Note from Rebecca: Carlos del Rio is working with us on some conversion and landing page testing, and he agreed to author a few blog posts about the topics. Also check out his previous post in the series, "Can the Long-Tail Hurt Your PPC Campaign?"

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Doing business on the Internet means you have an unlimited audience -- it also means you have many competitors. Thankfully, you also have numerous options to build your personal path to success on the web. They fall into two rough groups: Traffic and Customers.

Building Traffic

Traffic is all the people that see your site or pass on your brand to another person.

Web Traffic can be built through Search Optimization, both paid and organic. Increasing your volume through the search engines’ results can be a very time consuming process and requires a high level of maintenance. Your results are only as good as your current situation. There are regular changes to the search engines and ad distribution systems, and your many competitors will also be changing to take visibility for themselves.

A search campaign will include a combination of:

• Research to find keywords, link opportunities, and current positions
• Site changes to improve architecture and content
• Link acquisition through content creation, link buying, and link baiting
• Measuring results
• And then repeat the process

It is important to remember that the purpose of search optimization is traffic. Some people become obsessive about rank – that is a mistake. If you build your business on a handful of phrases, you are building a tower on wheels.

Search is a great option if you are already doing well, it will help you grow incrementally and increase your position to weather things like search engine changes.

Web Traffic can also be built through offline marketing like television and print. The Internet is not an island, and we are nearly immune to banners. Kia earlier this year aired a commercial that featured a man turning the pages of a book that was titled Kia.com, and every page of the book said in large letters Kia.com. The same goes for Burger King, who recently aired a commercial that ends with www.whopperfreakout.com. Both Kia and Burger King have successfully leveraged TV into web traffic; BK has even manufactured a query space around Whopper Freakout. And this isn’t BK’s first web venture; do you remember the Subservient Chicken?

If you already have an advertising budget, you should be incorporating your websites.

Going Beyond Traffic

If you’re in a position where you already have traffic, or if you don’t have time to wait, you may find a long distance to your next milestone. Traffic begins to degrade very quickly when not attended. If you focus on what you offer, you will find sustaining and growing easier, because a good offer does not disappear while you build traffic.

Unless your only goal is to capture a phrase for vanity, you should start your SEO changes by asking, “What am I going to do with these people once they get here?”

Building Customers

Customers are people that use your site: download, contact you, buy something, etc.

Where Traffic building is largely focused on distribution and visibility, Customer building is focused on people. Building customer base can be approached from a standpoint of retention or acquisition.

Retention means loyalty, giving each customer a reason to come back. Take, for example, Zappos -- they have a 365-day return policy. This keeps the customers coming back time and time again – because there is very low risk in purchase. The service level is so high that many people buy multiple pairs of shoes and return them many times. One of my friends bought five pairs of shoes in one work week and returned all but one pair.  Zappos is so customer-centric that they will even send flowers if your mom dies.

Zappos has such good service that these repeat customers ignore the poor usability and low success rate in finding a shoe that fits. While good customer service can be labor intensive, it is something you have control over and can create word of mouth traffic.

Also, you can grow through customer acquisition. For the Internet we call this conversion optimization. But what exactly optimizes your conversions?

Really anything that you control can improve your conversion of Traffic to Customers:

• The colors you use
• The service that you offer
• The brand feeling you create

To improve your bottom line you need to make a clear path of action and show clearly where visitors should go and what you want them to do. Making sure that the action that is important to your business becomes valuable to your visitor is the key to successful customer acquisition.

The positive of conversion optimization is that it focuses on things that are in your power. Google changing their algorithm can’t take away your message, guarantees, or loyal customers. Changes that are made for your traffic building campaigns run parallel to changes that affect your conversions -- so it makes sense to do them both at the same time.

Kia builds brand, Zappos decreases barrier to entry, and Burger King offers entertainment; all get the same end, more Traffic. But these new thousands of people are no more likely to become customers than the previous thousands.

If you are changing content to optimize for a keyword, you should also be making changes that improve your path to action. When you are building traffic you will quickly find increasingly difficult barriers to scale. Pouring thousands of visitors into a leaky sieve is going to make improvement slow. So, how do you improve quickly?

• Change your return policy
• Change the way you handle abandoned purchases
• Change what you put at the top of your page
• Think about what you want when you are a customer

If you are currently considering SEO, you should also be considering why you need more traffic. If you need more traffic because you aren’t selling well, you are taking the long road. If you need traffic because you need to scale up, you might as well consider how you can reduce friction for your customers at the same time.

By reaching for the low-hanging fruit in Traffic building and Customer acquisition at the same time, you will reap the most benefits from both.