Should you focus on increasing the traffic to your website or converting more of the leads that already visit your website? It’s one of the oldest business quandaries since the Internet became a thing.
In an ideal world, you’d be doing both. Of course, in the real world time, energy and manpower can limit what you’re able to accomplish. Instead of trying to do both without adequate resources, it’s usually better to give your attention to just one pursuit.
Ultimately, whether you should go after more traffic or a better conversion rate depends on your business goals. So, let’s take a look at some examples of high-level business goals, which web services to lean towards and why.
Want to Build Brand Awareness – More Traffic
Building brand awareness is crucial for new businesses as well as businesses that are undergoing a rebrand or pivoting. Awareness is all about getting your brand in front of people so they become familiar with who you are and what you’re all about.
Building more traffic to your website is precisely what you want to do in that scenario. You want eyeballs on web pages. Even better if you can get click throughs, shares and conversions. But the real goal is to get your name out there.
Need to Increase Revenue Without Increasing Marketing Spend – More Conversions
When you’ve maxed out your marketing spend and are already active with social media marketing, you aren’t casting a much wider net to grab leads. Generating more traffic could be challenging beyond improvements in organic rankings over time.
In these situations you have to optimize the traffic you are getting to boost the conversion rate. Take a hard look at where leads are dropping off in the funnel and make adjustments to keep more of them moving towards converting.
Get Strong Initial Sales on a New Product That is Complementary to Existing Products – More Conversions
When you’re launching a new product, usually there’s no better audience than your existing customer base. This is especially true if the new product is complementary to other products that customers have bought in the past. The same is true if the new product is an upgrade of the previous version.
The great news is launching a new product can naturally lead to more traffic if you already have a solid SEO strategy in place. More products mean more web pages and more opportunities to show up in Google search results for more queries.
Launch a New Product for a Completely Different Customer Base – More Traffic
This is an example of how nuanced online web strategies can get. Above we recommended trying to convert more leads over increasing traffic if the product is appropriate for current customers. But that’s not the recommendation if a new product is geared toward a different customer base.
When the leads you are currently getting aren’t the audience for a new product, you have to get in front of a different group of people. You have to bring them to your website to educate them about your brand and the product.
Gain More Market Share Over a Competitor – More Traffic
Increasing market share means you’ve got to bring in new customers, many of which may already be working with a competitor. It’s an issue of getting in front of more people to show them why you’re better than the competition.
To do that you’ve got to get more people to your website. Leaning heavily into search engine optimization is a good strategy when you’re trying to outpace the competition. You want to do what you can to outrank them in the search results since the higher you are the more clicks you get. You’ll also need to expand your marketing to new channels to capture more attention and drive more traffic to your website.
Recruit Brand Evangelists That Can Help Market on Social Media With User-Generated Content – More Conversions
If you’re looking for brand evangelists that can spread the word about your business, your current clients are where you want to look. You aren’t likely to turn a new lead into a brand evangelist right off the bat. You’ll have much better luck tapping into your existing customer base if you’re launching a brand evangelist program.
Take a look at your sales figures to identify your super customers. These are the people who religiously purchase products or services, leave positive reviews and have referred others already. Reach out to this group with a special opportunity to become a brand evangelist, and it should be much easier to convert.
Increase Sales When Traffic Levels Are Good But Conversion Rates Are Low – More Conversions/More Traffic
We saved this one for last because it is deceptively tricky. At first glance it may seem that the obvious answer is to try to increase the conversion rate. That could be the right move – if the quality of your traffic is good.
With this business goal you’ve got to first look at the traffic you are getting. This will tell you if it’s an issue of attracting the wrong audience or converting leads once they land on the site. You can have the best calls to action, valuable benefit points and the smoothest funnel ever, but none of that will matter if the leads aren’t your target market. If they are, then your messaging or funnel is off, and it’s negatively impacting your conversion rate no matter how much traffic you get.
At Bruce & Eddy we help companies hit their business goals whether that means increasing traffic, improving conversions or a combination of the two. Let us know what you want to accomplish, and we’ll put together a plan to make it happen.
Contact us by phone or online to discuss your business goals!
