This is the stuff that you can rely on to bring you traffic over the next 12 months. How do we know that they work? Well, because we’ve been using them relentlessly with clients on some extremely successful and award-winning campaigns.

So we’re going to share each of these strategies. We’re going to break down how they work, and who should be using them.

We’ve broken these traffic strategies. Now before we go running headlong into traffic strategies, it’s important to think about which ones are most likely to get traction for your business. Because here’s the honest truth. Some traffic channels just don’t work for certain types of businesses and most businesses have a sort of natural affinity with a certain type of traffic source.

Target Audience | Right Traffic Channel To Target

Now, you’ll hear us talking a lot about the importance of understanding your target audience, and with good reason, but when we’re identifying the right traffic channels to target, the main question we want to ask is, how do our target customers find what we’re selling?

Now, broadly there are two buckets here. We have searched, and we have an interruption.

Now search focus, businesses will be selling something that their customers are searching for. So your customer knows that they have a problem. They go to Google or Amazon or voice search, and they ask for a solution to that problem, or they asked for information about that problem.

An example of this might be a plumbing supplies company. If I need a new system for a toilet, I’m gonna go to Google. I’m not going to open Instagram and hope that I see an ad for a sister, right? That’s not going to happen. So that is an example of a search prior to the business.

The other bucket is interruption or impulse.

Now interruption or impulse businesses are selling something that the audience doesn’t know that they need, but when their audience sees it, they can often be nudged into making an impulse purchase.

An example would be those little flying drone things with the lights on which you see all over tik-tok at the moment. So nobody wakes up in the morning thinking you know, the really cool is one of those flashing drones that I can throw up in the air and it sticks and does all this stuff and I can crush it in my head.

Nobody thinks that right? But when they’re scrolling on tick tock and they see this thing, a proportion of people think yeah, if that looked anything like it doesn’t the ad then that would be pretty cool. And they buy it. So that’s an example of an interruption or impulse business.

Now a lot of businesses will actually be somewhere along that spectrum. So for example, luxury e-commerce fashion. Some people will be searching for particular brands or products.

So there’s a search component that businesses and some people will be motivated to buy if they see an influencer wearing or they see an ad for something that they can be nudged into an impulse purchase. So a business like that sits somewhere in between the search impulse extremities. So I don’t want to labor this point too much, but it’s important to identify where your business sits on that spectrum.

If you’re b2b and you’re quite an I don’t want to use the word boring but a boring company. By the way, no business is boring once you get to know it. But if you consider yourself to be quite a boring business, then you might be more towards the search side of things than the impulse. Okay, that said, onto the traffic strategies.

Importance of Blogging | Traffic Strategy

The first traffic strategy that we’re going to talk about is blogs. Now you’ve heard us talk a lot about the importance of blogging, and that will not change in the next 12 months. Google is still ranking, good quality informational content for all sorts of the informational keyword.

And blogs are fantastic digital marketing assets that you can build your business not only to target search but also to inform your social and the rest of your content strategy as well. So what sorts of businesses should be using blogs for any business reasons that either solve a problem for their customers or can entertain, inform and educate their customers to build a relationship?

For example, we write blogs and they form the kind of pillar that we write and create all of the rest of our content around you can use blogs as the basis for your social media content but most businesses still don’t get much traction with their blogs. And the main reason for that is that they don’t approach the topic selection in the right way.

So now we’re going to do a very simple exercise for a hypothetical business, which Mike chose all about computer keyboards, and we’re gonna go through the process of choosing our blog topics.

So the first thing that we want to do in my choosing blog topics is we want to think about our target audience. What’s most interesting to them and what are the problems that they are having? If we can write content that is a solution to that problem, we can get them onto our website, and we can convince them that we have the solution to whatever issue they’re facing.

So let’s say that we have an eCommerce store that sells computer keyboards, and we want to find a way of driving traffic to it. ranking for computer keyboards is really competitive. Ad costs are fairly high. So we want to find some effective but low-cost ways of getting visitors onto our site, or we can go to public.com and type in the computer keyboard. It’s then going to give us a list of questions that people are asking on Google about this topic. And we can see them here. So we’ve got 75 different questions.

