There are really two choices when it comes to getting potential clients to your website.
- You pay for them to come to you.
- They come to you themselves for free, otherwise known as organic / cold traffic.
Why organic / cold traffic is better
Organic / cold traffic refers to people who found your website naturally, say via a Google search.
But why is it better?
At a very high level, we’ll use our own business as an example.
We can call local businesses who we think need a website or put ads in front of them.
Now let’s say for the sake of this example, that they are businesses who are actually aware they need a new website.
In today’s world with spam calls, everyone is suspiciouos of who is calling them.
Paid ads are just that, ads. Some people find them extremely annoying and often scroll right past them.
Whilst ads are extremely useful as part of an SEO strategy, they are not a substitute for ranking highly organically on a Google search result.
On the flip side if someone finds your business by themselves, they’re choosing to engage at a time that is convenient for them. Remember choice equals trust. People are much more receptive when they are in charge of the decision.
1. Better lead quality
Organic traffic means someone actively searched for your service or product. They’re not only interested in that service or product but also likely have strong intent to make a purchase.
2. Credibility and authority
Your content ranking highly and answering real questions, shows that it has authority and therefore builds trust.
Trust is one of the most important factors in converting leads into paying customers.
3. Lower cost
The alternative to organic traffic is paid ads.
They are a fantastic form of paid advertising, but costly.
Organic traffic is free and once you rank well, people can continuously find you, making it scalable and sustainable.
4. Compound effect
Every piece of content you create on your website, be that a blog post, case study or landing page brings in new visitors.
This type of traffic compunds whereas paid ads stop as soon as your budget ends.
5. Insights
There are free powerful tools available that allow you to understand how people search for your business.
You can understand which pages they visit and what questions they have which then feeds back into SEO and content strategy.
How do you get your business found on Google?
Firstly it’s worth mentioning that everything necessary to do this is not complicated.
But, there’s always a but, it will take a consistent and sustained approach.
Believe it or not, it is consistency that will see you take over your rivals as opposed to some kind of complex digital skill that you think you need.
At a high level you need to:
- Get a website that is optimised for techinical SEO.This simply means that your website has everything necessary in order for you to create and carry out an SEO strategy.
- Consistently update your website so that you climb the Google rankings.
Simple doesn’t mean it’s easy
As simple as that sounds, very, very, very few businesses do this.
Why is that?
Essentially it’s not very glamarous and it takes a while to start seeing results.
Also it takes time and effort and you’d probably rather focus on your day-to-day business than on marketing that you have absolutely no interest in.
Track everything
However the businesses that we see successfully do this all track their efforts.
Improving anything in life, requires tracking and websites are no diffferent.
Website data shows you what’s working and what’s not. Without it, updates are guesswork; with it, every change drives real results.
There are so many free, powerful tools available that not only show you how you are improving, but also how to improve.
It is all there waiting to be taken advantage of.
“Website data shows you what’s working and what’s not. Without it, updates are guesswork; with it, every change drives real results.”