The goal of your construction website is to generate leads and traffic, so understanding how visitors land on your website is the tool for optimizing it. As a contractor, if you want to know how successful your website is in obtaining revenue and lead generation, you should better understand website traffic. Above all, if you want to turn your construction website into a lead generation tool, you should better understand the details of different website traffic sources.
Why Is It Necessary to Measure Your Traffic?
Unless you understand the leading traffic sources to your website, you can never invest your money and time sensibly in your marketing efforts. Let us take organic search traffic first. If you do not want to know which keywords bring the highest number of prospects to your website, you can never optimize your keyword strategies and content.
But here’s a warning. Right after Google introduced SSL encryption to searches, tracking keywords from organic traffic presents encryption to searches. Therefore, monitoring keywords from organic traffic has gotten all the more difficult. We know you never had any knowledge about stuff like this. But we suggest you know the basics and break down every bit of the traffic source to a certain level, determining which source leads to the highest conversions.
Here are some challenges you may encounter in web traffic sources and some best practices you can implement:
- Challenges: Though most traffic sources are easy to track down, social media traffic is not. It is nearly impossible to track back to the links sending you traffic from social media posts. That is because they exist in comment threads or temporary conversations that you cannot track back to and further analyze as they no longer exist.
- Best Practices: The correct website traffic source for your construction website varies on your business type. For your construction business, it is highly recommended to maintain a range of traffic sources for your website. This makes sure that your construction website still draws visitors from different traffic sources, even if your main traffic source is lost.
Always ensure to build blog content around topics and not keywords. And always keep your target prospects in mind while building your website.
Types of Website Traffic Sources You Must Know
1. Organic Search
This is typically used just to mean the amount of traffic that came to your site via somebody who found your website using the search engine. Organic traffic is the main focus inbound marketing strives to increase. The blog content you are putting on your website today is tomorrow’s traffic, by the next day, by next month and possibly years to come.
That is why content marketing is very important and one of the main ingredients of a successful marketing strategy. Moreover, the simplest way to increase organic traffic is through content creation and Search Engine Optimization. The higher you rank for the keywords, the more your links will rank higher in SERPs.
Getting good results from organic search takes time, but they are long-term and well worth your effort and investment.
2. Direct traffic
The traffic you receive to your construction website is called direct traffic. It does not come through any other channel. Therefore, this means a visitor to your construction website address by typing your URL directly in the address bar. Therefore, when you type constructionmarketing.io into your search bar and hit “Enter”, you access the Construction Marketing website via direct traffic.
If your people frequent your website, that can also count as direct traffic. Therefore, your team has to filter their IPs from your website analytics so your data will not be muddied. Here is a quick guide we prepare for contractors like you on how to exclude your IP address from Google Analytics:
- Log-in to Google Analytics
- Select your profile
- Select the Admin Menu
- Select All Filters (Under Account)
- Click Add Filter
- Give the filter name
- Leave Filter Type as Pre-defined
- Enter your IP Address
3. Referrals
Another excellent way for visitors to find you is thru another referring website. This is directly referred to as a “backlink” since the particular ink the user clicks on leads back to your construction website. This kind of traffic is much more beneficial to your SEO ranking compared to direct.
Backlinks can give your construction website credibility. According to search engines, the more relevant websites linking to yours, the more credible, valuable, and accurate your content should be. Today’s search engines think of this type of traffic as positive for as long as it comes from a trusted or highly ranking website.
The more relevant, quality links you can acquire, the more credit the search engines will give to your content. Here we give you some tips on how to generate more traffic to your referrals:
Get your construction website published on review websites
- Submit your website to online directories
- Write a guest blog
- Ask for direct links from some companies you already have relationships with
- Contact influencers within your construction niche
- Comment on other blogs and industry forums
You can also look at your competitor’s link-building strategies with tools like Monitor Backlinks.
4. Email Marketing
When running an email marketing campaign, it is crucial to use links that lead back to your construction website. It is crucial to use these links as a strong CTA similar to blogs. Many of your website visitors come from emails, including monthly newsletters about special offers or weekly emails.
Driving blog subscriptions are a crucial part of nurturing your potential leads. When you receive a notification thru email that you have new articles or posts available to read, they are most likely to click thru the website to read it.
5. Social Media
As you like to imagine, social traffic comes from social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms. And just like other organic traffic, social traffic is highly scalable. As your following grows, and so does your traffic. But it does not mean you have to constantly post new content every day to keep your audience engaged. Sharing content and linking this content from your website helps you build your following.
You may notice one platform is performing better than others. Let’s say LinkedIn improves B2B marketing. Therefore, LinkedIn should be your target market. Bear in mind that Google algorithms do not consider social links part of the search ranking criteria. Therefore, links from your Facebook page will not impact your off-page SEO ranking, but you still can able to benefit from the traffic.
Never doubt social media. Imagine how much people spend time browsing various social media sites. Indeed, it still plays a critical role in driving traffic to your website.
6. Paid Search
Paid search is the exact opposite of organic traffic. And when you choose to run a PPC campaign, whether, thru Google and some other PPC providers, you can track the website traffic. If you wanted proper PPC campaign management, you would also need to review whether the traffic converts. And just like email marketing as a source, make sure to include tracking tokens with all your paid search so that this is properly acknowledged as paid search.
There is a learning curve involved in profitable paid media. Over time, a great marketing strategy like CTAs pays off, leading to much higher-performing landing pages. In situations like this, it may be better to let the professionals handle the details to ensure there is a strategy behind the paid media.
7. Other Campaigns
Lastly, if you are running some other types of marketing campaign for which you have generated tracking URLs but do not fit into any different buckets, you may find it in an unclear “Other Campaigns” source. And hey! Just because it does not fit into another bucket, it does not mean it should not be tracked. That is why we suggest you again let marketing professionals handle all of this.
ConstructionMarketing.io Can Help You!
Although we shared with you the different types of traffic sources for websites and their unique purpose, the truth is that you essentially need all kinds of traffic to your website. Because as part of your solid marketing campaign strategy, consistently analyzing and assessing your website’s traffic sources thru Google Analytics, SEMrush, MOZ, and other software tools are critical. This all helps you determine which ones are the ideal and most effective for you and which ones may need more effort and attention.
So, whether you are ready to leap and pay for website traffic now or not, you will look at some point. Organic traffic created through content and Search Engine Optimization remains the most proven and website traffic-producing engine. And we believe you do not want to hit or miss that, right?
You can ask for assistance from a reliable digital marketing agency like us, especially when your website needs more digital leads. Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we have a strong team of marketing experts ready to serve and help you with your marketing needs.
Contact us and discover how we can help you reach your revenue goals thru content creation marketing and lead generation websites.