How do you get more traffic to your website without spending a fortune?
Posted by Nicola Clare on 28 January 2009
In today’s strange and challenging economic times, it seems the world has firmly moved away from high street retail and is now buying online. This presents a real opportunity to any businesses that don’t currently have an online presence but also a question. If a business does have a website, how do you get more traffic there who wants to buy your stuff?
When you consider all the big brands that have gone to the wall of late, the one commonality they all share is none of them had a good online web presence.
With all this in mind I can’t help but think many businesses should take a look at the PPC (Pay per Click) advertising model. These are the ads you see on the right hand side of a Google search results page, often referred to as sponsored listings.
The beauty of PPC is that unlike traditional display advertising, as a company you only pay when a user actually clicks on your advert and shows real intent to buy. Great news! No longer do you need to pay out to get your name in front of all those lovely eyeballs, never knowing if they saw it, remembered it even or really even cared how beautifully crafted your banner was.
Better still, it’s really not that hard to do as long as you understand the basics and have a little time and energy to dedicate to it.
PPC is essentially an online auction owned and controlled by the search engine, more often than not the giant that is Google.
All you need to do is decide what you want to sell be it paperclips to printers, choose a list of keywords and phrases you think an interested customer would type in to the search bar and assign those words a bid price which is what you’d be prepared to pay to get a potential customer to your site.
After that it’s a simple case of writing yourself a short ad and away you go! Google have some great free tools to help you create your account even going as far as making suggestions for your ads, possible new keywords and the daily/weekly traffic volumes there’s likely to be for your search terms.
Don’t get me wrong there are some tricks to this which will help your campaign perform better and some pitfalls to be avoided but it really isn’t rocket science. Watch this space for some tips and pointers in the coming posts.
Products you may be interested in: eStore
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January 28th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
A really insightful artcile into the basics of PPC.
January 28th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Nicola, where do you start with choosing the right keywords? How do you know what people will type in?
January 28th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
In terms of how to find keywords there’s no subsitute for knowing your product inside out and also knowing who your target audience is for that product. That will give you a starting point.
Competitor sites are always good to look at and will certainly help. Google has a keyword tool which is free and that gives alternatives to your orginal suggestions.
I also find sites like Trwitter and Linked In give great insight into what’s currently being talked about which can help keep you up to date with the latest developements in paid search.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any other thoughts on how they’ve tackled building keword lists?
January 28th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I use twitter as a research tool. Delicious is also handy to see what other keywords are used in a social capacity by your peers
February 5th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Its interesting that even online retailers though are in trouble. Empire Direct that sold white goods online and where I bought my dishwasher has gone into receivership http://www.empiredirect.co.uk
I no not think anyone is immune the the current economic climate. In Empire Directs case I think they were known in Yorkshire only and therefore were not being seen online for the goods they sold. Its vital that you are visible for the services you sell, even if your an online business.