Business owners are always looking for ways to increase traffic to their websites. While organic SEO tactics are essential to a long-term content strategy, results aren’t instantaneous. Paying for traffic can serve as a good short-term strategy to help build brand awareness, and generate leads. However, before you start plunking down money on paid traffic solutions there are a few important factors to consider. Read along to find out more about the pros and cons of buying website traffic.
What is Buying Website Traffic?
There are several ways to increase web traffic including buying high converting traffic, writing blogs, and using high-quality backlinks. Paid traffic is traffic that is generated via bidding for space on online advertising networks such as Google, Bing, or various social media channels. You can direct paid traffic to any piece of content on your website that you think is likely to generate a revenue opportunity. This can include landing pages, products, blogs or apps. It’s traffic that comes through ads that are promoted on social media or search engines. The ads are created by your business on platforms like Google AdWords and turned into results when keywords are looked up online.
The Pros of Buying Website Traffic
1. Fast Results
SEO consists of organic strategies like keyword searches, content creation, and link building. We term these strategies as organic because their value grows over time without monetary influence. Paid traffic on the other hand affords you the opportunity to quickly generate web visitors without waiting for the longer-term investment to pay off but it carries a price tag.
2. Increase Brand Awareness
Buying website traffic is a great opportunity to build your brand awareness and help grow your audience quickly. Using relevant keywords and a competitive bidding strategy you have the opportunity to have top placement on a search results page.
3. Retarget Visitors
Is your business having trouble converting visitors into leads? Getting potential customers to your website may not be the issue, but not all your visitors will convert or be in a state to buy on their first visit. Retargeting is paid traffic that affords the opportunity to recapture the interest of previous visitors to your website.
The Cons of Buying Website Traffic
1. Can be Costly
The cost of buying website traffic can add up pretty quickly. Essentially, you’re paying for each click on your ad, regardless if they turn into a lead or not. It’s important to plan out your paid traffic so you can distribute the money effective on each platform, and you don’t run out before the end of the month.
2. Short-Term Investment
Compared to organic traffic, which is a long-term investment in keyword and content building, buying paid traffic is only a short-term investment and should not be used as a standalone solution for traffic generation. If you are relying solely on paid ads to generate traffic, once you stop paying that traffic dries up.
3. Paid Traffic Can be Tricky
Buying traffic for your website isn’t as easy as it seems there’s a lot that goes into creating a good advertising campaign for pay-per-click platforms. For instance, setting up a campaign with the right amount, so it’s doesn’t run out all at once, targeting the right audience, and the competition for big keywords.
Now that we’ve taken a deeper look at the pros and cons of buying website traffic, your business shouldn’t rely solely on either paid traffic and organic traffic. A company can benefit from using both strategies in their marketing plan and create a larger brand awareness. If you need help getting started, contact the team at Fat Guy Media!