Website Traffic Generation: Top Of The Funnel – Part 1

You can have the most beautiful website around, but that won’t do you any good if nobody is looking at it. That’s not just a waste of resources, but a huge missed opportunity. Despite the numerous methods the Internet provides to share information and promote your business, your website should still be considered “ground zero”. This is the hub of all your marketing efforts, so it better be good.

To draw in new leads, you should make sure that prospects can find your site and engage them once they do. That means having a strong online presence and building a reputation for yourself as an authority that your prospects can trust.

First, you’ll want your site to draw in as much traffic as you can. That will involve a whole suite of different strategies along multiple online avenues that work together to give you the biggest funnel possible. Let’s take a look at them, one by one:

Blogging: This is one of most the important tactics you can use to attract leads through your site. A full 57 percent of companies that maintain a blog have drawn in customers from it, according to HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report. For companies that blog multiple times per day, the number is 92 percent. Blogs give you a constantly refreshing source of new content (which search engines like), encourages visitors to visit more than once, and is the perfect avenue to share knowledge, establish trust, and build a community around your business.

Search Engine Optimization: Organic SEO techniques are all the rage nowadays because they carry the wonderful promise of free advertising. It’s not exactly free, of course. You need to set up your website with the proper content, strong keywords and optimized pages so that a person searching for the products or services you offer will turn up your site on the first page of results.

Getting on that first page is critical. Plenty of conventional wisdom, and surveys like this one from iCrossing, tells us that 95 percent of search traffic goes to companies who were listed on the first page.

Link building: This can be time-consuming and frustrating, but it’s also one of the best ways to help you improve your website’s SEO ranking. Search engines give a lot of weight to sites that other people link to, so your goal is to become one of those sites. Part of doing that is making sure your site has good content, and using tools like blogging to give readers something to share. But there are so many different techniques, plenty of them expensive and tedious, that your best option might be to get a helping hand.

To be continued…