Recently, the practice of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) has flared back up. As a Digital Strategist (CRO) is always on my mind for my clients. Without successful CRO your clients will fail.
The process of optimizing for conversions is guided by two factors: Increased visits to a website and an increased conversion rate. In other words, you need to have visitors to your website that you can convert to customers and on the other side you need turn an increasing number of them into actual customers.
Today I’ll start off by looking at the first half of the equation:
How do I increase my website traffic?
In a nutshell you increase your website traffic with “traffic driving tactics.” Here are the top five tactics:
- Blogging — I lump content marketing, social media, and blogging together. Creating content, also known as blogging, is the foundation of any website. Writing blog posts that feature the websites target keywords and sharing them on social media is a fantastic way of driving traffic to your website rank in search engines for those keywords. These posts are also great for sharing via email (see below).
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Start off by making sure your website meets all the required technical aspects by the search engines so it’s easy to crawl and get indexed. This includes all the technical things like setting up 301 permanent redirects, XML sitemaps, Robot.txt files, optimizing meta tags and title tags, as well as fixing canonicalization and duplicate content errors. If done correctly, it will also improve the overall user experience of the site for visitors.
- Paid Advertising — This includes helping potential customers searching for your products or services by placing Pay Per Click (PPC Ads). It also includes placing ads where your potential customers hang out online to help them discover your products/services. Social Media Ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter can be very helpful here. The targeting capabilities to reach the correct person online are endless.
- Email Marketing — Helpful, informative, and attractive emails will always be welcomed by subscribers. Make sure you have grown a qualified email list and people will reward you by visiting your website to learn more. Sending a quick email to your announcing a new blog post on your website will get them to read it and see what else is new on your website.
- Referral Traffic — When you create great content (such as helpful blog posts, webinars, or white papers) – especially in your area of expertise and get the word out about it (via social media and email) other websites will link to it (as a reference). This will in turn send traffic from their website to yours.
Implementing these five tactics successfully will increase quality traffic to your website. In particular, companies who blog as part of an inbound marketing strategy have 55% more website traffic than those who don’t. In addition, B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not.
Why Digital Strategy Matters
The key is to implement all these tactics together as a part of one comprehensive strategy for your brand. The key is to create quality content that will rank high in the search engine, be shared on social media, and then emailed to a dedicated email list.
Stay tuned for a follow-up post next week when I look at the other half of the Conversion Rate Optimization equation: How do I improve my website’s conversion rate?