9 Traffic Tools That Help Us Drive Higher Quality Traffic
When it comes to selling products & services online – the QUALITY of your traffic is much more important than the quantity. In today’s blog post I will share with you my favorite traffic tools for driving high-quality traffic and a lot of it!
When we’re talking about the “quality” of your traffic, we’re talking about:
- Buyers intent – are these buyers?
- Demographic match – is this traffic your actual target audience?
- Cost-effectiveness – can this traffic reach my CPA (cost per action) goals?
9 Web Traffic Tools You Should Be Using!
1. Google Analytics
First and foremost, Google analytics is absolutely crucial in driving quality traffic. The ultimate mistake in driving traffic is not tracking your results. Google Analytics allows you to track conversions (goals), tells you which traffic sources are converting the best, and lets you segment your data so that you can go out and find more high-quality traffic. As far as I am concerned, it is the most essential tool in internet marketing. Visit Google Analytics!
2. Quantcast
After tracking, you need to make sure you’re doing your market research. If you don’t know anything about your demographic or target customer, you’re going to end up driving untargeted, low-quality traffic to your site that doesn’t convert. Quantcast gives you a demographic profile of your site, or, if you’re too small, your closest competitor – so you can get a feel of what audience you should be targeting.
We also use it for buying advertising – it tells you what demographic usually visits whatever site you want to advertise on, so you know if your traffic is going to be targeted or not. For more on quantcast and market research, check out our Market Research series over on our blog. Visit Quantcast!
3. Google Website Optimizer/Visual Website Optimizer
The thing that really sets apart top tier internet marketers and the rest of the crowd is simply this: split testing to increase conversion rates. It not only separates them from the crowd now, but will keep their advantage for years to come.
Basically, Google Website Optimizer and Visual Website Optimizer are split testing tools that allow you to test different versions of your website against eachother simultaneously to determine which version generates a higher ROI. The higher your conversion rate, the more you can spend on traffic, the more you can spend on traffic, the better you can compete. For example, if you are able to pay $40 per conversion, and your competitor can only pay $35, you can basically wipe the floor with them.
It’s the ultimate competitive advantage and if you are selling something online – if you are not split testing, you absolutely need to be. Visit Google Website Optimizer!
4. ClickTale & CrazyEgg
Another tool in optimizing websites – Clicktale and Crazyegg give you in depth information on how your visitors behave when they get to your website.
Crazyegg offers heat map tracking – showing you what places your visitors click on the most. It can show you places where you should have something for sale – for example, you might have an image that gets a lot of clicks – maybe that means you should link that image to something.
Clicktale goes a little more in-depth, offering actual recorded sessions of how your visitors interacted with your page. You can literally see them scrolling through your site and moving their mouse (a little creepy), and make business decisions based on their behavior. These are both massively useful tools and highly recommended. Visit Clicktale and CrazyEgg!
5. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools basically gives you an in-depth look into how your website is functioning. It shows you what your pageload time is (according to Google), which is a known ranking factor, it shows places on your site where there are errors or broken links, and it shows you your impressions/clickthrough rate/positioning for keywords.
It’s a useful tool in determining how well your SEO efforts are going, and we use it especially to see if we need to optimize our title/description tags (if our clickthrough rate is lower than it should be). Visit Google Webmaster Tools!
6. RankTracker
Ranktracker is one of the most powerful tools we use – it allows us to track our organic search rankings for hundreds of keywords at a time. Whenever we begin SEO work, we put in our keywords into rank tracker, and it allows us to see what gets us the best results. For example, we’ll buy a link wheel package and see how many spots it moves us up in our rankings – and based on those results, determine what kind of link building we need to continue with. Tracking your results online is essential – and RankTracker is a must-have in your SEO arsenal of tools. Visit RankTracker!
7. SEO Spyglass
SEO Spyglass allows you to see your competitor’s backlink profiles. Now, that might not seem like much at first, but it actually is incredibly powerful. When Google has ranked a site #1 for a keyword that you want to go after, the best place to start is by mimicking that #1 person’s backlink profile.
SEO Spyglass doesn’t just give you their backlink profile, it shows you the pagerank of each backlink, as well. Using this data, you can go out and essentially copy their backlink profile, moving yourself up in the rankings and dominating your competitors. Visit Seo Spyglass!
8. SEMRush – Marketing
The SEMRush All-in-one Marketing Toolkit is our favorite tool for checking how much traffic a website gets. We use it every day! It pays for itself.
Check out their Traffic Analytics tool – This is the best market competitive research tool on the market, allowing you to get estimations of any website’s traffic. It is also great for spotting your rivals’ strengths and weaknesses and testing a fresh market or niche. If you are ready to use SEMRush then IncomeDiary readers can take advantage of a 14-Day PRO trial. [instead of the usual 7-day trial]
World-leading businesses like eBay, PHILIPS, Booking.com, HP, Quora, and BNP PARIBAS already use SEMRush – why not you?
9. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a similar tool to SEMrush – again highly recommended.
You can find out all about a site’s search engine optimization. I’m talking, backlinks, social media shares, all the keywords it ranks for, 404 pages, broken links, and much more. This tool will show you where you are going wrong with your SEO and how to fix it.
And that’s it! Those are 9 of the best tools that we use to maximize our quality of traffic. There’s plenty of other tools out there that you can use as well – what are some of your favorite tools for internet marketing?
Read more: ‘25 Best SEO Tools For Successful Blogging’
Check out our must read articles about Get Web Traffic:
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21 Best Ways To Increase Your Websites Search Engine Ranking -
10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers -
10 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Getting Search Engine Traffic -
25 Best SEO Tools For Successful Blogging -
How we write top list articles using AI in just 5 minutes -
5 Best AI content creation tools for ranking high in search engines -
7 Lessons From 50 Blog Posts That Send Me The Most Traffic -
10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget
Great post, will definately be trying some of these.
