Attracting visitors to your website doesn’t happen on its own. Like giving birth to a baby, the real work starts once you’ve launched your website.
Your site needs to be nurtured, continuously supplied with the right mix of content and keywords people type into search engines when looking for the services or products your company supplies.
Optimizing your website to increase traffic will involve other strategies as well, such as coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords and the removal of barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. All this needs careful attention to boost the traffic to your website organically.
There also needs to be a focus on getting other sites to include a link or reference back to your website. This is seen as a vote of confidence in the eyes of the engines. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources.
But whilst this is essential, search engine optimisation (SEO) takes time and patience. New content can take weeks, even months, to begin appearing in search engine results.
To bypass the wait and as an adjunct to SEO strategies, more and more companies are investing in Pay per click (PPC). This is the process of paying for advertising on sites and search engines and only being charged when someone clicks on your ad.
Because of its immunity from search engine algorithm changes your ads will also be lifted to a ranking that otherwise you might not achieve naturally and thus be more visible to people browsing.
PPC invariably achieves quicker results than SEO, bringing in targeted traffic and qualified leads that have a good chance of converting into new income. Bear in mind that visitors drawn in this way have already expressed interest in a product or service by selecting and clicking on specific advertisements.
And because you pay for PPC only when an ad is clicked, it’s easy to manage costs, track conversions, and determine your ROI. This added control extends to advertisers being able to assign different ad copies for specific keywords and demographics which can dramatically increase the quality of website traffic.
PPC ads can also be scheduled to run during the best sales periods and in specific geographic regions.
SEO and PPC are both crucial elements in today’s marketing campaigns and 2014 is likely to see many businesses incorporating both. The most obvious benefit of combining SEO and PPC efforts is added exposure on the search engine results pages (SERPS). Once you’ve achieved a high ranking on both, it’s important to remember that the top two or three results on most SERPS are PPC ads. Dominating both will give your company the edge and given the impression that your company is an established presence in your marketplace.