Harnessing the power of the web may seem elusive if you don’t fully understand how to gain targeted website traffic. The road to online business success is not one that is necessarily the less beaten path, but it is by no means one that is traveled by accident.   If you want to find your way to qualified leads and vice versa—qualified, interested, and highly targeted traffic—you must plan a precise route that will lead to communicating with your target audience in the best way possible online. The best way to steer targeted website traffic in your direction and the best way to gain the most qualified leads online is one in the same–through inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing Through Search Engines Leads to Targeted Website Traffic

You may have heard about the growing necessity for companies to spend less marketing resources on outbound marketing and instead focus on inbound marketing. However, you may have been vexed as to understand what really defines an excellent inbound marketing approach on the web, let alone how to correctly execute in order to gain targeted website traffic.

Inbound marketing is all about placing yourself in a position that will allow your target audience to come to you and find you as a solution to their problem. The most practical way to do this on the web is through a quality content marketing strategy that leverages search engine placement.

Search Engine Marketing = Targeted Website Traffic

At the core of any search engine marketing plan is the goal of increasing targeted website traffic to your website in order to generate leads, sales, readership, or any other goal you desire for your website. There is a market for every possible concept or idea on the internet.

Think about search queries as highways, and each web page that is displayed is its own exit. Every highway has its own name (the searched phrase, or ‘keyword’). On “Video Games” Highway, a very large percentage of the cars cruising along are looking to stop off and play a video game or read about video games. You want your exit to appear loud and clear, at the front of the line, where it can get noticed, and where your ideal audience is driving the most. You also don’t want to disappoint visitors once they’ve stopped off at your exit. So there’s still a bridge that needs to be gapped: How do you get your content to appear on the ideal highways and ahead of your competitors?

The beauty of quality content marketing derives foremost from proper search engine optimization of your content. By properly optimizing your content—along with properly promoting your content—you can control where your website will rank in the search engines. All you need to do is figure out the best highways for your campaigns. If you’re selling video games, do you think “Video Games” Highway has more traffic or does “Cheap Online Video Games” Highway? Broader phrases like “video games” will always provide more search volume versus long-tail keywords like “cheap online video games”. But which one has strong competition? You should weigh out which highways are the best place to promote an exit by balancing your budget, the competition of a phrase, and the traffic volume it receives. For help with market research, contact us and mention this post to receive a free Market Research Report.

Now, I know you’re itching to know how you can actually rank once you know where you’d like to. Search engines are powerful and have the ability to analyze many factors that determine the authority of a specific website. Powerful as they may be, they have a judicial nature, and for even-handedness, search engines appease their prime priority—to provide relevance.

How Will Relevance Bring You a High Volume of Targeted Website Traffic?

The way that search engines are able to provide relevant information lies in their ability to analyze the content of a web page and position it in search queries that relate to the content. Relevance is the key to targeted website traffic. They want people who are looking for “DIY handyman tips” to find good tips about DIY home repair. When search engines display results for the search query “DIY handyman tips” they literally position web pages that include the exact phrase “DIY handyman tips”. There are several factors involved in properly using keywords and optimizing your website—all of which you can read about in this previous post. Beyond that, though, for search engine competitiveness, you must go beyond optimizing the content on your web page. You must promote it with equivalent relevance. Search engines aren’t the only place that your content can, or should, be found. And search engines take that into account. Where else? Social media platforms are of utter importance to your online marketing campaigns. It is inevitable that search engines must look at factors other than keyword density in order to—not just position pages—but to rank them; they must determine whether website A deserves spot #1 more than website B and why. One factor that is of ever-increasing importance to becoming an authority is to have links pointing to your site from social platforms, like social networking profiles and social bookmarking websites. Search engines like relevance and they like popularity.

The road map to targeted website traffic lies in you creating destinations (content) and multiple roads (links) that lead to them. Your goal is to build destinations that people can easily find their way to on the highway (ranking for the right keywords), but your goal is to also make it easy for people to share directions to your destination when they enjoy their stay (providing quality information and allowing for social sharing). When you can accomplish this you will be creating a self-sustaining cycle that will continue to increase the measure of your website.