How To Use Internet Marketing Tools to Increase Website Traffic

Is your website traffic low? If you are an internet marketer, you already know that simply investing in expensive tools is not going to solve that problem for you. Consistently creating content is the most important part of driving traffic. However, even if you are already producing the great content on a regular basis, you still need the best internet marketing tools to support your efforts. Without the right technology, your site traffic will eventually plateau.

This article will review the best tools for supporting internet marketing. Specifically, we will assess the functions that these tools should perform in your strategy to grow traffic on your site.

Identifying Your Traffic Problem

Let’s go over a simple example to explain this case. If I have a website that sells hats for $10 each (free shipping) and last year out of the 1,000 people who visited my website, 500 of them purchased hats from it. This means my site as a conversion rate of 50%, resulting in revenue of $5,000.
This year my goal is to sell 5,000 hats and generate $50,000 of revenue. I’ve done some research and I have discovered that the average conversion rate for a small e-commerce site like mine is 2%. If this conversion rate prove correct, I will need to get 250,000 people to visit my site.
Now given that last year, my conversion rate was 50%, I clearly do not have a problem with my conversion rate. I have a problem with my website traffic.

So what should I do to drive visitors to my website? According to the traditional marketing textbook, I would have to purchase traffic. This basically means buying advertising. But if I do that, it’s really going to cut into my profit margins. So I’m really not sure of the return on investment (ROI) for advertising will be worth it, as it will significantly increase my cost per lead (CPL).

This is why the smartest marketers are now focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), blogging and social media. In fact SEO, blogging and social media has a below average cost per lead (CPL) compared to all other marketing channels.  A lower cost per lead means higher profits for your business.

What should you look for in SEO tools?

Search engine optimization is one of the most critical components of your strategy to increase your website traffic.

In general, SEO can be broken down into two categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO concerns all of the code and content on your site. You have full control over on-page SEO, but it’s not the most critical component. Off-page SEO is all about the links that go into your site. The good news is that off-page SEO is extremely important. However, it’s much more difficult to control. If you’re a marketer looking to improve website traffic, you need to be concerned with both and understand these three primary factors that will help you select the right SEO tools.

1) Keyword Analysis: The first step in every SEO process is keyword analysis. It will help you understand which keywords you should be focusing on; which keywords you are currently ranking for, and which ones you should be trying to rank for. How do you get this insight? This is where the SEO tools come in. You need a tool that will be able to produce a report of all of your keywords, compare them by traffic, competition and current rank. These factors will guide your decision on which keywords to concentrate on.

A common mistake is to spend time trying to rank for keywords that have a relatively low search volume and a very large amount of results. Instead you should try to rank for keywords that you may already be ranking for, but where your ranking could be improved. Keywords that have a high search volume but are not overly competitive. They best keyword tools will help your figure out what the keywords are.

2) Website Tools Designed for SEO: It’s important to consistently measure the results of your SEO plan which you do
Website Tools Designed for SEO: Keyword analysis tools are what help you develop metrics and plans for SEO. Three features to look for when eveluating website tools are:

• Easy to change page attributes (like the title, meta descripition and keywords)
• When new pages are created they automatically have keywords in the URL address
• Sitemaps are automatically created

These are on on-page SEO factors that you can control easily with good website tools.

3) Page-level SEO Analytics: When you conduct a page-level SEO analysis you will be able to assess the quality and inbound links for every page on your website. If done correctly, you’ll be able to produce reports for each page, showing inbound links, keywords they rank for, content rating, and any SEO errors on the page.

What should you look for in Blogging Software?

Blogging is all about creating and sharing content. The more quality content you create and post on your blog, the more likely you are that people will find your website. By blogging about topics relevant to your business, you can establish yourself online as a credible source of information for your industry. Think about it like this: How often are your asked the same questions what you do or how you do it? Instead of answering each person one at a time, a blog post allows you to answer that question for millions of people around the world 24/7. It’s a very powerful to prove to your prospective customers that you are the go to resource for what you specialize in. Here are some features you should look for to supercharge your blogging efforts.
1) Ease of Use: The system needs to be user friendly. Creating content is difficult enough, so you really want to find a blogging system your comfortable with. If its easy to create, edit, schedule and publish posts, your blogging experience will be much more efficient. Make sure there is a simple way to manage comments and a way to block comment spam.

2) Built-in SEO Tools: These are are not SEO solutions, they are tools to help you with your SEO process. The URL structure of posts is actually a pretty important part of the posts search engine ranking. You want to be able to quickly and easily add or update keywords in a specific post. Really good built-in SEO tools will act like Search Engines and automatically scan your post, identifying factors you can improve on like missing keywords. Be careful not to overdo it with built in SEO tools, too much of one thing could have a negative impact on your ranking.

3) Social Sharing and Email Subscriptions: When people read your blog posts, you want them to share it. They can do things like it on Facebook, reTweet it, pin it on Pintrest, plus 1 it on Google or just email it to a friend. Make it super easy for people to share your content with their social networks. If you are regularly posting content, which you should be, email subscriptions can be a great tool. Look for something that lets people join your blogs email list, and subscribe to automatic updates. This will ensure you always have their attention, even if they’ve been away from your website for a while.

What should you look for in Social Media tools?

1) Social Media Monitoring: The number one rule of social media is “Listen”. Look for tools that will let you streamline this process. Rather on having tons of tabs open for each social network pressing refresh all day, find a tools that will organize all of your accounts in once place, listen for activity and alert you when there’s an update.

2) Social Media Publishing Tools: There’s millions of people on tons of different networks.Why waste time posting on each one individually when you could find a tool that will send the post to all of your accounts? Scheduling posts in advance to send out to multiple sites is a great way to stay on track with your social media schedule.

3) Social Media Following: If no one is following you, social media will not do you much good. Make sure you make it super easy for people to follow you on the social network of their choice. Many blogging tools have built-in tools to add buttons allowing visitors to follow you on popular social media site.

Integration is Important

SEO, blogging and social media software all have to work together. The integration of your internet marketing tools will save you allot of time and grief.

For example, if you SEO tool was integrated into your website management software, you would be able to conduct a SEO analysis and make updates in real time on the fly. This would make you much more agile and adaptable to changes in the market. Then, if your SEO tool is connected to your analytics you can see exactly what keywords people are searching to find your site as soon as they arrive. And if your social media tools were integrated with your blog, website and landing pages, imagine how fast you could spread the word about business updates or new content?

To really make an impact with your inbound internet marketing, you need an fully integrated SEO, blogging, social media and content management system. To find out more about how DigiMix develops these internet marketing systems and how they power up your marketing plan leave us a message. We are happy to provide a complimentary consultation and show you what the right internet marketing tools could do for your business.