On the surface, it seems a straightforward equation. You put up a site, do SEO, and expect the results to be visible. But, just below the surface, it’s one of the most complex digital geometries! That’s why many websites fail at SEO or lose patience after a few months.Every website owner naturally hopes to make his or her website perform well by the standards set by search engine algorithms. However, things often take a turn for the unprecedented.
What Works on the Internet
The problem is no one really knows the exact parameters used by crawlers to determine the ranking of a page. There are a lot of conjectures on it for sure, given that search engines are famously discrete about these parameters. The algorithms may change without any kind of formal announcement (such as a press release) to make matters more complex.
Marketers are beset with the obligation to find out more about indexing algorithms in SEO. Using the different tools fit for the purpose helps a lot. You can use tools for measuring search traffic, how it fares on your website, and valuable insights about visitors to your website. By using a tool to identify website visitor data, you can have a clear overview of how your marketing efforts are translating in real-life scenarios.
Organic Ad Traffic
Organic ad traffic is perhaps the most important of all kinds of search traffic. It refers to your visibility in the search engines (especially the first page) in response to the search query typed by the user. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an umbrella term (a very big umbrella that is) covering all the techniques you employ over time to improve your ranking on the search engine.
It covers content marketing, on-site SEO, backlinking, and others. Technical SEO refers to the structure of your site that is as per the standards required by search engine algorithms. Off-page SEO includes social bookmarking, social media, link building, and guest posts. Local SEO typically refers to the steps implemented to get your site listed in response to local search results. The keywords optimized for local SEO generally includes the name of the place, and phrases like “near me.”
SEO, for the most part, revolves around the optimization of keywords. As of the latest standards, it is understood that search engines (read Google) prefer long-tail keywords. Of course, other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo also have similar protocols to determine the rank of the website. Content marketing is one of the most vital aspects of keyword optimization and is universally accepted.
Creating information-rich, creative, and highly readable content is a great way to attract and retain visitors to a site. Using tools for traffic conversions, you can easily measure who is visiting your site, and how much of this traffic is converted to business. Of course, these tools measure all kinds of traffic, from paid to organic, and others.
Paid search traffic
These websites are typically listed above all other results when you type a particular query into the search engine. Different search engines have different rules to determine which paid listings are going to be featured and in what order.
Google Ads is considered the most important of all other paid search results. You will need a specialist marketer to get your paid ads featured in response to search results. It’s not so simple as paying a greater amount and getting your ad featured. In fact, Google may deem that your ad quality is poor if you try to compensate it with a greater bid amount.
Google assigns an ad rank for every ad competing in the ad auction for a particular keyword. Based on this rank, the search engine decides whether your ad would be visible. If you manage to make it visible, the ad rank will determine the relative position of your advertisement. The quality of your ad is determined by several factors. This includes:
- The click-through rate you expect for your ad
- The relevance of your ad to the search query
- The landing page quality
As for getting a higher ad rank, you will have to take into account several aspects. These are:
- The competitiveness: It depends on how many ads are competing for a given keyword.
- The bid:Your bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay to get a click on your ad. You can change the bid any time you want. The actual amount you end up paying is often less than the maximum value you had set.
- Ad quality: The overall quality of your ad as mentioned before.
- Search context:various variables of a search are taken into account. This includes the search terms entered by the person, his or her location, time of the search, and the type of device used, among other things.
- Ad rank thresholds: Google has minimum thresholds that an ad must achieve.
- Impact of ad extensions: Ad extensions are additional information covered by the ad, such as phone numbers, or links to specific pages. Google will estimate the impact of these thresholds on the performance of your ad.
Direct traffic
Direct ad traffic is the type where the user directly types the URL of a website in the search bar. Some websites achieve enigmatic branding status, and a lot of people would type these sites in the address bar. It includes all the popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Amazon, etc. Only a few websites have achieved the multibillion-dollar status, but there’s no telling who can be successful on the internet. Do note that almost all of the sites that have now become household names started as small businesses.
If you want to benefit from direct traffic, you can try different methods such as email marketing and influencer marketing. Running campaigns in print media, radio, and TV can also bring direct traffic to your site.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic happens when some other site refers to your website. It can be when your site is linked to the content on other websites. Traffic through social media can be considered as a kind of referral traffic. Strictly speaking, social media traffic should be considered separately. This is because social media optimization is a vast field by itself. Experienced digital marketers spend a great deal of their waking hours exclusively figuring out how to maximize referrals coming from social media.
Conclusion
Website traffic does not happen by happenchance. You will have to invest time and money to get the different aspects of traffic to work together. Getting more traffic is important, but it is more important to get traffic that converts. At the core, it depends on the user experience factors of your website. The better it fares, the brighter are its chances to make it big. You need to do your best to establish your branding identity so that your target audience can relate to your website.
Keep trying.