"In general I get about x leads from our website, and I believe we receive about y hits a month," you say to an online marketing salesperson who is selling more targeted traffic on your existing website. You proceed to hang up by saying, "No thank you, we are happy with our website and we are not interested in your services." You pause and wonder how many leads and how much traffic you really get a month. Moments later, you forget about the interruption and return to your work at hand.
You may have a general idea about how many phone calls come in originating from your website. But you are curious as to how you can achieve more targeted traffic. This article will delve into how you can find and tap into new targeted traffic.
1. Tracking your website is the easy part
For majority of small business owners, website design and coding is a mystery, so you may think tracking your page hits maybe just as complex. Tracking your website is neither difficult nor expensive these days. In this article we will talk about how to set up Google Analytics on your website to get some key reports that you need without spending too much time. Google Analytics is cost-free web reporting tool. See demo of Google Analytics
2. Knowing which report to look at and how to act on it is the difficult part
With the dozens or so reports available, it is easy to get impressed by the pretty graphs, but get overwhelmed and not take action on the information in front of you. The easiest way to do this is to ask questions of what you are looking for, and then find the report that answers that question. Below are some questions you may be wondering about your website and how to look them up on Google Analytics.
How much traffic am I getting on the website in a given month?
- Go to the calendar on the bottom left hand side and click on a month
- Go to the top left dropdown that says “Executive” and change to “Marketer”
- Click on Campaign Conversion and see the “Total” figure
What keywords are being searched to enter my site?
- Repeat first 2 steps from the above section
- Click on “Overall Keyword Conversion”
Where are my visitors coming from?
- Go to “All Reports” and expand "Visitor Segment Performance"
- Click on “Referring Source”
You can peruse through the dozens of other reports, but when it comes down to it, these are the 3 reports you need as a small business owner with an existing website. Now that we have information, in the next section we will delve into acting on the information.
Can I really tap into more targeted traffic?
Let’s find the truth behind the salesperson’s claim to be able to capture more targeted traffic for your existing website. Now that you know what keywords visitors search to come to your site, it’s your turn to list keywords visitors should search to land on your website. Write down a list of your target audiences, their scenarios and what keywords they would use to search for your products and services. Remember that a lot of customers may not know the exact terminology that you often use and they start their search using layman's terms.
If the website wasn’t designed with search engines in mind, chances are the keywords you see on your website reports and the ones you listed do not match what you would expect your potential customers to search.
Find Out Where Potential Traffic Exists
To determine how much traffic you can really acquire, go to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool.
This is a widely used tool for search engine optimization professionals to gain basic information on keywords. Try one keyword at a time on this tool and see how much traffic is listed. The number that you see beside the keyword are the number of searches performed using the keyword in the previous month on Yahoo. According to Nielson Net Ratings, as of July 2006, Google has 49.2% of the search engine market share, Yahoo with 23.8% and MSN with 9.6%. Considering these statistics, you can take the number of hits from the above Overture Keyword Selector tool and multiply it by 3.5 to get a rough estimate of how many times that particular keyword is used in a given month on major search engines.
Real Life Example: "Beverage Catering"
For example, one of my clients has a beverage catering business. In the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, I type in:
- "beverage catering" and it returns with a search count of “81” for previous month
- Multiply 81 x 3.5 = 283.5 searches done each month for this term
Just because there are 280+ searches done for that term each month that does not mean you will all of the sudden capture all of them. These numbers however, give you an idea of how much traffic is out there that you can potentially acquire if you invest further in expanding your website with online marketing professionals. The more specific the terms become, the smaller the numbers are. In this specific case, if you use the term “Seattle beverage catering” which are really the keywords that my clients want their visitors to search, the result does not even show up on this tool. If this is the case, you know that even if you pay a search engine optimization specialist a huge sum of money to rank very high on your desired keywords that it will not generate blasts of traffic.
Next Time Be Prepared
Next time a website optimization specialist calls, you can ask them exactly what they plan to do, and already know the maximum number of traffic you can garner with the research shown above and invest on your website wisely.
Do you have any particular questions regarding this article or want to learn more? Contact us at info@immotion.net and see how we can increase traffic at your existing website and provide the right online marketing services.