Boosting sales and leads to your site never follows a black-and-white pattern. We typically have two options: increase the number of eyes coming to your site or boost conversions from your existing visitors.
Ideally, we’d like to do both. But in a marketing world confined by strict budgets, this won’t always be possible, especially now that over 60% of marketers have reported an increase in customer acquisition costs (CAC) over the last few years.
So, when deciding where to invest your money, how do you decide between traffic or conversions? Here, we break it down for you.
Traffic Acquisition 101
Traffic acquisition follows two paths: organic and paid. Both of these channels require time and effort, so let’s start with the one that requires a bit of patiences — organic.
Organic traffic tactics involve press releases, strong SEO efforts, quality content, email marketing, and of course, social media marketing. And where does the patience come in? Well, increased organic traffic doesn’t happen overnight. Sure, it’s cost-effective, but a strong organic traffic strategy takes a lot of time and manpower — and it’s not always a guarantee that these efforts will yield favorable results.
Enter: paid traffic tactics. Paid traffic includes pay-per-click advertising (Google, social media channels, etc), re-marketing, and retargeting. While these strategies cost more money, they can show stronger results in a shorter amount of time.
The Benefits of Focusing on Traffic
- Allows you to build off of existing traffic.
- Traffic requires less time and effort.
- It’s more predictable.
- There’s little to no risk.
And the downside of traffic acquisition? A lot of times, marketers will spend countless hours and too much of their budget on a content strategy that lacks the conversion potential from the new traffic coming in. So in other words, you may have more eyes on your site, but are these eyes converting in the way that you wish? It’s not always guaranteed with a traffic-focused only approach.
Low-Budget Tips to Boosting Traffic
Develop An Effective Keyword Strategy
When it comes to boosting your traffic organically, a strong SEO strategy is essential. And luckily, it’s possible to implement an effective SEO strategy yourself, without having to hire the help of SEO professionals.
How?
Conduct strong keyword research and decide on which words and phrases you will optimize for. Incorporate these into your blog posts, headlines, and meta descriptions throughout your site. For a more in depth guide on how to SEO like a pro, check out our blog post here.
Know Which Advertising Channels Best Suit Your Needs
Not all social media platforms and advertising avenues will work for you. Traffic strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all. And while paid advertising is an excellent way to boost traffic, there are other routes to consider.
Join Facebook and Linkedin groups, send direct messages to people who engage with your content, post contests and giveaways. These are all great ways to engage an audience that reaches beyond paid advertising. And once you start posting and engaging more in these spaces, you’ll see which ones suit your content and business best.
Focus on Evergreen Content
As marketers and copywriters, we like to keep up with the times. It’s important to stay updated on all the latest trends, but sometimes extremely timely content isn’t always the best long-term solution for your traffic strategy.
Enter: Evergreen Content.
Evergreen content is stable in any good SEO and traffic plan. Why? Evergreen blogs and guides stay relevant for a long time, so if done well with the proper keywords, you can bring in more and more traffic for years. (Yes, years).
And not only does evergreen content have a long shelf life for your site, it also helps build brand credibility, especially if you post helpful guides and how-to articles. An Edeleman study found that 81% of consumers say they need to trust a brand before buying from them, so let that be a driving force behind investing in more high-quality evergreen content.
Conversions and Leads 101
And now, it’s time to discuss conversion optimization. What is conversion optimization? This involves the process of figuring out why your existing traffic isn’t converting — and making any unnecessary adjustments.
In short: it requires a lot of website improvements and sprucing up.
Optimizing for conversions means meeting your customers where they start their journey with your brand or company. What do they see when they first enter your site? How can you improve this process from the ground up?
This means revamping (as necessary) all landing pages, blog posts, call-to-actions, and marketing campaigns. Sounds like a lot of time and money being spent, right? While this may be true, a lot of marketers see the value in putting in the effort to completely optimize for conversions because of the long-term value.
How Can Conversion Optimization Stretch Your Marketing Budget?
Maximize what you already have. What exactly does this mean? Optimize for conversions with your already-existing traffic. This allows you to waste less money on pulling in new traffic and focus more on increasing conversion rates from your already-existing visitors.
The Benefits of Focusing on Conversions
- Boosts lead generation.
- Improves your SEO efforts, while leveraging your current traffic.
- Improves the user experience on your site.
- Helps you get a better understanding of your customer.
And the downside of conversion optimization? The wrong conversion strategy can have a negative, short-term impact on your conversion rates. Plus, your site has to have enough traffic to begin with in order to make proper hypotheses on your customers and their behavior.
How Conversions and Traffic Go Hand-In-Hand
It would be pretty difficult to convert visitors that aren’t there, right? So, if you don’t have a significant amount of traffic streaming in initially, you have nothing on which to optimize conversions.
Low traffic may take a while (and we mean a while) to show any sort of conclusive results — if they ever do at all.
Traffic or Conversions: What Should You Focus On?
Focus on traffic if …
You need a quick solution. Acquiring more traffic for your site is always a good thing, but there is always the chance that the benefits stop there. Solely focusing on traffic (even for paid campaigns) doesn’t guarantee conversions.
However, focusing on traffic can help you build brand loyalty with new and existing visitors.
Focus on conversion optimization if …
You want to improve the overall effectiveness of your site and its pages. No one can deny the power of increased traffic, but conversions ultimately improve the overall experience and effectiveness of your site.
Put simply, it has a lasting impact.
Because of this, a lot of marketers believe investing in all-encompassing conversion optimization yields a stronger payout. This is because you can dedicate a certain amount of your budget to these efforts and receive more effective results.
The Bottom Line?
For sites with low starting traffic, focus on traffic until you have enough to start optimizing for conversions.
For sites with a good amount of traffic coming in regularly, go ahead and start optimizing for increased conversion rates.
