“Web bait” is a popular term amongst webmasters and search engine professionals. As the term suggests, web bait is anything you add to your site to attract visitors. It may be a provocative picture, YouTube video, funny article, or even a free download of some sort. The point is to attract hits and to get visitors to share it with their friends. This is a popular technique among blogs and other informational type sites. Quality isn’t the goal, it’s quantity of visitors. Since most sites like this generate income through advertisers or affiliate links more traffic equates to more dollars. For business websites the challenge is a bit different. The objective should be to drive quality traffic that converts.

In the last year few years we have focused far less on volume of web traffic and started to really analyze the quality of the traffic. We use various forms of web bait, like our weekly project videos, blog articles, twitter updates and case studies.  Though we don’t expect anything to “go viral” per se, we know that our updates do get shared with colleagues and other marketing professionals. We don’t have gimmicky articles about some conspiracy theory, provocative pictures of Brittney Spears getting out of a car, or even a cute video of a dog and cat playing together. We have content that is created by us and meant to be useful for our prospective clients. Those are the people we want visiting our website.

So how can your website attract quality traffic and prospects, and not the multitudes of other web surfers with too much time on their hands? Here are a few tips to think about:

1.    Create individual keyword-rich landing pages for your individual products or services. That way people will find these pages when they are searching for that specific product or service. It will also help search engines determine the relevancy of your website and ultimately raise your rankings.

2.    Offer highly focused whitepapers or case studies on your website. Require people to give you their name and email address. A relevant prospect should have no problem letting you know who they are if they want to read your content. Of course, it’s best to let them know you will not be spamming them or selling their information.

3.    On your response forms (i.e. contact us, request more info…etc.) add qualifying questions. This allows you to grade prospects right when they come in. For example, if you provide a very high end service, you could ask a question about their budget.  The response choices could start with very high dollar figures so they’ll have an immediate expectation as to the cost of your services.

4.    If you’re tweeting or blogging, be sure your contributions are relevant to your industry and potential clients. Surprisingly, I find that many businesses tweet or blog about random topics that are not relevant.  Their strategy seems to be to appeal to a wider audience, but this goes back to the point of driving relevant traffic.  Personally, I like blogs that are a bit lighthearted and have a personality, but don’t stray too far off topic.

5.    Provide enough information on your website to allow visitors to determine for themselves if they are appropriate for your product or service. Some companies don’t like offering pricing or anything too detailed about their processes for the public to see. I suppose security is a concern, but I think the benefits of managing client’s expectations upfront outweigh the security concerns, but you have to make that determination for your own business.