When we paid to have our first e-commerce web site
designed in 1999 I didn't have a clue, in fact I barely new how to
email someone. All I heard was how many Hits our site would get and
how many they are getting. Wow, all these people are looking at my
website www.popguns.com , I can't
wait for the money to come rolling in.
Years and thousands of dollars later ,now that we
administer our websites in house the picture is much clearer. You
shouldn't care about the number of "Hits" your website is getting as
this information is useless. One of the most critical bits of
information regarding your true web traffic is the number of "Unique
Visitors". Your web designer and or hosting service should provide
this information to you. What is the difference? In plain language
"Unique visitors" are exactly that, each unique visitor is counted one
time per visit, where as the hits is the total number of pages that
has been called up from your site. This includes real visitors times
(x) the number of pages they review, search engine visits, image call
ups and more.
Back to the example of the web site
www.popguns.com in 1999, every
week our webmaster gave us a report, your hits are up to 400 a week , up
to 900 a week. Wow this is great, but I'm only getting one order every
other day? This could have been for multiple reasons. In reality we
only received around 20 unique visitors a day each visiting an average
of 5-6 pages, so our conversion rate
wasn't all that bad.
So what is the difference between Quality web
traffic and web traffic, aren't all unique visitors created equal?
NO! Not all unique visitors are equal!
A number of web marketing companies will guarantee
in writing or your money back that they will drive traffic to your web
site and all you have to do is sell them. Not a bad deal, until you
analyze the traffic. Most of the traffic will have absolutely no interest
in your product or service. Your marketing company set up spoof pages
or text
to redirect visitors to your site. For example you are a local Dentist
specializing in Veneers and caps and your company slogan is "Let us
make you Smile" The marketing company will make re-directing web pages
with titles such as " See our all nude girls live. Let us make you
smile". Of course this is the extreme case however this is one
technique used to drive useless traffic to your web page. I'm sure
you've done a search for an item and the description is a perfect
match for what you are looking for. However when you click on the page
it is a informational link page or something else completely off
subject. Yes this is part of the promised magic of the quick and easy
marketing plans of others.
Quality Web Traffic is visitors who come to your
site looking for a specific product or service based on the group of
Buzz word ( Keywords) that has been determined to be most relevant to
your firm and its products. Let's return to the example of the
Cosmetic Dental practice. If the dental practice is located in a
Indianapolis there is no need to pay for attempting top ranking for
the key word " Dentist", however you would market the term "
Indianapolis,
Dentist". You would not market the keyword " Pediatric Dentistry" even
though it is a hot topic, if the practice is not involved in
Pediatric dentistry. Sometimes it is better to the big fish in a
little pond than bait fish in a big lake. If we use the example of
www.popguns.com, the generic term
"Backpacks" has over 111,000 people searching for this
"Keyword" in a 30
day period. Since www.popguns.com
only sells tactical backpacks they are beginning their marketing to
this much smaller Keyword. Why? Less I.T. time and money with a higher
return. Can we get www.popguns.com
ranked high in the term backpacks? Yes! However the time spent would
not come back to the bottom line. Where as the much larger broad term of
" shotgun accessories" is worth the effort as
www.popguns.com sells over 300
SKU's related to shotgun accessories.
Bottom Line:
Don't pay for hits - Pay for Unique visitors that
you know are coming to your site by the consumers inputting the
Keywords most important to your sales. Your marketing company should
be able to supply this information, if not find a new one.
Return to TRICK BAG website marketing or Natural organic
search engine optimization (SE0)? |
