audience isn't that bothered about where they get their goods and services from. However, if they do, anything from a local domain name to some kind of physical presence will all contribute to helping boost traffic acquisition strategies by giving them a local aspect.

Mobile traffic acquisition strategies follow much the same path as local SEO - low page load speeds, high visibility, mobile specific content, etc. - with the added bonus that we can now leverage things like apps (iPhone/Android) to help improve incoming traffic.

The recent addition of In-Depth to the Google stable also favors traffic acquisition through high quality, in-depth (i.e. well written and researched) articles. Again, Websitemagazine.com has a great article on Google In-Depth, and the underlying message is clear : to get users interest and confidence/trust, you need to provide high quality content.

Now that Google is recognizing that content for what it is, you can build an additional level of trust into that relationship, making the target (potential) customer more likely to (a) bookmark, (b) share  - see Social traffic acquisition, above, and (c) buy!

Time to get researching, creating, and promoting your high quality, industry and product-specific material, then...

Which brings us to video. A staggering 87% of marketers use video, according to Uflip, and it's easy to see why. For example, did you know that YouTube is the second most used search engine?

Clearly, there's a great avenue for traffic acquisition through video. In fact, this is nothing new - it's how soap operas got their name - but the possibility to combine Social, Mobile, In-Depth and Video in one campaign is something that only new advances in technology can facilitate.

Something to mull over when you design your next online/offline traffic acquisition campaign!