We all want more customers – and what better way to get them than to get website traffic services? Unfortunately, if you’re like most business owners out there you’re likely getting bombarded with scam emails daily. They’re promising to ’10X’ your traffic and guaranteeing you’ll get thousands of visitors next month if you “sign up” and buy “this app” or “that service”.
Sounds all a bit too good to be true. And fishy as hell.
What if there was a simple way to figure out who’s legitimate – and who’s just trying to make a quick buck?
Well I’ve written this guide to help you with that precise question.
No matter where you are or why you’re looking for website traffic services, these are the facts you have to know before you sign up to any traffic building service.
1. Black Hat SEO can damage your website permanently
There are many techniques SEO agencies and other website traffic services can use to increase your traffic short term. In a few weeks you could rank very highly for even the most competitive searches in your industry. The thing is, scam agencies can do this for you, take your money and leave you with the consequences.
The effects don’t always have to be permanent – but it takes a huge deal of time and expertise to fix, and will cost you much more than ‘white hat’ website traffic services would have in the first place.
Explanation:
Google, and other search engines, use computer programs to decide which point in a search result to list your website should take in a search. It does this using an algorithm, which is like a maths equation that studies lots of different parts about your website, and comes up with a final result.
Website traffic services should help you rank higher in the search results to drive more traffic to your site – but if their tactics are mainly what’s known as “black hat” it can permanently damage your site as Google will flag it up as suspicious/dangerous – which is an extremely hard label to get rid of.
Some of these black hat techniques can work, usually for a couple of weeks – just long enough for you to pay your bill and be pleased with the result.
But there’s a catch:
Once Google checks over your website and sees what’s been done, it flags your site as bad and will likely knock it out of the rankings completely. After that, it’ll be a seriously long haul for you to recover from and be ranked well in any result, ever again.
What you can do:
When you’re considering who to work with be suspicious of anyone too cheap – it takes a serious amount of work to help a website rank in search engines, depending on your competition, but you’re talking good blog posts, well written SEO content, keyword research and linking strategies – if you’re looking for an agency to take care of it all for you, you’re talking big bucks – £1000+ per month minimum.
Some website traffic services will offer different parts of the full service if you can’t afford the whole thing. Just be aware of what’s needed (see above) and figure out what you’re willing to do in house vs what you need someone else to do.
Ask website traffic services about their tactics – anyone genuine won’t mind sharing general methods with you. You’ll want to go with someone who suggests your content is very important, and building a natural link profile (links pointing back to your website).
Here’s a short list of black hat techniques you can look out for.
The great thing about going with someone “White Hat” is that they should not only help you with search rankings, but increase your overall business exposure with PR tips and social media marketing.
If you’re too small to afford an agency like that, but still need help getting traffic, it might be worth considering taking a course yourself or getting weekly consultancy/training yourself.
2. Your website content is incredibly important if you want recurring traffic – and customers
If your website traffic services (whether it’s a digital agency, SEO company or a content marketing agency) are offering to build backlinks to your website and nothing else – it’s not a good sign.
Here’s the deal.
Good links can help you rank and drive traffic; but without the content to back it up, you’ll fall back down in the rankings in the long term.
Ultimately having good content is important for getting new customers anyway; so if you’re not happy with your own content now, like your sales pages and your home page, get working on this first before going to buy website traffic services.
Explanation:
Content – whether it’s text, video, audio or imagery – is so important when it comes to getting people to your website.
And getting them to buy from you when they get there.
Think about it – what did you last buy on the internet?
Now think back to how you decided to buy that particular item over the rest. Maybe you opened a few different websites. Maybe you did a few different searches and did some comparing. Maybe you even checked out reviews on amazon or YouTube. Maybe you even read a few blog articles.
You more than likely at least read the sales page – where you found out exactly about the benefits and features of that product or service.
What convinced you in the end?
The content.
You might be thinking “Amy, that’s great and all, but I don’t see what that’s got to do with my traffic.”
Well, I’ll tell you.
The 2 most important factors that effect your rankings in Google are:
- Backlinks
- Content
Basically it boils down to this:
Google’s customers are their searchers. They want to do what’s best for them – not for you.
Google want’s to deliver the best answer to any query someone enters into it’s search bar. After all, they want people to keep using Google, and not Yahoo or dare I say it – Bing.
People like pages & websites that answers their queries well. So great content, that answers people’s questions, is an absolute necessity if you want to rank highly.
The other biggest factor is backlinks – which are links pointing to your website from other website’s. More about backlinks here.
Google can’t use only content to determine who should rank highest, simply because people have been known to cheat the system using blackhat techniques. It uses backlinks to help it figure out how trustworthy and relevant each website is.
