Traffic. We talk about traffic all the time, and sometimes the lines get crossed. If you’re looking at top-level traffic, I’m referring to organic traffic, paid traffic, and referral traffic.
When you’re looking at your website analytics, particularly in Google Analytics, you can see these types of traffic listed. The data is split so you can understand where people are coming from and where they’re going.
Here’s a way to look at traffic:
Here are the types of traffic to look at (and track) and an example of what/how to generate more of it:
- Direct Traffic – people who know your URL and type it into the search bar. They’re going straight to “disneyland.com” or “beyonce.com.” Well, just like Disneyland, be known for the thing that makes you you. The thing that brings a customer to you – something you’re solving for them. If you’re a screwdriver-counting software, you’re likely the only one. So be that ONLY ONE and serve that customer – with your content – talking to that customer who has a need to count screwdrivers (and probably to cut costs and save time).
- Organic Traffic – people are doing a search and click on your link in search results. Something that you’ve written or said has caused Google to serve up a webpage to the searcher. Check your best performing pages, look at those keyword phrases people are searching for and then clicking your page, and work on honing in on those “intentional” searches and intentional keywords.
- Referral Traffic – people are clicking a link from another website. One way to do this is by writing guest blog posts or being a guest contributor to a newsletter or podcast guest. If you’re aligned with the other party’s audience, people will click through.
- Social Media Traffic – people are clicking a link from a social media post/content. ➡️ Builds good awareness at the top of the sales funnel. Publish consistent social posts that call out the link in your profile, drive that traffic back to your site.
- Paid Traffic – people clicking through your paid ads (can be social, display ads, someone else’s link that you paid for, google ads). The one thing that I work on is to have one CTA for one piece of content. That goes double for ads. You want to keep the call to action as simple and to the point as possible.
Of the five sources, where are you the best at? Where do you need a little help? You can activate ads and turn them off after a campaign, so don’t think you HAVE to keep ads on forever.
Who knows until you ask them.
You may find out it’s all word of mouth. Realtors, contractors, lawyers, … these industries seem to have the best word of mouth. (You still have to have a digital home base; that’s just how the world works in these parts. You still have to do some social media to get that top of the funnel filled.)
In the end, you have to figure out what your goal is for your business. Do you stay a micro business with less than 3 employees? Or do you grow into a small business…? And perhaps grow into a medium-sized business and beyond?
