How to Attract Qualified Visitors to Your Site
Getting traffic to your Web site ranks high up on all online marketers priority lists. The more traffic coming to your site the more sales opportunities you have. But simply driving traffic to your site isn’t enough. Traffic means nothing unless it’s benefiting your sales. This is why it’s very important to be able to drive QUALIFIED visitors to your site. 
What Makes a Visitor Qualified
A qualified visitor is one that is more likely to purchase or make a decision than a regular visitor. What makes them qualified is that they are actively searching for your product or service. For example if you are a Ford Dealer in South Bend, a visitor that types in “Ford dealers Indiana” is much more qualified than someone who clicks on your banner ad on a newspaper site just because it looked interesting.
Qualified traffic can come from a variety of sources. Typically though the majority of qualified visitors arrive at your site from a combination of search engines, pay-per-click ads, social media, and links from referring Web sites.
How to Drive Qualified Visitors to Your Site
Here are some great tips, with a musical metaphor, from the Online Marketing Blog about how to increase qualified visitors on your site.
- Know your audience - Should you be targeting a product’s end-users or distributors? What stage of the buying cycle are you targeting? A good online marketing team conducts the proper background research in order to fully understand who they are trying to reach, where they are in the buying cycle and plans content creation, optimization and promotion accordingly.
- Book your prospect’s favorite venue – Once you feel you have actionable knowledge of your target audience, you can select appropriate places for reaching them. Research communities, influencers and behaviors of the target audience to establish a useful presence and content, be it on social networks, forums, blogs or the company web site.
- Give fans what they want – Make sure the offer and conversion opportunity are a good match for what the target audience is looking for. In some cases they will be looking to buy your product, but in others they may want more information like a white paper or a case study, or the opportunity to be contacted.
- Choose the right ‘lyrics’ – When selecting keywords to optimize your site content or pay-per-click campaign, keyword popularity is only a starting point. Choosing the most appropriate keywords to describe product or service offerings considering relevancy, context and intent are important. Research, consideration, evaluation and purchasing are different phases of the buyer’s search experience. Optimizing the right content with the right keywords for each of these phases will help prospects find your site in a more relevant way.
- Sing it loud – The copy, images and overall design of your website and landing pages should be obvious cues to the type of product or service offered and consistent with search query that brought them there. Structure your site design and calls to action so that prospects immediately know that they’ve found what they are looking for. For example, sending PPC traffic from a specific product keyword to the company home page will alienate and confuse the searcher. Send specific traffic queries to specific landing pages. For SEO, optimize specific content for specific phrases to help searchers pull themselves to the right content for conversion.
Measure the Results
Successful marketing comes out of a never-ending cycle of testing and refining. The best marketers know that their ideas about what will work will often turn out to be wrong. That’s what it is important to have reliable way to measure your results. By measuring your success using insightful web analytics tools you can see what efforts are performing best and what strategies may need to go back to the drawing board.
