Zero-G Creative

If you build it, will they come?

Jun 02 2008

I wish online marketing were easy… I wish that I could launch a web site and then just sit back and smile as the traffic, cash and accolades come rolling in. But it isn’t easy and that almost never happens. The truth is that just like anything else, you need to promote the heck out of a web site in order to get results and you should never plan for things to happen the easy way.

“If you build it, they will come” is NOT an online marketing strategy, much as a “Grand Opening” sign does not assure you of a packed house in your first weekend if you were to open a store or restaurant instead of a web site.

A lot of clients will look unhappily at their web stats and say, “What’s wrong? We’ve got a great site and a great product, we’ve done the Search Engine Optimization… Where did we mess up?”

Great site + great product or service + SEO do make a great foundation for success on the web, but it isn’t all you need. A client of ours contacted us last week with questions about their SEO and why it wasn’t working like it should. We looked at their analytics and found that nearly 75% of their site traffic was from search engines…

The first question that popped into my head wasn’t “Why is our SEO not drawing enough visitors?” but “Why are WE not drawing enough visitors?” There are four ways that someone can access your web site:

1. Directly typing your URL
2. Clicking a link to your web site from someone else’s web site
3. Finding you on a Search Engine
4. Paid advertising

In the case of my client, they only had three potential traffic sources as they do not advertise and one of those traffic sources was doing three times as much work as the other two combined. Just think, if this company could just draw enough direct and referral traffic to match what they were getting from search engines, their overall site traffic would increase by 50%! And while retention programs aimed at current customers will help give the direct traffic numbers a boost, the biggest opportunity for success by far exists in building referral traffic from other sites.

Why? Because Google is a lot like high school… Popularity counts and the more people talk about you the more important you become and the higher you will get ranked. So an increase in solid referral traffic may actually have a much greater impact over time as the search engines compensate your increased popularity and perceived relevance in the marketplace with better rankings.

And don’t forget… If one of your competitors is consistently ranked highly by Google and the other search engines, it likely isn’t by accident. It’s because they worked hard over time on not only their SEO, but also their overall reputation and presence in the online marketplace. You can’t expect to beat them overnight. But do the right things with your web site and you’ll get there as well. It won’t be easy but it WILL be worthwhile.

Published by Erik Wolf under Strategy,Web/Interactive