Everything begins with web traffic, people seeking and visiting your website. It is simultaneously the most difficult and most mystical part of digital marketing.

Ideally, that web traffic converts to leads and paying clients.

Today, we’ll discuss measuring your web traffic against your leads and ways to improve both.

Difference between lead traffic and web traffic

Launching a new website doesn’t guarantee web traffic. Most websites on the Internet get nearly zero visits per day.

Of the traffic your website will get, very few will be lead traffic—visitors who intend to use your services—unless your website is optimized to turn general users into leads.

Contrary to popular belief, web traffic—and leads—does not come without active marketing and promotion.

There’s no magical freeway with millions of customers whizzing by, ready to visit your website as soon as it pops up.

Lead-generating web traffic requires a disciplined formula to research, generate, measure, and optimize web traffic.

How to increase lead traffic:

1. Keyword Research: Use SEMRush or Moz to research your keywords, looking for the most popular keyword searches in your market and possibly some overlooked, highly specific gems perfect for your business. You also want to research and discover your online competitors for these terms–looking for ways to navigate (waste money) these highly competitive spaces, at least initially.
2. Traffic Acquisition Strategy: Armed with a knowledge of what people are looking for and how they search for your products and services, it’s time to develop your traffic acquisition strategy. For this, I typically use a combination of organic (combining content and SEO) and paid (combining content and PPC) strategies to gain traction as quickly as possible.
3. Organic Traffic Generation: I begin my traffic strategy with an organic or search engine-optimized design because it requires a complete and organized set of content that can be reused for my paid traffic generation. In my experience, the best way to begin this process is to create a series of ‘guides’ focused on helping people through common problems or pain points your business addresses. These guides should consist of a top-level page overviewing the larger concept and then linking to a variety of supporting, more specific content providing deeper detail or specific case studies.
4. Paid Traffic Generation: Once your organic traffic generation content architecture is in place, you can start to layer it into your paid traffic strategy. Typically, this consists of Adwords keyword campaigns to specific guide pages, matching specific keywords to corresponding highly relevant, detail-oriented pages. In addition, I would like to begin a series of content distribution campaigns using OutBrain, Taboola, Reddit, and other like publishers, where I can buy positions and impressions in places relevant to the audience I am trying to attract.
5. Measure and Evaluate Traffic: Sometimes, in the excitement of building out our content and paid campaigns, we forget that we’re trying to attract people to our brands, not just a lot of traffic. That’s why it’s critical to make sure that you have tools in place to measure and evaluate your web traffic before you begin driving any significant traffic to your website. This can be as simple as Google Analytics or as sophisticated as Kissmetrics or Mixpanel, but make sure you have these tools installed and properly optimized to bring you clear insight into what traffic and traffic sources are yielding you the most value.
6. Optimize Traffic: Once you begin gathering web traffic, you need to sift through it immediately to look for the right traffic. This means reviewing the sources of traffic and the behavior of the visitors from each channel to zero in on the combination that brings you the best visitors. One of the simplest, and most underutilized ways to do this is by using Google Analytics Goals to identify optimal behavior on your website.

Once you’ve identified productive traffic sources and behavior, acquiring more profitable traffic is the next challenge.

Strategies for scaling traffic and leads:

• If the best traffic comes from organic search engine results (keywords), build more logical content around that profitable keyword. These additional pages, carefully cross-linked and indexed on your website, will continue to increase the density of content around this profitable keyword—yielding more related search engine positions and resulting traffic.
• If the best traffic is coming from paid search or content distribution channels, scaling requires optimizing the bids on your current keywords or placements and searching for similar pockets of keyword or content placement traffic on which to bid. It isn’t quite as simple as just buying more of the same.
• If a certain path or behavior on my website produces quality lead flow, test shortening the path or optimizing the behavior. I use Google Analytics Goals to look for revenue-generating paths and CrazyEgg to look for strong behaviors that I can monetize. 

As you can see, acquiring traffic and leads is more of a formula, requiring the right mix of critical elements to generate the perfect chemistry for a promising compound.

What will be your next lead traffic experiment?

Kaleidico can generate lead traffic for your pipeline

With over 20 years in the industry, our tailored digital marketing services are proven to increase your lead traffic and conversion opportunities.

We’ll optimize your website for organic web traffic and maximize your paid ad budget so that you can meet your target audience where they are.

Schedule a free discovery session today.