Succesful Internet marketing is a lot like a tri-athlete, well rounded. With so many potential customers in so many different places online, it’s imperative to make sure you’re getting them to find and come to your website. Below are the four main types of traffic to your site and what they mean for your company’s success.
Direct Traffic
When people come straight to your site, either by typing in your URL or having bookmarked your site, this is called direct traffic. There’s a good chance these are repeat customers, people that know your company or organization and want to come back to your site to find out more. If you have new visitors, that is also good news: they’ve seen your URL in advertising or elsewhere and it stuck in their memory.
Organic
For Internet Marketers, this is the jackpot. Organic traffic happens when searchers type in phrases related to your company and its products or services. For example, if I was searching for “brass tea kettles” (true story) on Google and your brass tea kettle emporium was listed at the top of the page, in my delight I would have to click on the link to your website. Because you didn’t pay to be on Google, your appearance would be natural, or organic. Search engine optimization is the art of helping companies be found organically on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Paid
Paid traffic are the visitors that come to your website through online advertising. The largest purveyor of this traffic is Google AdWords, an advertising avenue through Google. You might have noticed text ads when you search on Google or even appearing at the bottom of YouTube videos that you’re watching. Online advertising takes many shapes and forms and can be content-related or search-related. You might have heard someone working in Internet marketing refer to SEM, or Search Engine Marketing. That’s an acronym for someone who works with paid traffic.
All FirstSearch packages at Mavidea come with management of AdWords for your company. This is a great way to cover more areas that potential customers may be searching for and an opportunity to reach out to customers in a new geographic area.
Referral
Long, long ago, people used to refer to the Internet primarily as “The World Wide Web.” In fact, that’s where the “www” suffix in URLs originated. While people may not call it the web anymore, the Internet still functions as billions of interconnected pages. These links that we’ve become so used to are like roads to get from one destination to another. When someone finds a link to your webpage on another website, this is called referral traffic. Referral traffic is a way to cast a wider net and to gain influence online. As your company appears more often and on relevant websites, potential customers will trust. A good SEO team will work to build as many inbound opportunities as possible for you, widening your reach.
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