Natural Traffic Versus Paid Traffic
If you own a website, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Website traffic is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many business experts. Without people visiting your site (that’s what internet traffic is) your website is just a vacant piece of property on the internet landscape.
Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. The real question is how to get it. Everyone seems to have different ways to attract traffic to your website. Some people feel that search engine traffic is best. They use special programs like SEO elite to optimize their site (look here for a full SEO Elite Review). Others feel that paid traffic is the best, like pay-per-click traffic from Adwords. (If you go that route, be sure to read the Adwords Help page).
Many of the techniques are fads. Some are suspicious. Others only work in certain niches. But in the end, most traffic to your site essentially comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or website traffic you pay for.
Certain SEO gurus say that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They say that all website traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” as a synonym with search engine traffic. Natural traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not buy outright. Organic traffic can have many different sources. It can come from people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. Natural traffic can come from someone clicking on a link found in a different website. Free visitors can come from someone entering your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a friend, in a published article or on a radio computer talk show. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. They are also usually free in the sense that you don’t pay a fee to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is exactly the opposite. It is any traffic your site receives because you paid for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Paid traffic can be from a banner ad on a different website. It can be from from people typing in your website url from a paid print ad in a newsletter. There are several other ways you can pay for website traffic.
So the question is, which is better? Common sense would indicate that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free(organic) traffic also can take some time to get. When you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will put links on their site to yours. The search engines don’t know about your site either, so your site will never show up in the search results. Even word of mouth sdvertsing takes time to spread. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting incoming traffic to your site immediately. If you do it right, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that case, purchasing an ad is a lot better than waiting for your site to become profitable.
If you now think paid advertising is better – hold on. The wisest path is to use (both|both free and paid traffic techniques|paid and free traffic techniques|both natural and purchased traffic methods} in combination with each other. If you have a new site, the first step is to craft a pay-per-click campaign to acquire immediate traffic. Gauge this ppc traffic closely at first. Especially test which words and phrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and eliminate the duds. Then, start optimizing your landing pages for the high value keywords and find a way to get quality backlinks using those profitable keywords and phrases as the link text to specific pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and free traffic sources.
Filed Under Pfaff Sewing Machine | Leave a Comment
Tagged With
Comments
Leave a Reply