Generating visitors to your web site

Visitors are the lifeblood of a web site. Without them no business will be transacted and hence no revenue will be earned. Furthermore the wrong type of visitor can loose you money through higher bad debts or increased operational costs.

The articles accessed through this section deal with the actions you can take to attract visitors to your site helping to retain existing customers, acquire new ones, cross sell to existing product holders and reducing the operational cost to serve your customers.

The main areas for you to think about are: -

1. Search engine natural search results

75% of all internet journeys begin with a search engine. In addition to good layout, navigability and loading speed your site must be designed to cooperate with the search engines in order to be easily found and accessed by your potential customers. This process is called search engine optimisation (SEO) and success will lead to your site being fully included within the search engine databases. 

Ensuring your site is optimised to be fully indexed by the search engines removes any obstacles to your customer finding you. There is another important activity you also need to employ to ensure you are highly visible and rank above your competitors. That relates to your link popularity.

Link popularity is a measure of who is voting for you an their relative importance on the internet.  All this translates through to a measure of how important you are on the internet and hence your rank in the search engine results.  Are you on the first page or the twenty fifth. 

2. Exploiting all your marketing communications

Your existing communications and advertising cost you money and you need to put this expenditure to work to develop your online channel.  Read our guides on best practice use of your existing marketing activities to develop an awareness of your web site and channel customers to the pages which meet their needs.

3. Paying others to generate visitors

In addition to increasing awareness of your site through the search engines and your marketing activities you can also pay for customers to visit your site.  Pay per click (PPC) programmes, banner campaigns and joining affiliate programmes are all examples of this. 

There can be advantages in these options but you need to know what services are available and how to calculate the underlying business case for this activity.   Will this make you a profit or will it lead to uneconomical acquisitionof customers or sales at a loss.   The articles in this section will help you understand the economies of these opportunities.