Why are so many marketing companies opting to buy website traffic from traffic providers? Isn’t it a black-hat strategy with a low ROI?

Times have changed, as have marketing methods. While the conversion rates of paid referral traffic are low, marketers are finding it to be a useful source of human interaction which, when partnered with specifically-designed landing pages, not only converts but improves the impact of organic traffic-increasing strategies. Paid traffic is an accepted and popular modern marketing strategy implemented in every sector, including health.

So how can paid web traffic help your digital health site?

No Marketing Strategy Should Be A One-Trick Pony

Companies that rely on a single method of traffic generation rarely keep up with the competition. Although SEO is by far the most powerful way to get interested parties to land on your URL, focussing solely on this long-term technique is – to put it bluntly – wrong.

Everything we do to make our website interesting plays a role in SEO. Speeding up loading times improves UX – an important metric for Google Analytics crawlers. User experience is improved through, among many other features, responsive sites, good design, easy-to-navigate pages and simple order forms.

Even the content we write in the form of blogs and articles is written to improve SEO. More blogs means more keywords and a greater chance of rising in the SERPs. The health sector is hugely competitive – keyword bid prices can be high; finding unique but popular short and long tail search terms is tough.

Site popularity also counts toward SEO, and this is just one of the ways in which paid web traffic can make an immediate impact. Buy website traffic on a monthly basis from a reputable provider and your site’s popularity goes through the roof as far as the crawler bot is concerned. If your organic strategies bring in 1,000 visitors every month and bring you to page 4 of the SERPs, adding a monthly order of 10,000 paid visitors could find you on page 1 – that is, if your direct competitors aren’t ordering even more.

Social media advertising – now almost as important as SEO – can also integrate paid visitors. Buying likes, follows and even comments is far from rare. When it comes to being a popular site or profile, numbers count. And the right paid traffic guarantees numbers.

When You Buy Web Traffic, The Effect Is Immediate

Most marketing strategies take time to increase visitor numbers. In order of speed from slowest to fastest, we begin with SEO, followed by social media marketing, then email marketing, then paid web traffic.

When you order web traffic you are usually asked to fill in a timescale. Your ordered volumes are then delivered to your selected landing page over that period.

While it might be tempting to have thousands of visitors arrive over a day or two, certain factors make this the wrong technique. High visitor numbers can slow down a website, negatively affecting UX and so having a counteractive effect on your SEO. Before you buy web traffic check your bandwidth and server plan. There’s no point in ordering 100,000 visitors if your site starts to get clunky with 100.

It’s best to trickle visitor numbers over a period of at least a week to coincide with another campaign, or over a month to increase site popularity for Google Analytics crawler bots.

The Right Paid Traffic

Bot traffic won’t convert but it can be used to increase the popularity of your site – as long as Google Analytics doesn’t count the artificial visitors as bots. If you want to make your health-related website successful and implement paid traffic to help you reach your goals, you want real people to land on your pages.

So, the first tip in purchasing the right visitors for your digital health site is to buy website traffic composed solely of humans.

Secondly, you need to buy targeted traffic – people who have previously shown interest in your area of expertise or product. A good traffic provider offers human visitors from hundreds of niches – sports, healthy eating, medical, pharmacy, alternative medicine, sustainable living. Your research will have found a number of higher-converting target groups.

Which leads us to another use for paid traffic – to find new, often surprising niches. Even though many of your referral visitors won’t stay long on your site as they are not actively searching for your keywords (as with SEO), it is still possible to discover unusual groups that stay for longer, interact and convert. Paid traffic can also be a very useful tool for basic A/B testing.

Can You Generate A Million Visitors?

Unless you’re a huge brand, getting a million monthly visitors is – and remains – a marketer’s dream…except when you pay for them. A top web traffic provider generates millions of daily visitors from its own managed websites that cover countless topics, gathers data on individual visitor behaviour and demographics, and splits visitors into target groups that include age, gender, location, interests and language.

OK, a million monthly visitors is going overboard for the average small business, but you can order as little as a couple of thousand spread over a month.

And all human visitors have the potential to convert, even the ones redirected to your site by a provider. Bear in mind that if your organic strategies achieve a 3% conversion rate you can’t expect the same rate from your paid traffic – perhaps 0.03% is more realistic. But when your organic marketing generates 500 new visitors a month and your paid traffic numbers 50,000 a month, conversion numbers become very similar.

The Health Sector – Lucrative vs Competitive

Type in any health-related term in the Google search bar and it will come up with over a million results, no matter how long the tail. Health-related topics account for at least 5% of all search engine queries. That’s 1 in every 20 searches .

And with an estimated 228 million Google searches per hour (not including searches made on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Seznam, Quora and Yippy), thousands of people are looking for your particular information, advice or product every minute.

There is a huge market for health products. Unfortunately (for CEOs), there is a similarly huge number of businesses that – on the whole – cater for the customers’ every need. When you are part of the health sector the problem is not in finding the market, it’s elbowing through the competition. It’s letting the market find you.

Most large, successful health websites are translated into more than one language. Unless your business sells heavy exercise equipment or items that cannot be shipped cost-effectively or legally, the broader the outreach the better.

Every successful health website publishes a regularly updated blog or publishes white papers. Up to date, well-curated content tells the visitor that the information they read is reliable. Authority is absolutely essential in this particular sector.

And every small to large successful health website invests serious money in its marketing department. They need to, because these websites are also linked to numerous social media profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). They often use expensive animations, vlogs and graphics to explain complex information to the general public. They use every available channel to attract one of the largest global audiences – after all, we all benefit from good health and no-one chooses to be ill. To make an impact in the crowded digital health sector, you are obligated to provide a healthy marketing budget…and when you consider that paid web traffic is one of the cheapest marketing strategies, it makes sense to use it.

An Effective Marketing Boost

While it’s wrong to expect paid traffic to support your business as a sole strategy, it should be implemented as a major contributor. The buzz word when it comes to buying website visitors is ‘boost’. Large volumes of targeted users boost your SEO, boost conversion numbers (not rates), boost the effects of simultaneously-run campaigns, and – through all of these effects – boost your ROI.

And be assured, a healthy proportion of your direct health-sector competitors buy web traffic at regular intervals. To appear popular, you need to generate more visitors than them, produce better content than them, offer lower prices than them, advertise more than them and provide better customer services than them. In this cut-throat industry, buying website traffic definitely has its place, however small.

Source: https://blog.google/products/search/health-info-knowledge-graph/

This post has been sponsored by Rebel Internet