Website Traffic: Not All Visitors are Equal

August 8, 2008

by Jill Brennan

Targeted website traffic is by no means a guessing game. It is an exact science that takes time and effort to get right. The only way to get more website traffic is to reach the audience you designed your website after.

The only way your site can be successful is if the visitors find your information useful. For example, consider browsing for books on Amazon.com: when you buy a book, the site gives you suggestions for other books in that category. The company figures that if you bought one book on a specific subject, others on similar subjects might interest you. You’ve just been targeted. While targeted website traffic won’t give you guaranteed traffic, it will increase your chances of reaching the correct audience.

Now, targeted website traffic doesn’t mean guaranteed traffic — just a strong possibility of more website traffic. You don’t want to lure anyone and everyone to your site. Internet loiterers take up space.

Although they don’t really hurt anything by being there, you don’t want to waste time courting them, just hoping they will like what they see and become a fan or a customer. It is up to you to take advantage of all the marketing knowledge out there, just waiting for you use.

One good way to get targeted website traffic is to use keywords. Think of the person you want on your site. When he or she is looking up something on the internet, the person uses particular words to do that, right? If they need fuzzy dice to hang from their rearview window, they will type certain things into the search engine in order to find those fuzzy dice.

This is where psychology comes into play. Do they type in -fuzzy dice,- -car dice,- -hanging dice,- -rearview mirror dice,- -fuzzy car dice,- or none of the above? What if they can’t spell right and type -fuzy dice-? What if they don’t know whether -rearview- is supposed to be one word or two? You want the money from the -rear view mirror dice- people just as much as you want the others. Keywords are all about improving your odds.

Not only is psychology important, but demographics are important too. What market are you selling too when you are offering dice for your car? What else would they be interested in buying? What type of site should you set up to cater for them? Car accessories? Unusual gifts? 70’s memorabilia? To make the most out of the web traffic that you have gained and to get even more traffic, you need to have related items that your customers will be interested in purchasing.

Targeted website traffic is like playing the stock market — you can make predictions based on careful research, but you will never know exactly whether your predictions will translate into sales. All you can do is increase the odds of driving more website traffic to your site through targeting your audience.

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