With Traffic - Less may be More

First Scribe is just like every other company out there with a website -- We receive a lot of spam. One recent piece interested me more than most - Qwestdex Online services has a running offer for guaranteed Pay Per Click traffic for a monthly price.

This made me think - I don't necessarily want more traffic; I want more qualified leads.

Does more traffic mean more leads?

Heavy traffic may lead to more leads. Statistically speaking, more visitors to your brick and mortar store will equate to an equal percentage of increased leads and purchases. But with websites that's not necessarily true...

One of our clients sells a natural head lice remedy (http://www.liceice.com/). A great deal of their traffic comes from free searches for "pictures of head lice" and other noncommittal terms. Frightened parents want to verify that their children have lice while they're hoping to learn otherwise.

This traffic seeks our resources, they do not necessarily want a product (or any product for that matter). As a matter of fact, they may call us to ask about identifying head lice with no intention of a purchase. Further sapping our resources without intending to purchase.

Do we want this traffic? Yes we do.

Qualified Traffic

What we are talking about here is qualified traffic and that is a very valuable commodity. While they may not be seeking your product specifically, at least we have what they need once they identify the problem.

We now have a client in our store with head lice, here is the chance to hit them with a "call to action" and ask them for the sale. Every page of your website should have an obvious statement of what you want the client to do next: "Buy our product" -or- "Contact us for information".

Qualified Keywords

We are "marketing to the tail" with qualified keywords. We may have only 3 or 4 main keywords that perfectly describe our product but there are dozens of similar phrases to support our product. Each of these visitors give us a chance to convert to a sale.

Optimize around all of these qualified terms and then practice converting a higher percentage.

Geographic qualification

Service companies often forget that the Internet is without borders but their business is not. Your hair salon in Minneapolis may capture search engine traffic from Houston but you will doubtfully convince people to travel to receive your services.

Be conscious of the fact that travel may limit your service-customer base.

Avoid unqualified keywords

In this example we have been talking about head lice. We want to target terms like "head lice pictures" and "identifying head lice" while avoiding terms that do not qualify our product. Terms such as "bug pictures", "body lice" and "children ailments" do nothing to support our content and should be avoided.

They may lead to more traffic but they will not lead to more sales.