Attract, Engage, Convert:
Getting More Website Traffic in Three Basic Steps

1.  Attract Website Visitors

How Search Engines Determine How Well Your Site Attracts Visitors

First, you must make sure your company's website is as relevant, valuable, and original as possible for the benefit of your target audience. Good web design is absolutely crucial and should not be left in the hands of an amateur web designer -- otherwise your search marketing efforts (and MONEY!) will be wasted. You're welcome to read my latest blog article on the subject of good web design and how it effects search marketing results by clicking here.

Attracting website traffic requires that you maintain relevancy as an ongoing task. Over time, this practice will increase your site's prominence (search ranking).

Attracting website traffic requires that you maintain relevancy as an ongoing task. Over time, this practice will increase your site's prominence (search ranking).

Attacting Visitors with Paid Search and Organic Search

Your target audience can be attracted to your site using two forms of search: Paid Search and Organic Search. Paid Search means just what it says: You pay a search engine company to help drive traffic to your website. For more detail about how Paid Search works click here.

Organic Search, also referred to as "natural" search, is where your company's website rises naturally in its search engine ranking based on several key factors determined by search engine 'bots, or roving software agents. These search 'bots periodically index your site and mathematically calculate the true value and relevance of your site. This value is then translated into your site's natural search ranking.

In a nutshell, the more relevant, valuable, and orginal (there's those adjectives again!) your site is the more likely it will earn a first-page organic search ranking. Conversely, websites with poor quality content, poor usability, and poor overall web design generally do not appear on first-page search results.

I generally advise my clients that BOTH types of search strategies are important and delivering relevant, high-quality content is critical to both strategies.

2.  Engage Website Visitors

Once your prospective customers have been attracted to your site with either Paid or Organic search you must engage them in a "conversation" about what THEY need.  The goal of engaging visitors is to:

Finally, engagement should NEVER be about you or your company -- but about efficiently delivering information that the prospect needs and wants.  You should also NEVER make the visitor "work" for information (again, this is where good web design comes in).  Visitors can be engaged with video, web forms, pod casts, RSS feeds, online surveys, email marketing, and much more.

3.  Convert Website Visitors

If you have adequately engaged a visitor you can subtly lead them to perform a revenue-generating action, or conversion. This step mimics the old salesman's rule of "asking for the order" -- except that you do it online in such a way that the conversion seems like the most logical step for the prospect to take.

A "conversion" can be represented by many different incremental actions that you might want the website visitor to take before becoming a "paying customer."  Such actions might be as simple as clicking a button to view an informative video or clicking through to a special landing page.  Or, a conversion might require a more complex action such as filling out a short web form or clicking on an automated "click-to-call" button.  But whatever the incremental conversion action might be it MUST ultimately lead to a measurable, revenue-generating action for the business represented in the website.

Summary

As a business owner or decision-maker it's important for you to understand the basic steps for building traffic to your company's website.  Designing and executing a plan for attracting, engaging, and converting website visitors, however, should not be left to inexperienced web designers. 

The fact of the matter is that the competition for your customer's attention online is extremely high.  And the competition get's fiercer by the day.  For that reason it would be a good investment to retain an experienced online marketer to design a strategy that can accomplish your business goals and help you get the highest return possible for your online marketing investment.