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The Fastest Way To Increase Your Traffic and Generate More Leads

Written by Martin Wong on August 20, 2010

Deciding which keywords to target for search engine optimization can seem like a daunting task. To simply this often complicated task, I’m going to show you a simple and fast method to increase your traffic and generate more leads for your business.

Instead of searching for brand new keywords to compete for, the easiest way to increase your traffic is to work with keywords you are already ranking well for on search engines.

To get started, you will need a Google Analytics and a Google Webmasters account that has a least of month of data for you to examine. If you have e-commerce tracking or conversion goal tracking already set up, then it will be easy to identify the best keywords to target for search engine optimization. For example, here at SmarttNet we track our website’s lead generation with two Google Analytics conversion goals that are triggered whenever somebody completes our Contact Us form and Website Consultation form.

To see which keywords are sending you quality traffic, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the keywords report under the Traffic Sources menu. The initial keywords report will show the top 10 keywords that sent you the most traffic in the last month. Now, I want you to choose 3 keywords in this report that we will focus on for search engine optimization (if you have goals setup, you can use the Goal Set 1, Goal Set 2, etc. to see which keywords are generating the most leads). For our website, I’ll choose three keywords that send our website quality traffic.

Next, I want you to open your Google Webmasters account. On the Webmaster dashboard you will see a list of your website’s most popular search queries. Click on the “More » ” link to view the entire search queries report. Here you will find some keyword data that will be very useful in analyzing how much of an increase in traffic and leads you can generate by optimizing your website better for these keywords. For the 3 keywords I choose this is the keywords impressions data provided:

As you can see, we are only realizing a small portion of the potential traffic these keywords could be sending us. By focusing our search engine optimization on these three keywords which are already sending us quality, converting traffic we can easily increase our website’s lead generation. Even small, incremental increases in our search engine rank for these quality keywords would result in an increase in our traffic. The question, is how much more traffic would a slightly higher rank result in? To answer this question, we have some actual data from a 2006 study that analyzed 36 million queries on AOL’s search engine:

Source: Predictive Marketing

This click-tracking study provides useful data to gain a rough idea of how  much more traffic we can expect from an increase in ranking for each keyword. Keep in mind that this study focus strictly on clicks on the organic search engine results page (SERP) and that about 10-15% of people will click on Google’s Adwords ads.

The easiest way to increase your traffic is to modify your Title Tags and Meta Description Tags to more prominently feature your keywords on the search engine results page. In the example above, the click-through (CTR) for keyword #2 is much lower than the other two keywords and the reason for this is that the keywords text is not nearly as prominently displayed in search engine results page (description/title) as they are for competitor’s websites.

Once you’ve made the basic modifications to your Titles Tags and Meta Descriptions Tags, the next step would be to create new content around these keywords and build some incoming links with the keywords in the link anchor text.

By focusing your search engine optimization and link building resources on high quality keywords that you are already ranking for, you can easily calculate the potential increase in traffic and lead generation by using the click distribution chart above. Rather than guessing, now you can analyze all the keywords currently sending you traffic and easily cherry pick the most valuable keywords that should be the target of your next search engine optimization campaign.