About four years ago I participated in a lengthy search engine optimization course to be certified as an SEO Expert by SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization.)  The course was very helpful and taught me a lot about how to build traffic on your website organically. Just recently, I was looking over the many pages of notes I took and looking for some ideas for our 2011 web strategy. I was surprised at the way the course discussed the value of social networking sites, as a method for driving traffic, not leads. Furthermore, the core goal of SEO was, again, to simply drive more traffic. There was no mention of leads, conversion rate or ROI.

Four years later (decades in web-time) we know there is more. SEO is not the only consideration when you’re talking about web visibility. SEM (search engine marketing) is the practice of increasing site traffic through paid methods, like pay-per-click advertising, banners and content sponsorship.   There are also social networks to consider.  How important are they? In the past five years search marketing experts have been in a fervor over having a Twitter and Facebook account for your business, getting the maximum number of people to “Like” your company page, getting more “followers”, etc., etc.  All of this with the single goal in mind… traffic.

In recent years we have come to realize that our website’s traffic is not a good indicator of the quantity of quality leads we get. Since we get traffic from all types of sources like design websites, educational institutions, associations, and, of course, social networking sites, our leads vary in quality pretty dramatically. To explore this more we broke down the traffic statistics and compiled them with lead statistics and actual sales.  We were then able to measure the dollar value of a single website visit and a web lead. Now, our main focus is not on increasing traffic per se, but rather, the dollar value of a single visit.

I encourage you to look at the value of a single visit on your website. All you really need is your basic website statistics and knowledge of the lead flow and sales of your company. Once you have that information you can start thinking critically about how you drive traffic to your website. For example, do 1000 additional Twitter followers have the same value as a quality article or whitepaper posted on your website?

Here are some suggestions on how you can begin to increase the value of traffic to your site.

1. If you are running online campaigns, make sure you are targeting the appropriate groups. Most credible advertising services online allow you to target by a variety of demographics. Furthermore, try using services other than search marketing PPC (Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing), like Linked In or Facebook where you can be very specific about who you target. You may also consider sponsoring industry email newsletters or websites.

2. Create special landing pages on your site for specific campaigns or product lines. This will help filter your traffic to the appropriate areas of your website.

3. On your “request information” form, or whatever call-to-action form you use, add a few simple qualifying questions. There is no need to get too specific and annoy your user, but adding a couple of questions will help make your leads more relevant. For example, you may ask a question asking the prospect’s company size, or even specific goals for using your services.

4. Provide enough information on your website to allow users to determine for themselves if they are an appropriate candidate for your services. Many companies don’t like to provide information like pricing or volume discounts, or whatever, because they fear their competition. However, your website’s objective is to drive relevant leads to your business. Don’t let your concerns about competition hinder your ability to attract new customers.

Hopefully, taking some of these steps will help increase the value of your leads. Try and clear your mind of the natural obsession over number of visits or, number of email subscribers, or Followers, or Likes. That may be the objective for some people or businesses, but your objective should be quality.  We would rather have one relevant Twitter follower reading our updates than a thousand irrelevant followers. Those ego-driven statistics just don’t mean anything to our business.