Tips for Turning Unintended Traffic Into Ambassadors

If you have a content-rich, optimized site, you’re likely getting a substantial amount of organic traffic from channels you didn’t plan on – visitors searching for something related to your business who briefly land at your site and move on. Rather than ignore this extra traffic, you should engage them as potential ambassadors and influencers.

Recently, I reviewed analytics for one of our sites and found we get a lot of organic traffic for “B2B selling”, nearly all of it pointing to a single page on the site. We don’t really focus on B2B selling. We focus on B2B marketing. While related, they are different. And because the rest of the site is focused on B2B marketing, the page getting a high amount of organic traffic for “B2B selling” has a high bounce rate.

Rather than ignore that traffic, we need to develop content and navigation that keeps those visitors on the site a while longer and offers them a way to engage with us further, an opportunity to create a conversion. Whether it’s subscribing to the blog, downloading an eBook, subscribing to a newsletter, reading to a related article or blog posting, to sharing something with a colleague. After all, people searching for “B2B selling” likely have colleagues focused on B2B marketing. We need to develop a strategy and create content that makes B2B sellers (influencers) pass along or recommend our site, or become ambassadors for our eBooks, and share with their B2B marketing counterparts (our buyers).

Search your analytics data, and you might uncover similar findings.

1. Using your analytics, run a report of your top 100 organic keywords.
2. Export this to an Excel file.
3. Create new column in which you multiply the bounce rate for each keyword times the number of visits. This will give you the number of bounced visits for each keyword.
4. Sort the data by descending order of bounced visits. This will give you a prioritized list of keywords with the most bounce activity.
5. Then go back to your keyword report and identify the landing pages for these high-bounce keywords.

Once you’ve identified these streams of related traffic and the pages they land on, identify what you what can you do to lower the bounce rate and engage these visitors as potential ambassadors. Here are some ideas:

• Create new content for that audience, something they (the influencers) will want to share with buyers.
• Offer an eBook or some other valuable content asset in exchange for registration. Then, dedicate a segment of your email marketing to continue to reach these influencers.
• At a minimum, put some links on the landing pages to direct these influencers to other related content that might interest them, maybe a blog posting or two.
• Make sure your landing page has prominent subscription options to things like your newsletter or blog, and the ability to easily follow you on Twitter.
• If the landing page is content that can be shared, provide easy, automated ways for people to do so.

Once you’ve made the changes, remember to check your analytics for the results. Did the bounce rate go down? Did you get more conversions? Was the content shared more?

In a couple months, repeat the process. In doing so, you’ll gradually convert that ancillary traffic into meaningful interactions and leads.