Traffic is the Lifeblood of Your Business
If you are any kind of business or commercial enterprise, you know that the lifeblood of your business is traffic. I mean either showroom traffic, traffic to your business location, or more importantly, website traffic. You have to get people in your door. Then, you can work on closing ratios and sales conversions—that’s fine. But until you have that traffic, even if you have a 100% closing ratio, if you have no people coming through your door, 100% of zero is still zero. You have to have traffic. Obviously, if you increase traffic, you don’t have to increase your closing ratio—you just get more sales. But the most elusive thing is traffic.

SEO and the Odds of Ranking High
There are some very simple—or rather, very clear—pathways to getting more traffic. It’s a layered approach. People talk about SEO, and even this article mentions SEO success. SEO is like playing the lottery. There are millions of companies that want to be ranked on Google; everybody wants to be. But there are only going to be three that have any kind of traction. If you’re not ranked one, two, three, or maybe four, you might as well not be ranked because you’re not going to get any kind of traffic. If you’re five or below, any kind of measurable traffic that’s going to help you is nearly impossible to obtain. What are the odds you’re going to be one through four? Almost zero. No matter how much work you do on SEO, it’s going to be impossible to get there because millions of other businesses want to be there for those keywords.

Key Pathways to Traffic Generation
So yes, you have to put some effort into SEO. The three key pathways to getting traffic are:

Content Volume Production
Content volume production is number one. What does that mean? You can’t just do one blog post a week. You can’t just do one article a month or even two videos a week. You have to saturate your market area with content—hundreds and hundreds of videos, hundreds of blog posts, hundreds of social media posts. Having someone post five or six times a week is not going to be enough. You have to have hundreds, if not thousands, of traffic generators because the days of getting 50,000 to 60,000 views on every single post are gone. Now, you can only count on maybe 400 or 500 visits, views, or likes. But you can make that work if you have a large volume of traffic. So, you have to have that traffic machine in place—that’s number one.

Paid Search Marketing
Number two is you have to do some paid search, whether it’s Google, Facebook, or Instagram. You have to do some paid search. The problem is that it has to have a very clear ROI. If you’re doing paid search marketing or paid placement, you have to be able to trace that payment back to see if it’s worthwhile. Even if you spend $100 on an ad, if it makes you only $40 or $50, it’s a losing proposition—you might as well not do it. In fact, the return has to be at least five or six times. So, if you do paid search or paid advertising that costs you $100, you have to get $500 to $600 in sales just to break even.

Understanding Profit Margins in Advertising
You might say, “Well, if I sell $100 worth of stuff, didn’t I break even?” No, you didn’t. Because when you sell something for $100, how much do you end up retaining at the end of the month, end of the year? Most businesses operate on a 20% profit margin. That means if you sell a million dollars in a month, your net profit is $200,000 after you pay all your payroll, materials, advertising, rent, electricity, and everything else. Most businesses are 20% or 30% profit margin. So, for that $100 ad, you sell $500, and you keep $100—that pays for your ad. That’s break-even, but you really want more than that. You have to be able to track it; otherwise, you’re just throwing money out the window without knowing it. The only person that makes money off that is Google or Facebook, whoever you’re paying the money to.

Offline Marketing Opportunities
The third element of a properly layered marketing strategy is to look at offline marketing opportunities. Things like postcards, direct mail, billboards, display outdoor electronic ads such as radio or TV. You might think that’s old school. Well, it is. But here’s the thing: The fact that everybody is paying for Google means that some of those methods are cheap now. For example, if you did a Google ad campaign and spent $200 a day, that’s $6,000 a month. How many visitors are you going to get from that? Some clicks cost $2 a click; some clicks cost $3 a click. If you spend $200 a day, that means you get 100 clicks to your business—maybe 3,000 a month.

The Value of Billboards and Direct Mail
What if you did a billboard in your local market area that cost you half of that—maybe $3,000 a month? That billboard is seen by 45,000 people a day. How many of those will come to your business? Even if 10% visit your website or business, that’s the same number of people for half the price. What about direct mail? Well, if you can target a certain demographic, you can do a very nice postcard—printed, mailed, and with a mailing list—for 35 to 50 cents per postcard. Now, for that same $6,000, you get that in the hands of 3,000 people. If you can send it to people who you know are your customers—if you’re B2B and know who they are—that could have the same effect.

Durability of Traditional Marketing Methods
The other thing is it’s durable, meaning that it’s something in their hands. It can sit on their desk; they can pass it along to a colleague. More than one person in the office might see it. You have to layer these in. Again, you have to track your ROI. But a successful marketing or business development campaign for any business cannot stop at SEO. SEO is one component. But because everyone is flocking there, it’s a red ocean strategy—everyone is there, trying to capture the same audience. Be a little counterproductive, counterintuitive, and look at other opportunities in addition to SEO.

Diversify Your Marketing Strategy
You still want to work on your SEO, but you can’t just throw a Hail Mary and hope you become number one or two ranked for your keywords. It’s probably not going to happen. The other areas will be places where your competitors won’t be thinking about. It’s a little work, a little effort, but in the long run, the businesses that are successful encompass all these factors.