Generate Targeted Traffic

Traffic is essential to your online success. You won’t accomplish anything online unless you get visitors to your sites, so it makes sense to focus on traffic before thinking about web design or anything else. Where will your traffic come from, and who will your visitors be?

Most of your traffic will come from search engines. A visitor will find your business online if your site shows up near the top of the search results when she enters a search term in Google. Your job is to figure out which search terms (keywords or keyphrases) are most likely to get you the most traffic from the kinds of visitors who will produce the business results you want. Here are three steps to getting targeted search engine traffic to your site:

• Segment your market
• Research your keywords and keyphrases
• Analyze your competition

Segment your market

What is your target market (or markets)? How many kinds of customers does your business have? Are your customers consumers or are they other businesses? Do your customers live in a particular region, city or neighborhood? Do your preferred customers come from a certain demographic group or industry? Are they looking for a particular product or service? Are they most influenced by perceived benefits, or by price, or by value? Do they share attitudes, beliefs or cultural values? Use what you know (and whatever you can learn) about your customers to identify different market segments among your customers and potential customers.

Each of these segments is likely to have different needs. Each of these segments is likely to use different search terms to try to meet their needs or solve their problems online. For each customer segment, you need to figure out which keywords and keyphrases they are actually using, and then optimize your web pages to show up near the top of the search results for those phrases.

Research keywords and keyphrases

How do you know which keywords and keyphrases your potential customers are using to search for the solution your business offers? Fortunately, you don’t have to guess – there are several keyword research tools available online. I recommend that you use Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. It is probably the most accurate tool available, and it’s free.

You use the Keyword Tool by entering a few keywords and keyphrases you think people might use to find your business. The tool will return actual search volumes for those phrases – along with lists of synonyms and related phrases, including their search volumes. You can also enter the URL for your website (or a competitor’s website) to get additional lists of relevant keywords and keyphrases, including actual search volumes. You can use the Keyword Tool to sort the results by search volume, and export the results to a spreadsheet. Do this for all of your customer segments.

You now have lists of the exact keywords and keyphrases each of your customer segments uses to search for the products, services and solutions your business provides. Your segmented keyword lists are the foundation of your traffic strategy. You want to optimize your web pages for keyphrases with high search volumes – that’s where the traffic is.

Analyze the competition

Do you always optimize your web pages for the highest volume keyphrases first? Not necessarily… first you need to analyze your competition.

Most search engine traffic goes to the sites that show up on the first page of search results. You need to take a close look at the number and quality of the competing sites for each of your top keyphrases to see what your chances are of getting to the front page for that keyphrase. You will probably get more traffic by showing up on the first page of results for a lower volume keyphrase than by appearing on the second or third page of search results for a higher volume keyphrase.

Your web page’s position in the search results for a particular keyphrase is determined by a number of on-page and off-page factors. On-page factors relate to your placement and use of the keyphrase in your page structure and your page content.

Off-page factors include your domain’s age, the number and quality of incoming links (backlinks) to your page from outside pages, the amount of traffic it gets, its Page Rank and its presence in certain web directories. The search engines view these off-page factors as a general indication of your site’s quality, relevance and importance. The term “authority” is often used to describe the entire range of off-page factors. We’ll use that term here, and we’ll refer to on-page keyword optimization simply as “optimization.”

Optimization is quick and easy to do – you have complete control over your page structure and content. Building authority is a different story. You have less control over off page factors – and it takes a much longer time to accumulate backlinks, traffic and Page Rank. Assume for the purpose of evaluating your competition that all your pages will be well optimized, but will initially have low authority.

To make an informed decision about which keyphrases to target first, here’s what you need to know about your competition:

Optimization (on-page factors):

- Is the keyphrase included in the page URL?

- Is the keyphrase included in the page title?

- Is the keyphrase included in the page description?

- Is the keyphrase included in the page’s headline tags?

Authority (off-page factors):

- What is the domain age?

- What is the Google Page Rank?

- What is the Alexa Traffic Rank?

- How many backlinks to the page?

- How many backlinks to the domain?

- How many .gov and .edu backlinks to the domain?

- Is the domain listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)?

- Is the domain listed in the Yahoo! Directory?

For each of your keyphrases, gather this information for each of the top 10 pages in the search results. You should also check the websites of your main offline competitors, even if they don’t appear near the top of the search results.

Getting the data isn’t difficult, but it does take some time. If you want to do it yourself I recommend SEO for Firefox, an excellent free tool. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do it yourself, any competent SEO consultant should be able to provide you with all of this information, and should be able to help you analyze it to determine which keyphrases you should optimize for first for best results.

Remember that your goal is to get your page to show up on the front page of search engine results. Your well-optimized page may be able to overtake poorly optimized competing pages, even though they have high authority. But if you see that all the competing first page results for a certain keyphrase have high authority and are highly optimized too, you should move on to your next keyphrase. Concentrate first on keyphrases that give you your best chance of getting on the first page of the search results so you can start getting some traffic to (and building some authority for) your web pages. Plan to target your more competitive phrases later, as time and resources allow.

Buying traffic with PPC

You may also decide to use a pay-per-click advertising campaign such as Google AdWords to show up immediately in the paid search results for keyphrases where the competition for the organic search results is too strong. Or you may use PPC ads to test whether the traffic for a particular phrase actually converts before you spend a lot of time and effort optimizing pages for that phrase. A discussion of PPC advertising is beyond the scope of this article – I mention it only to note the same steps apply whether you focus on paid or organic search results. You generate targeted traffic from search engines by starting with market segmentation, keyword research and competition analysis.