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Feb 03, 2016

Driving Traffic and Generating Revenue – Tips From Credera’s Digital Practice

Justin Bell

Justin Bell

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Nobody likes traffic.  Unless, of course, you run an eCommerce business.  Then, traffic is one of the keys to your success and the more of it you can generate through organic channels the better.

There are a lot of tips and tricks to increasing online traffic and I’ll cover some of them below, but the key is simple but hard… have great content.  If you don’t have great content, no tricks are going to get you there in a sustainable way.

With the content and product(s) you have, some of the commons tips and tactics to maximize your organic traffic include:

  • Understand your audience and what keywords you want to be found for

  • Optimize your website to utilize those keywords in a way that search engines will understand, but that is really written for and valuable to your actual audience

  • Avoid “keyword stuffing” – if you write great content about your company and products it should naturally contain the right keywords.

  • Blog often and keep all of your content up-to-date, write about topical things and utilize catchy headlines

  • Leverage the right social channels and social sharing for your brand

  • Play by the rules… don’t try to trick Google… they are smarter than you

  • Utilize videos, info graphics and other multimedia – tell your story

  • Make sure your website is optimized for mobile

  • Look at your web analytics to see where your organic traffic is coming from (e.g., keywords, sources, etc.) and learn from this information to optimize over time

  • Create great email campaigns that feature a combination of curated products and valuable content / stories.  Huckberry is a great example.  I look forward to getting their emails because they always contain an interesting set of products that change frequently, they include value-add stories and helpful / interesting information.

I recently asked three members (Phil Lockhart, Olin Moran, Kyle Wahlquist) of Credera’s Digital practice for their insights on how to generate more organic traffic and ultimately generate more revenue.

  • What has worked well with the organizations you work with in driving increased traffic and customer acquisition organically?

One of the biggest things is maintaining discipline on some of the blocking and tackling first.  It’s remarkable how quickly this can fall out of line and start negatively impacting your site.  Maintaining things such as MicroData, Meta Tags, and strong URL structure/architecture is something that should not fall out of practice.  Secondly, specifically targeting high volume key words with specific landing pages versus trying to manipulate the standard dynamic / templated pages on the site.  This requires strong content and avoiding keyword stuffing.  Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to discover patterns associated with text and allows Google to uncover more context about the type of information being communicated.  This is a technique that if used properly can provide extra lift for content.  Lastly, many companies neglect analyzing deep linking to internal pages and fail to optimize the value of pages deep within the site.  There are many tools that help uncover pages that can be targeted for deep linking such as MOZ.

  • What role does the growth in the use of mobile devices and increase in mobile traffic play in your organic efforts?

Mobile traffic has increased dramatically and in some industries represents a larger percentage of traffic than mobile.  With that in mind, Mobile has moved from a second thought to an imperative part of any SEO strategy effort.  Usability of the mobile site plays a much bigger role in achieving sales goals and if ignored will put a company at a greater and greater disadvantage as time goes on.

  • In addition to focusing on Google, how do you recommend leveraging social or other channels to amplify your message and / or increase traffic organically?

Social organic strategies require great content because you are basically earning your way into these networks by providing content that people love.  Companies such as Ford hit many social channels in order to effectively spread their message and create brand awareness.  They have tactics spread across Instagram, Vine, Twitter, and Facebook – not just one channel.  The use of branded video in social channels has also been shown to allow companies to reach millions of customers but finding the perfect message that will go viral is certainly challenging.

Social is also getting an uptick in Paid since Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest provide buy buttons that allow customers to discover and purchase new products direct from a business without leaving the social site to checkout.   This doesn’t require companies to have extremely compelling content in order to get attention, just products served up at the right time and place.

What has worked well within your organization in driving increased traffic and customer acquisition organically?

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