If you’re spending money to get visitors, look at the phrases you’re using.

Being at the top of the search engines for “Christmas gifts” is not only going to cost a lot of money, it’s also pretty useless if you only sell one or a few things. “Christmas gift baskets” is more targeted and will help raise your conversion rate.

Other fairly useless phrases I’ve come across people using recently (and I use the word useless to mean that although they generate a lot of traffic, they don’t generate targeted traffic).

• Web design (on a site that was very focused locally, so “web design Northampton” would provide more qualified traffic)

• Graphics (on a printing site where ‘exhibition graphics’ would have been more targeted)

• Coaching (on a business coaching site – ‘business coaching’ would have been better)

• Sales jobs (again on a geographically focused site – “sales jobs Milton Keynes” would have been more suited)

Think differently – search engines aren’t the be all and end all of website traffic generation;

* The Northampton based web design company would be better off targeting local search phrases, and putting their link on localised websites. Most towns and/or counties have local directories.  They could also try a targeted email campaign to Northampton based businesses.

* The exhibition graphics company could advertise on sites that promote exhibitions, as well as finding better targeted phrases for search engine promotion.

* The business coaching company could advertise on sites devoted to new and growing businesses, as well as a targeted email campaign to businesses of a certain size.

* The sales recruitment company could again advertise on local sites, as well as free recruitment sites, and job seeking newsgroups and forums.

Lots of traffic is good – lots of targeted traffic is even better.

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