Now, not all of these are relevant to our target customer. And not all of them have any sort of commercial intent. So if we look at a question here, what are computer keyboard shortcuts? That’s not a question being asked by someone who is about to purchase a computer keyboard. They’re just looking to improve their efficiency or their productivity.

So that might be a blog that we want to write further down the line, but it’s not something that we’re going to prioritize because it’s not likely to lead to money for us. If we search for something like how to clean a computer keyboard, that’s kind of further along the line, because that’s someone that has a dirty keyboard.

Now if we can persuade them, that their keyboard is really dirty, or we can say that here’s how to clean it. But if it looks like this, then there’s probably this bacteria, blah, blah, blah, and you might want to consider a new one, then this is someone who we might be able to nudge into a purchase. But there are some other questions here that are much more commercial intent.

So which computer keyboard is best? Which computer keyboard should I buy? This is definitely somebody who is looking to make a purchase. So these are the sorts of blog posts that we want to write and that we want to answer.

Now, these are going to be fairly competitive as well. So what we might want to do is niche this further into things like which computer keyboard is best for gaming, which cheap computer keyboard is best for gaming, and what is the most expensive computer gaming keyboard phrases like this are like sub-topics off this main topic here which are going to be less competitive, and have a much higher commercial intent than some of these other really broad really informational and fairly nonrelevant terms.

So you can do exactly this process for your business and your target customers. Think about the three phases. Of the buyer journey, curiosity. These people are just curious. They’re fairly unlikely to purchase at this stage. But they indicate that they might have a problem which you’re thinking, solve research. There is people that are getting further along the buying journey. They’re starting to compare different options and search for things like which computer keyboard is best, and then intent.

This is when they are looking to make a purchase. So people searching for a particular keyboard model might be people who are in the intent phase because they are actually looking to make a purchase. You can then write blog posts on your site targeting people at each of these three phases. With the right call to action for the person at that stage of the buyer journey.

Amending Videos To The Blogs

Next up expressly we’re going to talk about video. But 82% of all internet traffic video is becoming harder and harder for businesses and brands to ignore having a video strategy now video doesn’t have to be as complicated as it might feel. For example, this video is just me talking about a particular blog that we’ve written and just slightly amending the blog to turn it into a video script and then essentially reading adding some examples showing you some stuff on the screen.

You can use exactly the same process in your business. Now, of course, you might expect lighting you might be talking about some sort of setting so it looks half decent. But here’s the thing, the sooner you start, the sooner you get that stuff right. In fact, some people would even say they still suck, but we just keep going for video gets more engagement on social you can chop it up.

You can use it in different formats you can use in different places, and it has the great benefit of being searched-based as well. So if you have a video on YouTube and someone searches for what it is that you’re doing, then you’ve got a good chance of showing up, and when they watch the video that engagement that relationship-building piece is that much stronger because they’re kind of seeing you face to face.

Landing Pages

And I’ll be honest, it’s a bit weird, but it’s also good for business. Now, before we continue, I want to talk about something which is really important and will be even more important over the next 12 months. That is landing pages. Now back in the day. A landing page was a special type of age and you’re billed for Pay Per Click ads, or opposing you wanting to target a particular type of traffic to today. Every single page on your website can and in many ways should be a landing page.

For example, when your website is properly optimized for search, you are going to be having all sorts of pages bringing in traffic, all sorts of pages are going to rank and they’re going to be landing pages for new cold traffic coming to your website. If you’re an e-commerce Store, for example, you’re going to have people coming to product category pages, your product pages, your homepage the content pages in your blog or your resources, or your knowledge base.

If you’re a service business, you’re going to have visitors coming to the individual service pages on your website as well as your homepage. Now, this poses a challenge for many businesses because their website has not been designed like this. Most people’s websites are designed for visitors to follow an orderly queue in a very linear pattern. When people come to the homepage, they read the homepage in its entirety.

They then go to a sub-page on the site and they move through the site like that. This just doesn’t represent modern user behavior. The danger with this approach is that the information on that second page of your site assumes prior knowledge.

It assumes that someone has been through your homepage. They understand your business. They’ve got some context, but that’s not how we use the internet. We might land on that sub-page first. We have no context for our business.

