Website Tools Moving Beyond Google
For years, people have been starting their marketing and advertising campaigns solely by keeping Google in mind, aka “the big daddy.” Google was once the number one source to use when it comes to gaining exposure and visitors to your websites. Eventually, a new era of media marketing began, which made people socialize online. These new and diverse social media platforms became a way for publishers to attract viewers on their content. Along with attracting direct traffic from these sources.
When people set up a website to gain online exposure, oftentimes they come across articles based on SEO (search engine optimization). And with this, receive great search engine traffic results specifically from Google. However, it’s best not to put in all your efforts and resources into mainly relying on Google. Expanding on your website traffic sources will ensure that your business does not fall apart due to a single change in Google’s algorithm update. And, will allow you to move beyond Google.
What does moving beyond Google mean?
Basically, no one wants to lose all of their web traffic all because Google decides to make a change to their algorithm. In order to build traffic from Google, it requires effort for nearly 3 months or even longer. You have to consistently optimize your webpages for Google. If you are not in the top 6 spots in Google, then you should not expect more than 4% of clicks to your website.
Also, if you are not on the first search result page, then you should not even think about organic traffic, direct traffic, or any other sort of web traffic from Google. You will not receive any sort of visibility if you are not on the first two search result pages. Let’s take a look at alternative search engines besides Google that will drive traffic to your webpages. And, build a more sustainable source of organic traffic for your website!
Search Engine Website Traffic
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1) Capture Emails
When you capture emails from first-time website visitors, you’re able to retarget site visitors, turn them into leads and eventually, hopefully convert them into customers. Some of those customers may even help you make more sales through word-of-mouth marketing. Emails tend to command the attention of most people on a daily basis, drive engagement rates, and thus, accelerate business growth and results. Email marketing has a higher conversion rate as compared to social media marketing.
Here are some steps that you can take to increase direct traffic from your email campaigns:
- Setup lead capturing tools on your website. Lead capture tools are plugins or online services that are able to collect email addresses from your visitors and add them to your subscriber list. They are essential for building a list! Hello bars and slide-ups are examples of some tools that you can use. Your visitors should not feel forced into giving their email and you should restrain from showing visitors pop ups and banner ads repeatedly after they have shown a disinterest in giving you their email address.
- Onboard new subscribers efficiently. When you send a welcome email, that is your first point of contact with the subscriber. It is advised not to try and impress your subscriber early on in your relationship with them. Instead, Ask the ‘number one’ problem that they may be facing. This will automatically encourage interaction and will lay a strong foundation for your association, conversations, and relationship with them.
MailChimp
Test your email subject lines. After your subscribers open up your emails, you will get the chance to engage with them. MailChimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service. Mailchimp has found that average click-throughs last for only 3.5% after the 100th email campaign for the users that last. The average email open rate for all industries that MailChimp analyzed is 21.33%. Brushing up on your subject lines can make a huge difference for increasing your open rates and increasing engagement rates from your subscribers!
Email Marketing
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MailChimp
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2) Interview an influencer or get interviewed
Your website traffic is bound to increase if you either interview an influencer who has a big following. Or, get interviewed by a website that receives a lot of traffic! Interviews are very engaging, conversational, and dynamic. Interviews are a win-win for both sides of the party. The interviewer receives exposure to a new audience while the interviewee on the other hand, gets the opportunity to share new engaging content to website visitors.
If you get the opportunity to interview an influencer, you have the opportunity to request that they share the interview with their own followers on social media. With this, you will gain organic traffic from thousands of their social media followers.
Along with this, getting interviewed by a website that has high-authority and a lot of traffic can bring you a huge amount of search engine traffic to your own website. Overall, interviews serve as a lead generation source for your company for a long period.
Interviews
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3) Invest in Facebook ads
One of the biggest benefits of Facebook advertising is its ability to reach your exact target audience. Compared to other types of online advertising methods and tools, Facebook advertising is one of the most popular. You can advertise to specific people by their age, gender, interests, behavior, and location. If you really know who your target customers are, then you can use Facebook advertising to engage with them. And even market towards them in the best way possible.
However, sometimes using a paid advertising strategy makes people question whether it is really worth it. Putting some money towards running Facebook Ads can greatly accelerate your email list growth rate. This is one of the best repeat traffic sources on your webpage.
Along with this, lookalike targeting is known as Facebook’s proprietary technology which will allow you to provide Facebook with a list of people, such as your previous customers or current email list subscribers. Facebook’s algorithm will then work to create a targetable audience of people on Facebook or even Instagram that are most similar to the people you initially gave to it.
Take a look at Image 1.5 for an example of one of our clients, Avon Cleaners‘ Facebook Ad performance.
Facebook Ads
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To conclude…
With the way that Google’s algorithm works, updates are always unpredictable and with this, you can risk losing website traffic. Therefore, it is very important to experiment with traffic sources other than Google. Need further assistance when it comes to site traffic sources? We are here to help. Contact us today! We can’t wait to hear from you. Feel free to take a look at our published blog post to learn more about how your company can be successful on Google.