Guetting Guaranteed Visitors Doesn't Guarantee Business - Part 1

There are two major ways of driving traffic to your website. These two categories could be summed up in paid traffic, such as Pay per Click, Banner Advertising, Link Advertising …etc; and unpaid traffic, such as any search engine organic results.

After assuming that you have spent nights and days researching for the perfect keyword, key-phrase or combination of the above, stayed away from including your company name and whatever best describes your business, and solely focused on how your customers can best reach you instead, you can then go ahead and launch your preferred search engine. (We’ll be covering how to choose the correct keywords in the coming articles).

After entering your keywords in the search field, and executing a search, you will be “face à face” with both organic and paid competitors. Organic results are always displayed in the middle of the page of most search engines, while Pay per Click or PPC for short, will be displayed either at the very top or at the very bottom of the page and sometimes on the left hand or right hand sides, depending on the search engine. There are some search engines that will even indicate those paid advertisers, by adding the word “sponsored” to the bottom ad.

By now you have a wealth of information that is displayed after your first search, which should be analyzed and processed carefully. For example, too much total results, and too many sponsored ads appearing on the search results of your desired keywords, are indications of brutal competition ahead. Another tip: refreshing the result page several times, will display different sponsors for the same keyword.

Study each one of your competitors, their website organization and design: What first impression do you get when you visit their site? The product they are offering and their advertising strategies: Are they offering buy 2 get 1 for free? Any discounts? Their geographic location: Geographic market coverage, and shipping charges, amongst many other different factors.

Now remember, unlike organic results, every time you chose to click on a sponsored link, the search engine will charge the advertiser a certain amount of money. To avoid that, you can simply copy the link at the bottom of the ad, and past it in the address field of your internet navigator. This way you will bypass the script that will place the monetary charges and can still carry on with your ethical research.

PPC campaigns can start as low as 5 cents up to over 30$ for the click, depending on the number of bids that are placed on each keyword by your PPC competitors. Every time a user clicks on your sponsored ad, you will end up paying a certain amount of money. But now you’ve got traffic!

Getting traffic doesn’t mean getting sales. And getting guaranteed visitors doesn’t guarantee business. That also applies even if you were number one on all search engines organic results. Any online user, whether coming from paid or unpaid search engine results, is considered traffic until a transaction has been made, and only then this user will become your customer. 45 out of 100 users will turn away from your website from the first 5 seconds. 25 will follow within 10 to 40 seconds. Another 25 will think about it and 5 are left considering a purchase. The bitter truth: 95% of potential traffic turns away from your site on a daily basis.

Both organic and paid advertising strategies should be considered based on your financial budget, but before you decide to unleash any kind of traffic, you should be prepared to host on your website server not only HTML files and scripts, but also the simple but powerful secrets of the traffic to clientele conversion.