The vastness of the internet means it's a competitive place to work, especially when you're trying to win over new visitors. Battles to increase website traffic are often hard-won, and the work of attracting a larger audience is never-ending — but that doesn't mean you have to set your sights months down the road to see results. There are some steps you can take to increase website traffic right away. Even if you're already drawing a respectable audience, consider how these strategies might elevate your website's performance and increase your sales opportunities.

Crafting a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign can be quite the arduous task. You have to consider who you're targeting, whether you're selling an individual product or the business itself and, of course, how you can stay within budgetary constraints. However, with so much to consider, you may be glossing over one of the most important components of a campaign to generate SEM leads: local keywords.

More than ever, customers are calling local businesses directly from searches, without ever visiting a company's website. For SMBs, it's easier than ever to use call tracking not only to monitor this surge, but also to connect online and offline worlds and get a better return from investments.

But before answering the questions "How does call tracking work?" and "What can it do for my business?" it's important to understand what it is.

What Is Call Tracking?

Call tracking simply means monitoring your business's incoming phone calls. With call-to-action buttons easily incorporated into digital marketing campaigns, particularly SEM, it's simple to collect a great deal of information. Without this technology, however, it wouldn't illuminate your offline campaigns — or help you monitor customers who dial rather than click to call. Thus, you might assume a particular campaign isn't working, and you could be making a costly mistake.

Crafting an SEM campaign is a lot of work, and it can be frustrating when a well-thought-out strategy isn't generating the leads you expected it to. However, by taking a step back and reevaluating some of your campaign's core components, you can get back on track without completely going back to the drawing board.

Whether your campaign has only been running for a few weeks or is well-established, these are three mistakes that you could be making right now.

Your Keywords Are Too Popular

When you first begin crafting your SEM campaign, you'll probably do a little research and find keywords that will help searchers connect with your business. Although this is a great place to start, it's easy to forget that competitors may very well be crafting their campaigns using the exact same keywords you are.

Converting competitors' customers into your own is an art form. Beyond being the best at what you do, you need to beat the competition at their own game. If you want your business to grow, you must constantly be seeking new opportunities. It's only logical that the most effective place to seek out those opportunities is among users who are already inclined to purchase your products and services. As the information economy evolves, there are several highly effective strategies for nabbing the competition's audiences.

Bidding on Competitors' Brand Keywords

One strategy involves going right to the source — include your competition's brand name in your pay-per-click ad campaign. You may have seen this plan in action when you're searching for a particular store or item and another brand name pops up. The challenge, however, is to keep your quality score high. Consumers looking for Best Buy may not be happy to see Bob's Computer Services pop up, and search engines will rank your ads and site lower for that. But for new businesses, or in markets where there is brand confusion, this can be a highly effective technique.

Even for brands generating great traffic from organic channels, search engine marketing remains a high-value outlet for reeling in valuable prospects. SEM leads excel at generating sales leads and likely conversions. More so than even organic traffic, SEM has the power to find you quality leads at a high clip and cultivate a steady stream of high-interest consumers.

But when it comes to paid search, lead generation is only as good as the targeting methods used to identify and attract those consumers. As SEM Rush points out, the quality of a lead depends on the mechanics of your targeting strategy, which include the abilities to target through keywords, filter an audience through various criteria and deliver a relevant landing page. In a perfect world, the components of a paid search campaign work together to single out the highest-value traffic and lead it to your online assets.

Because of this, optimization is crucial. Here are some essential steps to optimize your SEM strategy for lead generation.

The Cox Media Group (CMG) Local Solutions team is proud to announce we've placed second for the 2015 Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner Award for Highest Customer Satisfaction. This award was based on the feedback of our small- and medium-sized business customers in our markets across the country. 

"We're honored to be recognized with Google AdWords' Premier SMB Partner Award for Highest Customer Satisfaction," said Jesse McCambridge, CMG's Sr. Director of Digital Solutions. "Our relentless focus on marketing excellence, customer service and delivering results for our advertising customers is represented with this award. We would like to thank our valued clients and our dedicated team of digital marketing experts that have made this possible."

Though online shopping allows consumers to make purchases while they're still wearing bunny slippers, surprising data was unveiled in early 2015 that showed the vast majority of consumers prefer to shop in store at least some of the time. PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that many consumers still shop at physical stores once a week, with only 27 percent shopping online weekly. However, even though consumers are willing to show up at a store, marketers have to give them a reason to do so. Fortunately, paid search marketing can help your business accomplish this task.

When it comes to search engine marketing (SEM), keyword strategy remains essential. Social media and other digital marketing channels may provide streams of traffic and referrals, but paid search depends on key phrases to effectively target consumers, drive website traffic and generate conversions.

Long-tail keywords may seem like an unnecessary refinement due to a potentially narrow scope, which can make targeting seem too limited to add value, but this perspective overlooks one fundamental truth of the Internet. Many users from all over the world are running Google searches on a constant basis, and some are using specific phrases as they search. Long-tail keywords focus on a select niche, but this niche has strong volume for your prospective targets.

If you're new to the concept of long-tail keywords or aren't sure how to use them for SEM, here's a quick primer.

Conversion metrics are a crucial part of any search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. SEM can put your offerings in front of customers as they're searching for them. But if you aren't measuring visitor actions, you don't really know what's working.

You can track many different conversion metrics — online sales, phone calls, app downloads, in-app actions, new leads and in-store purchases to name a few. Inc. even shares a helpful list of 11 Web analytics tools to help develop a strategy for optimizing your campaign according to your business goals. You should develop a strategy that includes knowing what behaviors you want to encourage of your visitors once they land on your site, but this will vary according your campaign goals and even the business you're in.