Driving traffic and keeping the traffic there

As we approach 2008, websites are becoming more advanced; more user friendly, more informational, better content, etc.

In order to keep up with other competitors, whether it be another retail site similar to yours or a YouTube clone, you have to stay ahead of the curve - keep the user engaged and give them a reason to come back for that repeat purchase or the additional number of page views. Think about the sites you visit the most: Facebook, Myspace, your favorite news site, your e-mail inbox. All of these areas of interest have something in common - updated information. Your friends on your favorite social network are always engaged, thus keeping you engaged, and thus keeping them engaged, and so on (not to mention the myraid of widgets and applications these days). News is always being updated on MSN and CNN’s homepages - they help you keep up with the world, and a step ahead of your friends who might catch the news at night on TV. Your e-mail… well, I hope I am not the only one who checks their e-mail over 5 times a day.

So you have a website that isn’t as exciting as Facebook, not as informative as CNN.com. In fact, it is a drop of information in the ocean of the internet. But like Facebook and CNN, you want to keep your users and site visitors up-to-date and engaged somehow in your site. Are you thinking what I am? You are engaged right now, and all it takes is a few original articles every now and then: a blog.

A blog on your site, in my opinion, has three different uses:

1. Keep your visitors and users engaged in your site and give them a reason to repeat visit
2. Show your site visitors that you are passionate and care about what you are trying to do, whether that be to drive sales, discuss new industry buzz, etc.
3. SEO purposes

The first two uses are decently self-explanatory. If your favorite news site was suddenly abandoned and all the pages on the site were to stay exactly the same for the last year, you’d start getting bored of reading the same articles over and over. The articles would get outdated, and after a while, you would search for a new site to get more up to the date articles. Same with the second point - if you don’t show your users that you are up to date with your industry, don’t update your site, and seldom visit it yourself, then why should they?

Which brings be to my third point - SEO purposes. Having a blog on your site is a great way to maintain fresh content. Blogs attract more search engine traffic as it is; they attract search engine traffic as they already have optimized site architecture. If you pay attention to and use keywords in your blog as well, search engines will pick up on that and you can get rewarded accordingly.

Essentially, websites today are very similar to magazines that are delivered into your mailbox - you won’t order a magazine that has old outdated articles, nor would you continue visiting a website that delivered the same content.

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High natural search results… why even run paid search?

This question comes up a lot… if you are ranking well for a competitive or non competitive term, as in the first 3 positions in organic listings, let me congratulate you. That isn’t something easy to do - consider yourself lucky, smart, a combination of both, or thank whoever got you there.

If you are in the first three positions in organic for, let’s say the term, “buy dvds”, an obviously competitive field, wouldn’t you save money by just running your website without a PPC campaign? The answer is simply “yes” as you won’t be spending a dime every time someone clicked on your listing. It’s free - you’ve worked your way up the organic ladder and you’ve earned it! Chances are that you may be paying for SEO services to get this high on such a competitive term, or maybe you know what you’re doing.

Besides, its also said that over 70% of folks that search for a term will click on the organic listing anyways. So whats the point behind all of this? There are several points you should keep in mind when you decide not to run a PPC campaign:

1. losing out on more traffic
2. branding opportunities
3. visibility & reliability

The first reason is very simple; you’ll get more traffic. As stated above, 70% of the users will probably not click on sponsored links, but what about the remaining 30%? Why not give them an opportunity to visit your site? As your landing page is already optimized for that particular keyword (as you are on the top of the page in organic listings), your quality score will be very good assuming you have a properly written creative. On top of that, the user may see your first ad in the sponsored links section, but may look around at different results before choosing which link to click on. Perhaps after they see your paid link on top, and then your organic link, they’ll click on the organic link instead - essentially making your impression a “free online billboard”. Which leads me into the next point…

In my experiences with banner and display advertising, there is something called a “road block” which is essentially a complete site takeover. No, I am not talking about those really annoying ads that expand to the size of your monitor and you cant seem to find the “close” button - but websites where you might visit that have a 728×90, a 300×250, and a 468×60 - and all banners are displaying almost the same graphic and creative, but in different sizes. In my experiences, when you run 2 banners on a page instead of one, this will more likely lead into a click than running just one banner on the page. With an organic listing and a paid listing on the search engine results page, this can have the same effect. While studies of this concept is hard to prove that both the paid and natural search listing together provide synergy, I recommend it as it can be a good opportunity to promote your brand, your services, your products, whatever you can. It is definitely worth the extra cost that you might incur if a user does click on your PPC ad - and maybe your organic ad would have never been clicked on if it weren’t for the fact that they saw your PPC ad first! Better safe than sorry!

Finally - leading into my last point is visibility and reliability. Now that you have two listings on the search results page and more visibility - there is a chance that your user who clicks on the ad will notice your visibility and deem you more reliable. Perhaps that your website won’t increase traffic by a large amount, but there is a chance that conversions could increase a little bit. If you see a organic link for a site, such as “www.dvdempire.com” not accompanied by a paid link, or vise versa, it may be more tempting to just skip over it. However, what if you typed in “buy dvds” in Google and a paid listing appeared right before a natural listing? A user may see this as a more reliable source, maybe click-thru, maybe search the site, and maybe check out with $150 worth of DVDs just in time for the holidays.

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