Market Samurai is my personal favorite for market research. I currently use about 4 or 5 of the tools you mentioned. Will have to check out the other tools. Thanks for a helpful post once again.
Great post David, I use some of these tools but not all of them. I do get a little lazy when it comes to traffic optimisation. It’s nice to get a comprehensive list to work with cheers.
Daniel Sumner
Great round-up of services. Wasn’t aware of either #6 or #7. Thanks so much.
Fantastic! I have one more to add and that is Alexa site tools.
Love the info. Have not spent enough time with Quancast.. Will investigate that more now!
Thanks a lot for this post , i think a will use SEO Spyglass
to find fashion competitor.
sorry for my bad english i’m french.
With plugin are you using for the “related post” ?
best
thanks! these are fantastic. A lot of new stuff too.
Very nice tools! I will print this email and research more on these awesome tools. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for these great tips David. I am starting to feel like I am relying too heavily on the Google Keyword Tool these days… With the changes Google made to the tool last year, I am wondering just how reliable the data is…
I will difinitely look into some of these tools.
Thanks.
Great! Thank you very much! Success!
Hi David,
This post is really awesome and it is so cool to know which tools you use to get more traffic to your blog. I’ve been using Google Analytics for sometimes now and I recently just started using Google Website Optimizer to split test my squeeze pages – I must confess, it is awesome!
Thanks so much for the awesome post,
-Onibalusi
You must be able to scale out the competition and do what they do..using these tools will help you do that..
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
Hi Michael, super post. I must agree with you especially with the google analytics, Google Website Optimizer & Google Webmaster Tools. I have been learning and using these tools for few months and the results is great. thanks for this post. just a question Michael, Have you used Market Samurai for your blogs before?
Nice post, but there’s a typo that will throw some people off. You put http://BigBoards.com which takes you to a whiteboard sales site. (with a dash) is the correct URL for the forum directory.
Google Analytics is a great tool to learn what are the best posts with high conversion rate, keywords that bring money and the demographics of converting visitors
Great article, David.
I’ve jumped over to Heatmaps already- think that I’ll certainly be looking to use that on some websites for optimization.
I’m personally not a huge fan of GA though, I find that it isn’t as accurate or as quick to update as other stats packages such as StatCounter.
nice post david. I think there are a lot of tools to help us drive traffic and analyze our traffic, i can think of for example of google analytics.
I’ve been running websites for 3+ years now and have never used ClickTale yet. Am I stupid?
I’ve used CrazyEgg which has been awesome, but I’ve only heard great things about ClickTale.
For the time being I’m using only one tool from mentioned above,
but I’m going to give a try with another ones.
Thank for sharing,
Barbara
P.S. Has tool no. 8 got right link?
#9 by far the best tool in my tool box for getting more than one thing done at a time
Great info! Tnx. I think the main problem is motivation. It is easy to obtain some tools and start to use them.. but it requires time and patience to get results. I started SEO with 30000 searches per month keyword.. failed 🙂
In order to get up I chose keyword with 340 searches per month. And that worked. But 340… you know… it’s not a big number.. at all 🙂
Can anybody say please – what are optimal searches number per month for keywords to start with? If I am absolute novice?
common …why the 50 comment mike…pls go ahead with the other ..Please..know something..you doing a great job and i hope to meet you in future..
DR. BABS
learned a lot here……what about the external google keyword tool?
Great post! I currently use Google Webmaster and Analytics. I will definitely give the others a try. Thanks again.
Thank you for your help! I am Very new to all of this and you have been a light in the darkness! I will keep reading your blogs, and I can’t tell you how many times I go back and re-read! Thanks again!
Very good list you have there. Another great program (with an affiliate offer) is IBP, I use it a little more than market samurai, but it does the same thing. The things I like it is that it can create really great reports for clients and you can put a ton of the websites in that you would like to track for specific keyword position in the search engines. IBP stands for internet business promoter. I am not affiliated with them, but I do like their product. Thanks again!
Awesome post. All of tools is great for online marketing. Anyway, I need to read part 2, PLEASE!
Great tip! Thanks for these. I am still a newbie in internet marketing and would like to learn how to make a job killing income. Your tips are really helpful. Keep coming!
Very informative post. I always learn something new everytime you post and it really helps, especially for a newbie like me. I can’t wait for your next post. Let’s get this to 50 comment 🙂
I especially like Clicktale. It’s like being right there with your visitors, watching over their shoulders.
It can provide great insights into how to make a website more user friendly.
You provided the one in all guide for internet marketer. Some of what I used too. I should check out and try your other suggestions.
Great post, will definately be trying some of these.thanx
Thanks for the tip. I’ll surely check these out. There are some on the list that I’ve already been using. Those that I haven’t looks quite interesting. Surely worth a try if you’d ask me. Great post. Keep it up.
Thank you so much, for these wonderful tips! I’m so glad that you give away your expertise for us to study!
Thanks for sharing the tools 🙂 A quality content attract more traffic plus awesome tools
I only used Google Analytic, the search keyword traffic are good for finding some idea for next post
Thanks for the teriffic advise. I will incorporate many of the ideas into my site.
How do you get those screen grabs with the nice shading around the edge? They look great!
These are some great tools! I use a few of them and they work sooo well.
I am so impressed at the valuable, concentrated information available at this site! Extremely Impressed! Keep up the great work. I will definitely pass the link on.
Awesome list! We use some of these but my mom didn’t know a few of them. She will check them out. Dad handles most of this stuff.
I’m really impressed with your site, you share so much information. Thank you. I’m looking forward to a successful journey. Your site will definately help me get there.
Piano Lesson Girl,
Dakota