Moving from Traffic Gathering to Traffic Creation

There comes a point in every search marketing campaign when traffic volume starts to level out. In many cases, the initial optimization of the site was successful, and site traffic surged for several months while new search engine rankings developed. Once a site has been established and ranks well for its top phrases, though, it is more difficult to show a steady increase month after month. While site traffic is leaps and bounds higher than before the program began, it quickly becomes decision time for the online marketer. Continue to stay the course while showing minimal gains, or change strategy in order to reach more visitors. This is what I call the end of the traffic gathering stage.

There comes a point where there just isn’t much more traffic to be had – either with SEO or PPC. Yes, a site can max out. The question becomes, how do I get more people searching for my brand or product? Where as before we simply had to reach the traffic that was already available, in this new stage, more web traffic must be created in order to continue to show increases. This is the traffic creation stage.

It really isn’t an easy thing moving from traffic gathering to traffic creation – the later stage is much more difficult and gets to the heart of how a business operates and markets itself. I’ll admit, for a while I was strictly a traffic gatherer myself. It was fun to work for large businesses and perform traffic gathering services like search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising and see their satisfaction when website traffic increased 300%. But I’m learning that I can’t be satisfied as an online marketing if I simply grab the low-hanging fruit.  Traffic creation involves techniques that are creative, out-of-the-ordinary, socially cool (that’s hard for me!) and cutting edge.

As I gain more experience with all kinds of customers, I’m learning that online marketing is less about magic code and symbols and more about defining a strategy and executing. Sometimes my strategy doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but that’s OK. The great thing about the new web is you can be adventurous and try new things quickly and with minimal risk.

Will Google’s Universal Search Impact CTR?

Nearly a month ago, Google introduced a most radical shift to its search results page, dubbed Universal Search. Universal Search combines listings and information from multiple sources and mediums, all compiled and displayed to the user. This means that along with normal “blue text” links, Google may display data from blog search, book search, finance, images, local, video, etc. For a complete rundown of Universal Search, see Danny Sullivan’s writeup at SearchEngineLand. Read the rest of this entry »

New Interface for Google Analytics?

I use Google Analytics often – multiple hours, each day and every day. I often complained that with all the resources and money that Google has, it has not spent much time upgrading Google Analytics since its purchase of Urchin in March of 2005. Since we know that Microsoft is planning their own competing product (code named Gatineau), it has been my opinion that Google has version 2 of their product packaged up and just sitting on a shelf, waiting to steal the thunder from Microsoft upon announcement of Gatineau launch. Well, hopefull I am wrong, and I sure got excited when I saw the following message at the top of my Google Analytics interface this afternoon: Read the rest of this entry »

And Now for Something Completely Different

Welcome to Kirksey Solutions! OK – before I give my current employer a shock, please know that I’m not jumping out and going independent or anything like that. I just came to the realization that if I was going to continue doing small projects for friends and co-workers, I might as well look at least somewhat professional.

So – here we are. This is where I’ll be blogging about business-related items, and my personal blog will be just that, personal. You might see posts on here about online strategies, business models, agency life, interpreting web analytics, SEO techniques, usability, etc.