Traffic to your website can arrive from various sources, Search Engine Optimisation can obviously help with driving traffic from search engines, but other sources of traffic should not be ignored.
Visitors to your site will come from:
- An awareness of your business and your company name
- Searching for your products or services
- Seeing your details on a business card or advert
- Referrals from existing customers
- links from other websites
- Paid search, e.g. Pay Per Click or Display Advertising
Searching for your business name
If you already have a website, try searching for your site by name. Hopefully, you will find your business on the first page, ideally at the top. However, sometimes this is not the case. Directory sites or social networks may appear above you.
Local Search
The growth of mobile devices has dramatically changed search. Your potential customers are using location-aware devices to find products and services. Often qualifying their search term with “near me” rather than typing a place name.
Search engines work hard to ensure that their results are relevant to the searcher. This is why searching for “interior designer Cheltenham” will produce different search results than “interior designer Glasgow”.
Direct Visitors
When someone types your domain name into their web browser, they are taken directly to your site. Monitoring these sources can help identify which elements of your offline marketing are working and how well your brand is remembered.
Referral Sources
There are almost a limitless number of online directories, some good and some not so good. The Yellow Pages used to be the default place for UK businesses to advertise, subsequently replaced by yell.com. Referral traffic is the term used to identify visitors to your site arriving via another website (by clicking on a hyperlink).
It is essential to understand that you can not “game” the search engines on a long-term basis. Good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should be focused on helping the search engines find your content and provide meaningful information to visitors.
SEO Services
An SEO campaign can be broken down into stages, starting with getting the basics right. In almost every case, we follow these steps:
- Audit the website to ensure that there are no technical issues that could prevent the search engines from accessing all relevant content
- Ensure that the site performs properly on a range of mobile devices
- Audit the backlink profile to identify any negative aspects that may harm the site’s reputation
- Ensure that the site ranks well for your brand and/or company name
- Identify relevant keywords that the business should be ranking for
- Audit site content to ensure that visitors can find interesting and informative content about the services and products
- Setup and monitor conversion metrics to test and improve performance
Having identified what work needs to be carried out, we then agree on a plan to address any gaps in the above process. Once these necessary steps have been taken, you can then confidently expand your online marketing efforts into social and paid marketing channels.
