If you’ve ever stared at a Google Analytics report just to be left scratching your head wondering “Why is the vast majority of traffic I’m getting not converting?” you’re far from alone.

Just take a step back and consider where that traffic is coming from.

And I don’t mean step back and glance at Google Analytics to see your referral/organic traffic numbers, I mean analyze what campaigns and efforts are specifically creating the traffic that lands people on your website.

So, where are these people actually coming from?

If you’re like most other small to medium business owners, it’s likely that you only know of those that type a keyword into Google, clicked through to you from something you distributed on your social media pages, found you through one of your Google search ads, or directly typed in your URL.

But what I love about online marketing is that it’s such a huge field that you can do just about anything to get traffic to your site that is so much more valuable to you than one of the above listed traffic sources.

Why does targeted traffic lead to better ROI?

• A much larger percentage of your ideal customer reside on certain platforms.
• The expectations of each traffic source is different and completely depends on the journey they took when finding your site.

You can do all the conversion optimization in the world, but there will always remain a sizeable percent that will really want what you have to offer because of the technique you used to get them there. Of course, this isn’t to say that conversion optimization doesn’t have a huge impact, because it does.

Proven best ways to get targeted traffic:

1. Quora question answering
2. Facebook/LinkedIn Groups engagement
3. Forum/Blog comments and engagement
4. Cross-promote with a blogging community and guest blogging
5. Contacting and mentioning influencers in your niche

These are very grassroots types of strategies that require more manual effort and relationship building. If you’re not comfortable with these kinds of strategies, well, get comfortable because they aren’t going away.

Not every one of these will work the same, so we recommend measuring them before you really start a new initiative in Google Analytics. Setting up a custom report for each strategy can be done with tools like the traffic report, content efficiency report, and landing pages report.

If you do this, pay attention to total conversions and conversion rate per source, so that you can increase what’s working and boot what’s not.

Engaging on Quora, Forums, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups

Quora

Answering a question like this can get a huge and consistent flow of traffic to your site if you take the time to contribute a quality answer. The above example is from 4 years ago and is still driving clicks to another page, and each answer below it has about 2 thousand views as well.

Besides looking for a question to answer, finding forums regarding your niche can be done quite easily over some popular online platforms. The most obvious of which is Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups

As written about in a previous blog, you can see firsthand the success a young muffler designer had with his business, RLS exhaust, by engaging with a large motorcycle group with 21,000 active members.

Ricky Sutton found his niche, built a relationship from the community, and gained a strong base of 1,532 followers (many of which bought from him) from this method alone.

In this case he harnessed Facebook Groups for social media traffic, but it could easily be the same way with a landing page.

Forums

You can start by trying your search out simply like this:

But likely, this method won’t get you far. The best way we know if is to go in and download this extension (takes 3 seconds) called “Discussions button for Google Chrome” and you’ll have all the forums you could ever want filtered by what you’re searching for.

From here, simply engage on a forum relevant to your business and position yourself as an authority while linking back to helpful productions you or someone else in your company has made to either give an opinion or answer a question. With the way forums are looking in modern times, it’s likely that they will only work for a handful of niches out there, but they still do have some use.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups can be an extremely powerful and lucrative marketing tool for both increased web traffic and lead generation, especially for B2B.

Scout out a few potential groups with a filtered search and check out the member count and post frequency to find where you best fit in.

Depending on what you want to accomplish, you can start by doing the following within LinkedIn.

1. Building yourself as an authority or thought leader in the group
2. Answer questions by presenting professional and quality content as answers
3. Create and launch a poll for visibility in the group and for interaction with others
4. Connect with group members
5. Message those relevant to your engagement if you want to use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

Want to learn more about this strategy? Explore the below guide.

Guest blogging and Influencer mentions

Guest blogging

Trying out guest blogging for the first time can quickly become complicated if you don’t know these three pivotal steps:

1. How to find the right blog?

Using the same extension mentioned above to find forums, you can find blogs just as easily. You want to make sure the potential candidates have at least a decent amount of followers already and that the audience would be interested in what you have to offer. One additional way to find potential guest blogs is to try out this community guest blog site called myblogguest.com

2. How to get a guest blog posted?

Knowing what kind of content is posted and how other guest bloggers post is paramount before ever sending a message. Consider what topics will do well after a few minutes of research and then put your own spin on it. Sending a personalized message with your thoughts on this topic has been shown to work quite well.

3. How to submit your guest post?

Instead of trying to put out the most earth shattering post you’ve ever made, consider what content already fills up the site in terms of format, word length, and your guest bio. Additionally, do not forget to reply to any comments in a guest post.

Want to learn more about this strategy? Explore this guide.

Influencers

Influencers exist all over the internet. In a recent post we made about how to find social media influencers, we simply defined them as people that create action in others.

Intuitively, influencers bring traffic to your website that trusts you much more than someone who clicked a random ad on Google.

Finding them and effectively connecting with them can prove to be a little bit of a struggle for most of us though. If you want to find them check out these steps here.

Want to learn more about this strategy? Explore this guide.

Bottom Line

Remember, conversion optimization and traffic acquisition are two peas in a pod that should never exist without each other. Acquiring massive chunks of traffic to your site that are either not wanting to buy or are outside your target audience is easy to do if you throw money at Google and Facebook. Using the above strategies will help you bring trusting and targeted traffic to your site that actually wants to be there.

Our work to get more ROI out of your search traffic goes far beyond this guide. To find out more about how to turn traffic into sales, just drop us a message.

Tags:- conversion optimizationFacebook/Linkedin Group engagementforumsGoogle Analytics