One of the most frequent questions I get asked is... how do I attract clients to my website?
After all what good is the website if no one visits it. However getting visitors is only one part of the story. You need to attract targeted visitors!
That is visitors who are interested in what you have to offer.
In contrast to TV, radio and Newspaper advertisements to attract clients, attracting clients using search engines is very targeted. It is targeted because visitors find your site by searching for something specific.
They search by entering search words/phrases into the search engine and the search engine presents them with pages/sites that best match their search phrases.
Whether or not the searcher selects a free listing or paid listing from the Search results the page that it is directed to matches the search phrase.
Therefore the visitors to your site from the search engines are effectively already filtered and they are already interested in what you have to offer.
Paid Or Free
Everyone likes to get something for free. However in reality not even search engine traffic is really free. If you get visitors from the so called natural/ free listings (main part of the SERPs page) it is because your page has been optimized for the search engines, and that takes time/effort and even money.
The Good news is that once you have done the optimization and you are getting results you need to do very little to maintain it.
On the other hand paid traffic is relatively easy and fast to get but you will always have to pay.
Combining the Two
You could of course combine the two approaches; by paying initially for the visitors while you optimize the pages. Once you start getting traffic through the natural listings you can then decide whether or not to stop the paid traffic.
Of course if you are converting your visitors to clients at a reasonable cost then why not continue to use both methods
About the Author
Stephen Cope is a freelance trainer and webmaster. You can find get free SEO and PPC online training and consulting at his site dedicated to providing affordable SEO and PCC consultant/Training Services for small businesses.
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