The utmost criterion of site relevance is traffic. It affects the sales and the company’s success. But just launching a platform and waiting for customers to come is a bad strategy. In this article, we will look at how to boost the conversion rate of the site, what are the long-term traffic sources, and how you can save your budget.
What is a traffic source?
A traffic source is a route that brings clients to your webpage or app. This info is recorded by data analytics systems such as Google Analytics. In simple words, site traffic is the number of users who come to a web resource in a certain period. This indicator reflects the popularity of your resource. High-quality conversion is users who are interested in the subject of the portal and its content and are ready to take targeted actions. It allows you to expand your client base, increase sales, grow your income from advertising campaigns, and find investors or partners. Victor Karpenko, the owner of the SEO agency SeoProfy.com, told more details about the long-term sources below.
- Sources of targeted traffic can be of the multiple varieties:
1. Direct
This is one of the sources that appears in webpage stats. In Google Analytics, we will see it as (direct)/(none). Direct means that the user accesses the portal without the mediation of other sources, simply by entering the address of the resource in the browser. Net direct traffic comes from several categories of users:
- Second-time users who visited the website after a while, and memorized the correct URL, or saved it in a tab;
- People who visited it from the address bar, in search of a specific product or brand (for example, Coca-Cola);
- People who learned the URL from an offline advertising campaign (for example, in the press, on the radio, on TV, on the street);
- Users who visited the platform on the recommendation of other people;
- People who have previously visited the webpage from other sources, but for technical reasons (blocking cookies, changing the browser or device, etc.) have not been assigned to them.
Direct traffic largely reflects the strength of the brand and the loyalty of regular customers. This buyer is a real treasure, and he will most likely make a conversion in your store. This is always the result of past advertising activities.
2. Referral
Referral traffic is generated from other sites. If it is of high quality, it improves search engine rankings and indirectly affects organic ones. When an authoritative source links to you, your resource is well-indexed and appears higher in the search. Your webpage may receive referrals from your own email newsletter, YouTube vlog, and even offline marketing. So, publish expert articles in friendly media with a similar target audience. If you have a large holding or multiple projects, you can link between websites. With referral traffic, visitors come to you from other resources, trusting the recommendations of the platform they came from. After analyzing the list of such sites, you can determine the interests of the audience, understand what users want to read, and optimize content for them.
3. Organic
An organic stream is generated by people who came to the resource through a search engine. More precisely, they insert the request they needed (for example, “buy a laptop”) and visited the webpage of interest. Site conversion is considered organic if the human came specifically from the search engine (Google, Bing, etc.). Here are the benefits of the organic variety:
- stability (the content does not suddenly disappear, although there are drawdowns for various reasons);
- relatively low cost of getting clients;
- increase the brand awareness;
- greater user trust;
- more humans get interested in the service.
You can get organic traffic in almost any niche. Of course, it is necessary to take into account the high level of competition in some industries, which complicates the task and requires more time. Still, this variety is considered long-lasting.
4. Social
Social traffic is the one attracted from social networks. To date, generating this type of content is one of the most important tasks for optimizers and webmasters of Internet resources. Speaking about the advantages of social traffic, there are several main factors to keep in mind:
- Any social network attracts only targeted visitors to the resource, which has a positive impact on the behavioral factors;
- Attracting users from social networks makes it possible to increase the number of social links of the resource, as well as improve the quality of its link mass.
It is essential to note that any resource that is actively promoted in social networks should also have well-configured pages.
5. Paid
Paid traffic is a promotion method in which users get to the webpage through online advertising. Purchased content includes everything that you need to pay for: targeted ads on social networks, contextual advertising in a search engine, affiliate articles, and even ads from bloggers. Almost all enterprises need some paid advertising, but the volume differs depending on the sphere and niche.
How to drive traffic to the site?
Search engine optimization includes not only carefully setting up the pages of the site, but also the preparation of content through which you will receive new arrivals. Create a blog on your platform and fill it with useful articles that will help solve the problems of your potential customers. You will get a loyal audience, which will then recommend your site to friends, relatives, and acquaintances.
SEO is a method of attracting long-term traffic. That is, you are working for the future – search engine algorithms will analyze the article and show it for certain queries. SEO performance can be affected not only by the number of pages relevant to a query but also by their total number. Use the natural inclusion of queries in texts to communicate with a client in the same language. You can also use shareware interaction with the audience on social media: posts, contests, games, polls, etc. Feel free to search for thematic questions from users and answer them by providing a link to your resource in the description. Good luck!