We have no prior information. So that sub-page needs to do a great job of setting the save, giving us all the information that we need to move forward with a purchase or becoming a lead. Another area where this really shows up is in the content on your site.

Let’s say you spent all this time making these amazing blogs and then ranking really well. You’re sharing them on social, they’re getting loads of engagement, awesome. But then people go to those pages on your site from search or from social and assume that you’re just a content site because they can’t see any info about the business. So we need to make sure we’re including calls to action, introductions for business, and what you actually do. And we’re linking people through to the commercial pages on your site so they can go through and make a purchase or become a lead or whatever.

Let’s go back to our computer keyboard business as an example. So let’s say that you’ve ranked a blog post on how to clean a computer keyboard and you’ve got some tips on how to do it. And you say something like, if your computer keyboard looks like this, it’s probably got more bacteria than the inside of a public toilet. Now if you make that post really compelling, you might be able to persuade someone to purchase a new keyboard. But if you just give them how to clean it tips, they’re going to look at those tips are great. I know how to clean my keyboard, but don’t clean it.

And then that’s it. All you’re doing is you’re paying the server cost to give Google information to give to people free of charge. There is no benefit to you at all. You’re just sending your staff out into the world to just help people with no expectation of anything back.

Social media

The next traffic channel is social media. Now if you’ve told me back in 2014 that most businesses would still be struggling to get to grips with social media. Honestly, I’d have been devastated. This has been a problem for so many businesses in so many marketers for so long, and yet so few are any closer to solving the social media problem than they were 10 years ago. But social media is here to stay and the time people are spending on social media is only going in one direction.
That’s a clue. That’s a clue by the way.

Why do businesses fail on social media? | Reason 1

Now one reason that businesses fail on social media is that their audience just isn’t in the right frame of mind for the content that they’re posting.

Now I want you to think of an example business that we could use to illustrate this problem and I wanted to come up with a difficult one. If you’re struggling to get engagement with your social posts, then one technique you can use is to take a step back from the solution that you offer, and instead focus on the problem that you are solving.

Let’s assume The problem we’re trying to solve is people with gut health issues. So let’s make ourselves an authority and influence if you will, on gut health. Let’s share tips about different nutrition types. Let’s share tips about common conditions and symptoms of those conditions. Let’s share inspiring and educational stories from people that have overcome those conditions. Because that is the stuff that people go on social media for. They go on social media for it to be entertained, informed, and educated.

Why do businesses fail on social media? | Reason 2

Another reason that brands fail on social media is that they choose their channels based on their own preference, rather than the preference of their customers. This is particularly acute when a younger marketing manager will assume that the brand needs to be visible on Instagram or Tiktok because that’s where they themselves spend their time rather than looking at where their audience now if their audience is much older than they are, they might be spending much more time on Facebook and LinkedIn where the largest user group is actually 46 to 55.

So it’s really important that we choose our social channels based on where our audiences are rather than where we are.

Why do businesses fail on social media? | Reason 3

The third reason that businesses fail on social is that their content just sucks, right? It’s purely self-promotional. It’s all about the business. There’s nothing to entertain, they’re not really speaking the language. This is like the person that business networking bandwidth just pushes that car into everyone’s hands and just talks about themselves.

What you really want to do on social is provide the sorts of stuff that people are looking to go on social for. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Here we can see a post of Jim shark who has done a fantastic job of their society is the sort of content that people go into social for. It’s a well-taken picture is fitness-related content and this person is wearing GymShark clothes, so there is relevance to the brand.

Now, of course, not every business is as social first as GymShark. We also have businesses like to work that sells a boring product, or project management software to an audience that doesn’t necessarily go to social for that type of content. But what teams won’t do is rather than just talking about boring stuff, they share tips easily digestible. Tips, not in massive detail, but digestible enough that you might follow them.

If you’re interested in productivity, time management, project management, that type of thing. So really, those are two of the main types of content that you’re probably going to be posting either pictures or videos of your products in action. Or tips, informative educational type stuff. You don’t see your product in action because pictures of teamwork and action are not gonna be fun.

