How Keyword Research Helps Reduce Traffic Acquisition Costs

One of the key questions on all content producer's minds is "how can I reduce my traffic acquisition costs?"

There are some easy answers - pay people less for content designed to pull in visitors, blanket bomb the social networks with a variety of split-tested messages, and use tools to target the lowest priced PPC keywords that have the highest raw return.

But none of these are particularly efficient. They may well drive up visitor numbers, but anyone playing around with Google Analytics will quickly realize, by looking at the Visitor Flow diagram, that the quality of visitor will be falling.

In short, they won't stick around long enough to make a purchase, and they won't come back.

The underlying reason for this is simple : there hasn't been enough keyword research, and as such the visitors that are being captured don't have a real interest in what the site has to offer. You're just pulling in more people with the hope that some of them are interested, whereas an efficient traffic acquisition drive will aim to pull in traffic where the majority of the visitors are interested in what you have to offer.

If you think that sounds obvious, then do me a favor. The next time you go on a traffic acquisition drive, track the conversion rate. 99% of the time, no matter who is managing your traffic acquisition project, it will begin to dip, even as the visitor numbers climb. So will your repeat visitor ratio. As will the time spent on page.

In short, stickiness will fall. And the further it falls, the less profit per visitor is being made. And the cost per visitor therefore begins to climb, which makes the TAC (traffic acquisition cost) look a lot less attractive!

To counteract this, make sure you do your keyword research. Now, as I pointed out on the Keyword Cracker blog post 'The Future of Organic SEO', Google is, on the face of it, about to make this a whole lot harder with the retirement of their AdWords Keyword Tool.

But I think that it's a blessing in disguise, because it will force (persuade?) people to put more emphasis on the context of the keywords that they use, and to re-examine the actual keywords that are bringing in traffic now, rather than trying to second guess what people might be looking for in the future.

So, fire up Analytics (or just look at the Blogger/Wordpress/Squidoo/HubPages/whatever stats) and start your keyword research there, instead. Then try to pick out areas that people are interested in, but that you don't cover explicitly.

Use those in the next traffic acquisition drive, and you should see a rise in effectiveness over previous campaigns, making it that little bit more cost-effective.

Components of Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC) Calculations

Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC) is often used as a general catch-all to explain to stakeholders the reason why a recent marketing campaign has cost so much money. 


For example, Wikinvest has a detailed account of Google's own TAC explantion and justification. From this text, it is clear that even though Google benefits from a strong market position, they regard payments to affiliates (generating traffic) to be a vital part of their traffic acquisition strategy.


So, that's one component that can be listed under TAC cost calculation. Here are a few more:

• pay per click (or pay per action) campaigns;
• paid inclusion in search engine directories;
• banner and click based advertising.

These are the old standards, in more recent discussions of online traffic acquisition costs, social media has become increasingly prevalent. For example, when some organisations come to define traffic acquisition costs, they find that they need to include:

• paid tweets;
• paid content (i.e. blog entries, forum posts, etc.)
• creation of free resources to attract traffic (eBooks, newsletters, etc.)

The question is - when do these traffic acquisition costs examples become just another form of marketing or advertising, and when are they valid components of the TAC calculation?


As Investopedia notes in their definition of traffic acquisition cost, it has a direct affect on profitability, and is worth tracking as a component of total advertising costs. Expressing it as a percentage, whilst maintaining a consistent definition is key in understanding TAC evolution over time.


This is important to any business that relies on traffic to survive, and investors keep a close eye on TAC evolution as a way to measure the performance of an online company.


Entrepreneurs need to keep a close eye on TAC evolution as well, as it may well point to issues in their online marketing strategy that need to be fixed. 


While there are no hard and fast rules, hopefully this brief discussion of the components of traffic acquisition cost calculation has helped understand the importance of this complex metric.

Traffic Acquisition Strategies Using Squidoo

The Squidoo publishing platform is organised around the concept of a Lens. Each Lens is a focussed discussion of a particular topic; which can be anything that the content creator wishes to publish.

Squidoo does have a few restrictions on content, and requirements (such as keeping Lenses fresh and up to date) which are all designed to help its stature as a publishing platform, and web property.

To use Squidoo for traffic acquisition, the Lens has to be attractive, relevant, and interesting, with a compelling call to action to drive the traffic from the Lens to your primary sales site.

There are many reasons for using Squidoo as a publishing platform designed to capture traffic: 

• flexible yet robust structured publishing interface;
• high Google ranking;
• large user base.

The last one might need some further elaboration  - the large user base is useful in the keyword research part of a traffic acquisition strategy, and can also be used to take a shortcut in buying an established Lens with existing traffic.

In other words, you can look to other lenses for keyword phrase inspiration, or you can search for a ready-made solution.

Squidoo Traffic Acquisition Strategies

In order to set up a Squidoo Lens (Lens being a kind of structured blog) for traffic acquisition, the usual factors need to be kept in mind:

• keyword density in content;
• keywords in Lens Title;
• correct tags describing the content.

The three principle strategies for setting up a Lens geared towards direct traffic acquisition:

• build it yourself
• have someone else build it for you
• buy an existing Lens 

Clearly, there's an issue of cost here. The first strategy is essentially free, but will require time to build the Lens, and time for traffic to build up. There's also no guarantee that the best Lens titles have not already been taken, especially if you are trying to capture traffic for a particularly popular keyword phrase.

Outsourcing the Content Creation Process 

The second strategy will require paying someone to build a Lens, and will also require some time for the traffic to build up. 

The building process should be shorter (as long as you choose someone with Lens building expertise – i.e. from vWorker.com) but the time to build up traffic may become a factor for those looking for a quick return on the initial investment.

Above all, for these two strategies, you must remember that although Squidoo has a high Google profile, the exact choice of keywords and content will dictate the length of time it will take for a decent amount of traffic to build up. And, only a proportion of that traffic will click through to your main site.

Buying a Squidoo Lens for Traffic Acquisition 

The third option is perhaps the most interesting. Many people build Lenses (some build many, many of them) with the specific aim to 'flip' them for money. 

Lens flipping (Google “Squidoo Queen”for a masterclass) has become the principle business venture of many online content creators, and if you're targeting a popular niche keyword, there's a good chance that there is a Lens for sale that could be of use.

The price is dependent on several factors:

• amount of revenue generated;
• the CTR (click through ratio) on third party links;
• and volume of unique traffic.

While there are no hard and fast formulae, expect to pay tens of dollars for a new Lens with very little traffic, and thousands for an established Lens being sold as a going concern.

Choosing the right traffic acquisition strategy using Squidoo Lenses to capture and direct traffic (traffic bait) is an exercise in weighing cost against time. For those willing to pay a premium, there is instant traffic available – what you do with it is another question.