9. What is traffic and why is it important — 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.
Today as a natural follow up to my Understanding the Online Sales Funnel article, I’m going to talking about ‘traffic’ and why it’s important for your business.
You can catch up on the first 8 days of my Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
What is traffic?
Traffic refers to the amount of visitors your website receives.
The term ‘how much traffic do you get’ is generally referring to the number of unique visitors who land on your website each month or year.
Is all traffic the same?
Good question!
The answer is no.
Website traffic comes in all shapes and sizes, from different channels, locations and devices. Even different browsers.
Traffic channels
To understand website traffic you need to get your head around channels.
Traffic channels is fancy marketing speak for which medium the traffic comes from.
For example, do most people just type in your website address to visit your website? If so, this is referred to as direct traffic.
These people directly visited your website.
Or do they find your website via Google Searches? Congratulations, you are getting some good organic traffic (short for organic search traffic, traffic coming from search engines)
There are 5 key channels:
- Social
- Organic search
- Direct
- (Other)
- Referral
Social traffic is self explanatory, that’s website visitors originating from social media platforms.
Organic search refers to traffic from Google and other search engines. There are lots of ways to drill down further into which parts of your website are attracting this traffic.
If your’e clever, you can check your landing pages to see which pieces of content people are landing on to connect the dots. If you are a roofline businesss for example and can see that many visitors are landing on your upvc Cladding Replacement, this is a dead give away that this page is attracting targeted organic traffic.
You can break down your traffic by channel by accessing the acquisition overview in your Google Analytics dashboard.
Why is traffic important?
Your website traffic is like your petrol.
It makes your website run for you.
You need traffic to generate leads, to generate customers.
Driving the right traffic allows you to fill up the top of your sales funnel.
If you have a decent website and funnel system in place, the rest should happen on autopilot.
As your traffic grows, so should your list and your business.
I talked yesterday about understanding your metrics and the importance of forecasting.
If you understand your online marketing metrics, you can accurately forecast your growth based on the amount of traffic you generate.
As such, if you want more leads, you can focus on activities that will drive more targeted traffic to your website like:
- Creating long tail content targeting specific keywords
- Creating videos and starting a YouTube channel
- Writing on Medium and building a readership here
- Emailing your existing list new pieces of helpful content
- Setting up a social media schedule to automate sharing of your content at optimum times on the right platforms
- Participating in new Facebook and LinkedIn groups
Your acquisition report will allow to measure which of these activities is being most effective at driving traffic to your website.
This feedback loop allows you to focus on what works or improve what doesn’t.
I hope you find this article simple and easy to understand. Follow me for the next one tomorrow!
Any questions on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
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