Getting Qualified Visitors

Once you’ve properly researched your market and have a deep understanding of your ideal customers, the next step is to get visitors to your website. Getting targeted visitors to your website is paramount to making money with the Internet. If you don’t have any visitors then you won’t make any sales through your website. Think of it this way: traditional businesses rely on steady foot traffic in order to make sales, the same is true of the Internet.

In other words: No visitors = no sales

Let me just say that there are a multitude of ways to get high quality Internet visitors to your website. What do I mean by high quality? My definition of “high quality” is people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution that you provide in your business.

Three of the main sources of Internet traffic for local businesses are Google, YouTube and Facebook. There are a lot of other traffic sources, but they are insignificant compared to these two sources. So for the time being we will focus on them.

Google Traffic

Google has more sources of traffic for your business than you might aware of. Go to https://google.com and search for “day spa johannesburg”. You should see a screen that looks similar to the following screen shot (Google may give you different results depending on your location, past searches etc.) I’ve marked up the image to show you what each traffic source means, and then given a description as well.

Here’s what each traffic source means:

You can buy visitors from Google on an auction basis. This is called Google Adwords. For each keyword that you are targeting you can set an individual bid. However, I must warn you that this is a costly exercise unless you really know what you are doing. The big advantage of Adwords is that you can start getting targeted visitors to your website immediately.

2. Local Business or Google Places Listing (with the map)

When you see a map displayed in the normal Google search results, this is known as the Google local business listings. These are great because they give a map location for your business, and a page (a “Google Place page”) with reviews, photos, and videos and other additional information.

As you may have noticed in the above image, it takes up a big chunk of the screen, meaning that if you rank in this space then you will get a lot of the available visitors to your website. Getting ranked in local business listings takes approximately 2 – 8 weeks.

3. Search Engine Optimization

The organic search results or search engine optimized listings require a completely different approach to get your web pages ranked. In cases where it is too competitive to rank for local business listings, I will instead look at Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization involves 2 key strategies:

• First you need to develop a list of relevant keywords with strong ‘buying intent’ i.e. “Nokia 234x phone battery.” This keyword has a high probability of getting a sale from a visitor. However, “phone battery” has a very low buying intent and is unlikely to make you much money.
• For each keyword create a page of content with information that is highly related to the keyword. There many details to tweak on the page – too many to mention here.
• Once each page is properly optimized you need to generate a significant number of links from other external websites back to your own pages, and this needs to be done continually. The more competitive the market, the more new links you will need to have coming into your site in order to dominate your competitors.
• Having a well-optimized website is a factor in getting your Local Business listing ranked highly.

So those are the 3 main methods that you can use to drive high quality traffic with Google. But Google is not the only game in town. In the next post, I'll talk about another traffic giant that you should be using – YouTube.