Promotion By Position Or Traffic: Advantages, Disadvantages, Features - Insight From Semalt



Each site has one main goal for which it was created but we can also use it as an additional (and sometimes the only) sales channel. Therefore, it is necessary to attract as many visitors to the site as possible. Some of them will become the buyers of goods or the customers of services. But for each site, you need to choose the most effective method of driving traffic. The companies often offer promotion by position or traffic. 

Basically, these 2 methods differ as follows: 

1. The volume of the nucleus

Traffic promotion consists in improving the site's positions for all the possible requests (from 1,000 to 30,000 search phrases), and in case of promotion by positions, the resource will be promoted according to a limited pool of requests agreed with the client at the stage of concluding an agreement (from 50 to 1,000 search phrases).

2. Warranties

In the first case, the company guarantees the traffic to the site from the search engines, and in the second, the site is found in certain positions in the search results (the company does not bear a direct responsibility for the traffic).

It is IMPORTANT to note that both methods use the same technology for improving the position of the resource: optimization of the texts, the link mass, the commercial and behavioral factors.

Not all the sites can be promoted by the traffic, and the positional promotion will not be more beneficial for all types of sites. To understand the intricacies of the SEO and to decide what to choose for a particular business, you can use the professional's services.

For which sites is traffic promotion more suitable?

Promotion by traffic: attracting visitors by a large pool of queries (more than 1,000 search phrases). This type of promotion will be useful for the large online stores, the portals, the real estate agencies.

To get the maximum results, you need to have a multi-page resource with a huge variety of products in the catalog, which can be filtered by various criteria, and the ability to attract visitors through information traffic (articles, blogs, forums).

The products must have several properties (for example, a TV product has filters such as the manufacturer, the model, the screen size, the resolution, the body color, 3D support, etc.), because for each such intersection, you need to create the separate promoted pages with your own CNC, the headlines and a unique content. Each of these filtered pages will be a useful landing page for the visitor and relevant to the search engines, because it will give the user the content he asks, and not the general pages with a product catalog or, worse, the main page of the site, on which you still have to dig around to find what you need. If we take into account that the main purpose of the site is to receive the orders (applications), then the promotion of the "long" mid-frequency and low-frequency requests for such resources will be more effective.

Unfortunately, it is not for all the topics you can offer a traffic promotion.

It is better to not promote the sites with an insufficiently large catalog of traffic - it is too expensive and useless. It is much easier to move up the positions, working through the catalogs, the sections and the subsections more carefully, paying more attention to the transactional queries (with the words "buy", "price", "inexpensive") than to look for the demand where there is none. 

It is IMPORTANT to have a resource that will allow you to make a large number of daily edits. Website, CMS and the hosting must be ready for the colossal loads.

For which sites is the positional promotion more suitable?

The promotion by position is a universal method of getting the targeted visitors. A very large percentage of the visitors convert to the buyers. The main goal of this promotion is to be in the top 3 for the hot requests.

The semantic core of the requests is carefully compiled so that the customers' planning to make a purchase in the near future will definitely get to the client's website. For example, there are such hot topics of the business for which it makes no sense to be below the top 10 of the search results, and sometimes it is strictly forbidden to go below the top 3 in order to get the buyers.

Such cases are very clearly shown by the sites that provide a service for the urgent opening of the locks. After all, having lost the only keys to their apartment and standing in front of a locked door, a person will not be able to view 20 sites. He will pay attention to the first 3 companies and choose the one that is closer to him geographically in order to get the service as soon as possible. The same applies to ordering a taxi, delivering water, calling a tow truck, etc.

By position, it is recommended to promote narrowly thematic and image sites (mono brands).

What does the client pay for and what should you pay attention to?

The issue of payment always worries the most of the customers. Basically, the client pays to ensure that his site is as good as possible for both visitors and search engines. In this case, it will bring the maximum benefit and achieve the goal for which it was created.

Depending on the choice of the promotion method, the payment is made once the intended purpose has been achieved.

This is either payment for the attracted visitors (in the case of traffic promotion), or for finding the specific queries in the top. At the same time, it is important to monitor that the client does not overpay for the "empty" visitors.

Why you should not pay extra:

When you are driving the traffic, you should not take into account the direct visits and the branded traffic, since this indirectly depends only on the work of the SEO specialists.