Search Engine Optimization

The reason we love SEO so much is if we can choose anywhere to be seen by potential customers drive they are searching for what we sell that old question or feature put programmatic anywhere where the right answer of course is in front of a hungry crowd. That is exactly what search is. There is no faster pace in the history of wanting to be found at the top of Google when somebody is searching for what you sell.

SEO for Small Business: The Ultimate Checklist For Success

So SEO is a really important channel today as important as it has been for the last five or 10 years. Now not at some point. Text Search is going to be replaced by something. People thought it was Voice Search. That hasn’t panned out the facts with an estimated trillion a year more prominent than ever. It also has more data on any other entities in history, which means that whatever comes off the tax base, Google has a big role in that new world. Now when it comes to SEO, there are no two ways about it.

20 Top SEO Tools That Will Boost Your Rankings Instantly

It is more competitive today than it was in one year which is a zero-sum game. Hence if you want to be found that you’re going to be missing someone else, they’re going to be fun enough. You are this is a competition. That means that the thresholds are a standard you’re going to have to work through if you want the top ranking to be higher than ever. So what are the baasics that you need in place for SEO today? What do you need to be nailing your metrics? These are the Page Titles and Meta descriptions, those things that are visible on the search results page on Google.

They are key to getting people to click on your ad. Your page titles are key to getting visibility for your target keywords. If you don’t put the masses in Google center, replace them with something automatically generated that may or may not be good but the downside is you don’t get control over what those searches see on that first page of Google. You need excellent content on every page. If you’re an eCommerce business, you are sick of content on your product, and category pages, but you need great content on your product pages as well. Your homepage every single page on your site that you want to get.

18 Of The Most Frequently Asked SEO Questions

If you’re a service business, those service pages, need to be longer, more in-depth, and more useful than ever before. There are no two ways about it. You need an excellent user experience on your site goes on the day. It is more difficult than ever, and of course, is website speed.

Website Speed

You can use a test by the site to work out what your website speed is and to get tips on how to improve. It’s no exaggeration to say there are very few businesses that potentially know businesses that cannot benefit from being found at the top of Google for that made target searches.

So commit to making this year the gear you get to grips with so if I can choose any traffic tools to drive, high quality, commercial attend profitable traffic, getting ranked on Google being seen where for the foreseeable future.

Google ads

Google ads are so commonly misunderstood and treated almost as a second priority against organic search, almost as if you can rank organically, right? If you can’t, you’ve got to start shoveling cash into Google, but actually, SEO plus PPC is typically a high yielding than just SEO or low Firstly, because PPC provides data that SEO does cannot give us examples of conversions.

This is really useful, but secondly, having a strong unproductive PPC account gives you insulation against an over-dependence on SEO. Today, PPC is more expensive than ever now loads of us inside Exposure Ninja were asked to make predictions at the start of 2021 about what was going on was the cost per click from Google ads but go higher than ever, as a result of increased competition due to lockdown.

And that is exactly what’s happened in some spaces in 2021. cost per click is increased by 35 to 40%. This means that if you’re going to play with Google ads you absolutely need to bring your A-game. Your landing page needs to be better than ever.

The offer that you’re making to visitors needs to be more compelling it needs to stand out against what else you’re competing against in those search results. The targeting needs to be more on point than ever spray and pray. You don’t want to be doing that for too long.

Interestingly though, these days it’s very rare to see a really poorly optimized Google ad campaign at scale because businesses just can’t justify spending a lot of money on something that isn’t well-optimized. This also means that in more markets than ever professional Google Ad Management is the cost of entry. We used to see lots and lots of self manage campaigns today for yourself. manage campaigns are getting to profitability just because the competition is so high. If you’re competing against professionally managed campaigns and you’re trying to do it yourself in your spare time that is getting harder and harder than ever. Now it is still possible. And every so often, we come across a business where the owner or the marketing manager has been running their PPC ad campaign for years. They know in intimate detail, and in some cases, they are the best person to run that campaign. With some outside perspectives to just identify areas that they might want to test. But this is becoming a smaller and smaller pool is most likely that if you’re going to be scaling PPC ads, you’re going to need some sort of professional management.

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