The moral of the story is – you won’t get long term traffic without good content.
And good content is the only thing that will turn your visitors into customers.
What you can do:
You have 2 options here:
Work on your own content first
Or:
Choose an agency that writes content for you
If you’re going to an agency to write your content, you’ll want to make sure you focus on a few things:
- Check their blog articles. Are they engaging? Do you find them interesting or are they boring articles? It could be that you’re not their target audience; but more than likely they should be written in way that keeps you interested and wanting to read more.
- How long are their articles? It’s pretty well known that long form content does best on Google – 2000 words +. Of course not every article might be this long; but if you notice a consistent 300-800 word article, they might not know what they’e doing in terms of content.
- Do they have calls to action in their content? Calls to action such as ‘comment below’, ‘sign up’ or ‘contact us’ are really important in order to increase their number of customers. If they’re not doing it for themselves, I would worry that they might not do it for you. Again – there’s little point in getting traffic if it’s not going to result in more customers.
3. Focusing solely on numbers is a terrible idea
Some traffic services may offer thousands of visitors to your website quickly – and they might not even be lying. They probably are, but about 5% might not.
But before you throw your money away, consider this – what kind of visitors do you want?
Explanation:
50,000 new views might not do a single thing for your business if they’re all the wrong type of person.
And this is not impossible to do – an agency can write a good article about super adorable puppies, send a link to your site in some viral places like Reddit and get you lots of traffic, very quickly.
But if you’re an estate agents and you suddenly have a bunch of people on your site that are only interested in cute puppies – what use is that to your business?
Even if you got only 100 new people – but the right type of people – from a blog post that turned into 3 more customers – that’s a much better result than a few thousand views to people who don’t buy.
What you can do:
Don’t be lured in solely by the numbers. Be suspicious of website traffic services who flag numbers and only numbers up about their past clients.
Look at their reviews if you can. It’s always good to get past clients perspectives.
Ask them how they are going to get you traffic – do they suggest specific blog articles? Are those articles related to your business? How do they plan to promote your content, and where?
Social media can be particularly dubious – you can attract lot’s of visitors using twitter, but again, if they’re not the right type of visitors, it’s not going to be any use to you. Social media is important for building a reputation, promoting content and attracting new prospects – but it shouldn’t be the only strategy for your online marketing.
4. Traffic isn’t always the problem
Sometimes it can be easy to think “I just don’t have enough customers coming to my website“.
And that could be the case; however, don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s the most important issue.
If you’re getting a few hundred new visitors through organic search and not one is becoming a customer – there’s something bigger you need to tackle before throwing more money at getting traffic there.
Explanation:
A good conversion rate is usually between 0.5 – 2%. That is to say, out of every hundred people to your website, at least 1 should be signing up, sending an enquiry or buying from you.
If they’re not – the issue likely lies elsewhere than your traffic level.
Before ploughing more money into getting more traffic, you might want to review your website and see why people aren’t converting.
What you can do:
Check your Google analytics, look at new users, and if you’re hitting a few hundred or more monthly and not seeing sales – you know you have an issue.
The first step is to check it’s not something really obvious – get family and friends to test out your shopping cart or contact forms. Is everything getting through? I’ve seen many website’s with low conversion rates fall at the first hurdle – people can’t get through the steps you’re putting in front of them to get in touch or buy.
Make it as simple as possible for your customers to buy or enquire.
Compare your website to competitors. Your customers are doing it, so there’s no point in burying your head in the sand. Is it easier to understand their message? Maybe they have a page or two that explains the benefits of your product in a clearer way? Make sure you feel your site’s offering can compete.
Get some targeted feedback. Get in touch with some people in your target market. Ask them to review your website (maybe you can offer a free product for doing so as a thanks). They should be able to help you weed out anything that maybe isn’t clear, or when compared to your competitor’s just isn’t matching up. Ask them for their biggest concerns/problems rather than just what they don’t like.
And ask them to be as brutal as possible
For every one brutal thing they tell you, it’s likely hundreds of past visitors thought the same but never took the time to get in touch and let you know. Don’t take it personally; no one gets a website perfect first time. Take the feedback and run with it. Make the changes and people will be impressed you took their feedback on board.
Lastly – get a consultant to do a review. If you’ve done your best and just can’t seem to figure out why people aren’t converting into customers – it’s time to get a professional in.
You can always call on POP Content to help you out. We can do a website review from £100, depending on the size of your website.
I certainly hope you found this helpful – and if you’ve ran into any other issues with website traffic services, I’d love to add them in – just leave a comment below!
Remember you can easily send this article onto any of your family or friends who might be running a website – and help them avoid any traffic scams!