With the positional promotion, you need to keep track of how many days the request was seen in the top 3, top 5, top 10. This is because when you are in the different places, the top 10 benefits for the client too, because the top 3 are viewed much more often than the 8-10 positions in the search results. Correspondingly, the price of a request that is on the 8-10th position should be significantly lower than that of the top-3.

SUMMARY


What is the company responsible for?

If the promotion is based on the traffic: the company is responsible for ensuring that the site constantly grows the targeted traffic as much as the breadth of the audience of the niche in which the site is being promoted, allows of course, within the company's ability to influence the site optimization process.

In case of the promotion by position: the company is responsible for ensuring that the site is ranked as high as possible for the selected target queries in the search engines; again, within the scope of the company's existing opportunities to influence the optimization. As high as possible - this is from the 10th position and higher.

What determines the choice of the tariff? How to understand what is more profitable for me?

Choose a tariff according to your goals: if you need to maximize the traffic, then a traffic strategy; if you need to collect the traffic for a limited list of requests, then a strategy for positions.

Traffic promotion is suitable for absolutely everyone, including the commercial sites. Separately, we will highlight the types of sites that are more efficient to promote by traffic, and not by positions:
  • Content projects
  • E-commerce
  • Hosting
  • Exchanges
  • Message boards
  • Other resources with unlimited semantics
The promotion by traffic is often more expensive than the promotion by the queries, because the volume of work is objectively greater and the process of building up, the semantics itself takes a lot of time. But nevertheless, it also happens that the cost of the promotion by position may not be less. For example, a client fundamentally promotes the requests and believes that only a specific list can receive the targeted visitors. At the same time, the site has a specific list of requests, the premium for which is higher than the premium for traffic.

When in doubt, it is better to talk to a sales manager who can help you choose a profitable strategy.

How to understand that you don't have to pay extra?

Read the contract carefully.

Contract for SEO-promotion by traffic: pay attention to whether the contract contains a condition to exclude traffic by the negative keywords and the basic traffic from the targeted traffic. Also find information about which web analytics system is collecting data and what kind of data it is - visits (sessions)/ visitors.

Contract for website promotion by position: the contract must clearly state the list of the target requests, and describe in detail how the cost is formed. It also describes how the company finds out the position of the site.

How to evaluate the performance of an SEO contractor?

For any SEO strategy, look at the following metrics:
  • Search traffic dynamics. It is desirable that the traffic grows. If the traffic is stable, then you need to check if the objective "ceiling" has been reached in this topic. In this case, stable dynamics is an achievement. The ceiling can be checked by the competitors (for example, the Ahrefs service shows the competitors' traffic) or by the frequency of the requests.
  • The dynamics of the breadth of the semantics. The breadth of the semantics is by how many requests your site is visible in general. 
  • Dynamics of behavioral characteristics: number and percentage of the conversions, bounce rate (also in Metrics and Analytics).
To move through the positions, look at the positions of the selected target queries. To do this, there are many services that an SEO company will provide you with access to. Semalt experts will help you to avoid most of the mistakes.

Conclusion

The importance and validity of the website promotion

The validity and the necessity of having its own website for every company that seeks to develop and expand its business do not need proof today. It is obvious. A huge Internet audience will allow even a start-up company to quickly become famous and recognizable.

Targeted traffic

But when you are investing in the promotion of your site, you should not immediately expect the sales growth and an increase in profits. You need to tell the Internet users about the site, introduce the search robots to it, and much more. After all, the success of an Internet resource directly depends on its popularity and attendance. Moreover, it is desirable if the visitors are targeted, that is, interested in purchasing a product or service from your company. This is exactly what the promotion of your website is for. At the same time, the design of the site and its usability must be performed at a high level, so that once they come to your site, the customers want to come again.

The importance of getting to the first pages of the search

Most of the users will get to your site through the popular search engines - Yandex, Google, Rambler. Therefore, the website promotion necessarily includes its promotion in the search engines. Keep in mind that half of the users browse the sites only from the first pages of the search results. This is where your site should (for certain key phrases) go so that the users will notice it and want to look at it. Therefore, in advance, correctly and concisely compose the snippets - the fragments of the text that the user sees under the link to your site on the search results page.