Driving Traffic to Your Web Site
Increasing your business’s profitability by fully utilizing the potential of the Web depends on getting qualified traffic to your site. You want visits from potential customers who are motivated to spend time there—and money, if you engage in e-commerce—because you make it compelling to do so.
The importance of indexing
For starters, this means that you need to make sure that the site’s content will not only create a strong bond with visitors, but also contains lots of keywords that will register with search engines and lead people to your site. When you have important news about your company, particularly product or service news, issue a press release via an online distribution service, as well as directly to your local media contacts, advises Dana Hutchins of Inforest Communications (www.inforest.com) in Trenton. “Even if the local newspaper does not publish your news, the electronically distributed press release provides a quick way to get indexed by search engines.”
Press releases are likely to be archived in various places on the Web and can continue to deliver traffic over time. These links have a positive effect when search engines, such as Google, calculate your page rank, which in turn determines how high up on the lists of results your site goes, said Hutchins. “And, of course, media coverage of your company will be archived, as well, providing even more credibility to your information,” he said.
Linking is a key to success
In addition, three key strategies—collaborating with online partners, targeted search engine submissions including some advertising and building a personalized e-mail list—can be highly effective for increasing traffic to your Web site.
The Web is a collaborative network, so you can drive traffic to a site by soliciting links from a related site with a higher hit count. Make sure that your site is listed in directories related to your industry and that your link is on pages of fans, collectors, hobbyists, local chambers of commerce and downtown associations.
Avoid mass linking offers from spammers that can often do more harm than good to a site. These offers claim to provide matches, but instead often deliver indiscriminate links. This could lead to your site being banned from inclusion in search engines. Instead, cultivate quality links from business partners with complimentary services then decide which links and advertising you should purchase.
And do not forget the simple math of page indexing, advises Barbara Zaccone of BZA Strategic Design Solutions (www.bza.com) in Little Falls, N.J. “A Web site that has 10 pages compared to one with five pages has twice the amount of content to be indexed by search engines,” said Zaccone. She also points out that Google, the largest search engine, indexes Portable Document Files (.pdf). “So, if you put your catalog online as a .pdf document, Google will index each word on every page,” she says.
Yahoo! and Google remain, by far, the most heavily trafficked sites; so, inclusion there can easily increase a Web site’s traffic exponentially. While you should submit your site to Google for free, paying to be included in Yahoo!’s directory makes sense, too (be prepared to budget a few hundred dollars for it). These inclusions set the stage to explore pay-per-click advertising like Google’s AdWords and Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search. These are two of the most widely used pay-per-click options, in which Web-site owners bid on key terms and pay only when searchers actually click through advertisements to get to their sites.
Depending on whether you have a product or service focused on a local market, free and paid inclusions in such locally focused directories as Verizon’s Superpages.com or Switchboard.com can prove helpful in reaching local consumers. For products that can be sold or shipped anywhere, these directories also provide national advertising opportunities.
Cross promotion and e-mail marketing
It is the local market that the Web marketers are still trying to capture and one that has the greatest potential to create cross-media opportunities. Many retail stores report that their Web sites frequently bring customers into the physical stores, even though they could have opted to purchase their products online. Conversely, existing customers provide the best and most cost-effective target market, particularly through e-mail marketing. Driving existing customers to Web specials cost very little and is potentially an invaluable profit-enhancing component to a small retail business.
Forget about purchasing a third-party e-mail list for most general categories (for a specialized market, a trade association or industry group might have a good list), but do create incentives to help you gather customers’ and visitors’ e-mail addresses. If you can offer special deals or discounts or an e-mail newsletter that people care about, the best e-mail list will be one that you cultivate based on interest in your company’s products and services.
Consider using a third-party e-mail management solution to store your e-mail customer list and user preferences (such as html or straight text formatting) and allow customers to unsubscribe automatically, rather than risk damaging a relationship. Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) is a well-rated service that provides these services and includes e-mail templates for newsletters, promotions and event promotions. These services allow you to gauge the effectiveness of your e-mail campaign by reporting the number of e-mails received and opened by intended recipients and also how many recipients clicked links within the messages.
The beauty of an e-mail campaign or any strategy to drive traffic to your site is that the Web enables you to track success by the numbers. To do so, a site manager should check the Web-site stats package on a daily basis to determine the number of hits coming in, the links visitors followed, which search terms they used to find your site and which products they evaluated and purchased.
With a focus on the site’s current level of activity as a starting point, implementation of proven strategies to drive traffic to your Web site can help you capture new visitors and increase the profitability of current customer relationships.
Nat T. Bender is the E-Business Services Director for the NJ Small Business Development Centers network (www.njsbdc.com) where he consults with small businesses in integrating information technology into their business plans.
