Unless you are genuinely altruistic, an artist, or maybe someone who just likes to spend money on marketing for no reason, I am guessing you know what you want from your website - that tangible result for your business.
You would be amazed at how many people still don’t focus on that end result. Which is exactly what I am going to do in this post, because I’ve spoken about the absolute need for website KPI’s before and today, we are going to talk something else - your website traffic funnel and how to expand it.
What Is The Website Traffic Funnel?
In the same way you may focus water through a funnel so that you can push it in a certain direction (into a bottle for instance), the same is true for your website (and your KPI) and it’s reach on the internet to attract traffic leading to actual business. Check out the image below - the traditional website traffic funnel.
You have a goal for your website, and you have content about your company and services to attract traffic to your site. That said, it’s a big wide world out there and people are all very different in the way they search and use the web.
One of the interesting things I hear a lot (especially in meetings) is talk about “key words” that a client may want their website to be found for. Many times there is no justification behind these keywords they talk about, other than personal opinion and based on snippets of information they have heard. The statement often goes something like this,
So when someone types (key phrase) into a search engine, we’ll be found.
Now, if you could guarantee that “key phrase” (replace as necessary) was exactly what every person would type in, wouldn’t that be great? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
For instance, The Escape website has over 600 different search terms used during November 2007, including some quite obscure searches such as:
- “when creating a website main questions for design”
- “sendtoafriend mobi v php id 1″
- “what is in a case study for a beauty treatment”
- as well as more generic terms such as “the escape”, “web agency in hampshire”, etc.
Now obviously you only really have control over your own website and the content on your web pages to attract the apprpriate search phrases, you can’t influence the way people search or the way they use the web. And yes, it will be phrases, not single words that we need to focus on.
So, what if you generated more content, still on topic, that covered more bases?
Expanding Your Traffic Funnel
If you thought about how much more water you could pour into a funnel if the circumference of the rim was that much wider, you may begin to guess how much more traffic you could attract to your website if you had more content, with more reach. You have expanded your funnel.
An example that highlights this well is something like commentary, or news, on a website. This can (and should) be topical but almost conversational in the way it’s written - this blog post is a good example.
Relevant search terms may then be caught in your far reaching funnel because the words used, and the style in which they are written, could be crafted in a much more efficient way to attract more inquisitive searchers.
Another good example is a testimonial. I have bolded my interpretations of potential search phrases in this real example:
So why did we choose The Escape? Quite simply practical, applied technical knowledge and creativity. Our requirements focused on absolute excellence in all the esoteric (both new and fast-moving) technical areas of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising. But we also wanted the expertise and creativity of a traditional marketing agency. We were having a hard job finding a supplier who could combine both of these skills until introduced to The Escape and have not looked back since.
Bear in mind that from a semantic point of view, these phrases fit with each other (in the big scheme of things) and will be recognised as such. They don’t necessarily have to be right next to each other.
Qualification, Filtering and Drop Outs
Some of the most attractive (top of the funnel) content on our website are the tools and articles we publish that attract people looking for such things as a website brief, how to build better web pages, or even a web page analyser tool.
Now, most of these people won’t ever use our web or online marketing services so that traffic is purely PR for us. The more people that link to these pages (link bait), the more incidental traffic we may get and the higher up the search engines we may appear for certain phrases, which enhances our reputation when it needs to count - when a potential client is searching.
However, there is then the qualification process. That’s why, those top level pages need to display (somewhere, somehow) qualifying information and relevant call-to-actions to encourage potential customers to filter down the funnel - towards the KPI, the website’s goal.
It is important, therefore, that the messages your display on your pages, those call-to-actions and qualifying statements, start to increase focus quickly to attract your relevant audience.
This may be a 2 or 3 click process, it may be that your landing page does this by the time the visitor has finished reading scanning the landing page they have ’stumbled’ upon.
The sooner you focus the reader, the better. That’s why, for instance, the case studies you display and the way they are focussed; the language you use and the image you project needs to attract the right fit customer to take action. And, just as importantly, they need to filter out the wrong fit people.
Summary
What you should end up with is three things:
- More generic traffic through search
- More links from other people - Blogs, social sites, etc. (if your content is good)
- Appropriate drop-outs but more qualified leads at the end of the process
So, a very quick recap:
- Create variations of [on topic] content to attract different types of traffic
- Display your message to focus on best fit customers
- All paths should lead towards the action
