Inbound Marketing Basics: Driving Traffic

Without traffic to your website, and especially your blog, there’s no point to even having a website. The only reason you spent all of that time and money was for people to come visit your website.

In this article, you’ll learn about good versus bad traffic, along with the best ways to send good traffic to your website.

Sign up for the Inbound Marketing Basics Email Course

Good traffic vs. bad traffic

Wait. Don’t I want as much web traffic to my site as possible? Absolutely not.
Bad traffic consists of visitors that aren’t and will never be interested in your product or service.

Bounce rate is the one one way to know you’re getting too much bad traffic. Google defines bounce rate as:

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

In plain English, that means that if someone comes to your site, doesn’t click any links or interact in any way, and then leaves, that is considered a “bounce.” The higher your bounce rate, the worse it is. (You can see what your bounce rate is by looking at your Google Analytics reports.)

The reason someone would bounce off your site is because, when they arrived, they quickly saw that the site was not relevant to their search term and then left.. For example, if someone does a Google search for “driving school,” happens to see a link to this blog article with “Driving Traffic” in the title, and clicks on it—they’ll quickly see that it isn’t what they are looking for and will leave.

Bad traffic drives up your bounce rate, which Google isn’t very fond of. Google wants websites to be highly relevant to the search terms for which they show up on the search engine results page.

Good traffic, on the other hand, makes Google happy because it shows that you’re delivering useful and relevant content. They want people to find what they’re searching for. For example, if someone does a Google search for “how to get website traffic” and finds this article, they’ll see that it is relevant to what they were searching for. Hopefully, they’ll stick around to read it and perhaps even click on the link at the bottom to sign up for our short ecourse.

How to drive organic website traffic

Organic traffic refers to visitors who arrive at your website because they found you via keyword search or clicking on a link from another site. Non-organic traffic is paid traffic from ads.

The two main ways to drive web traffic organically is via keywords and links.
Keywords. I referred to keywords earlier when I discussed search terms people use to find your site. When you include the right keywords, you attract the right traffic. One of the earlier articles in this series, Inbound Marketing Basics: Keyword Research, teaches you a lot more about finding the best keywords.

If your blog article contains a phrase that someone searches for, you will show up in the search results. Your placement in the rankings depends on several factors, but without using that keyword or related topic, you will not show up. Choose keywords that will be used by your potential customers so they have a chance of finding you.

Links. You want people to share your article. The more people who link to your article, the more people who will visit your article. If someone who has hundreds of visitors to their site shares your article, then you could potentially get hundreds of visitors to your site.

Links are also important to how high you show up in the Google search results. If a page with high authority links to you, that gives your site more weight and you show up higher in the search results. Of course, you need to write an article worth linking to!

Drive traffic with ads

Notice I didn’t write “How to drive traffic with ads.” There are entire books written about online advertising and all I can provide for you here is a brief introduction.
Ads are a sure way to buy web traffic.

Most online ads are PPC or pay-per-click ads. This means that the advertiser pays a particular amount every time an ad is clicked. These are most commonly seen on the Google search results page, although they are also used by Facebook, Instagram, and others.

There are also banner ads, also called display ads. These are similar to the ads you see in newspapers and magazines where the advertiser pays a specific amount for the ad to run for a particular length of time.

The other benefit of paying for advertising, especially Google Adwords, is that you learn more about the best keywords to use. Google Adwords connects to your Google Analytics account, and between the two, you receive valuable insight into which keywords people are using to find your site.

Conclusion

You want to attract the best prospects to your website, the people who are most likely to purchase your products or services. Writing blog articles that they’ll find useful and valuable is one of the best ways to do that.

When you use the right keywords in your blog article, you’ll attract the right customers. When you add links from other websites, you’ll quickly rise in the Google search results.

Spend your energy on building organic web traffic first. If you need more, you can also buy web traffic by using PPC or display ads.

Driving traffic to your website does not have to be difficult or left to chance if you write great content based on strategic keywords and then supplement with paid ads.