One of the most fascinating things to watch, when you’re running an online business–or likely any business, for that matter–is the increase in traffic coming through your virtual (or physical) doors. Watching that traffic count tick up due to a successful optimization, PPC or social media campaign can be thrilling.
Yesterday I talked about how to turn your top search engine rankings into traffic. In reality, rankings are just one way to generate traffic. There are literally countless ways in which you can drive traffic to your website, via both on- and off-line marketing efforts. Unless you sell advertising by the impression, traffic isn’t the end-all, be-all of website performance. For many sites there has to be a conversion.
What that conversion is varies from site to site. For one it can be finalizing the sale of a product, for another it can be a lead, and for others it can be a download or signing up for a newsletter subscription. Whatever a conversion means to you, you know that getting it is the most important thing. Rankings only lead to traffic. Traffic puts eyeballs on the site, but beyond that, we need to know how to get that traffic to convert.