SEO AND THE QUALITY OF WEB TRAFFIC
These days people are really interested in web traffic – big web traffic. But one thing that many web designers don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ’search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.
NOT ALL WEB TRAFFIC IS CREATED EQUAL
People love counting page-views and unique visits but from my perspective, if the traffic sucks, who cares if you get 100 000 visits a day!
HOW TO DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF WEB TRAFFIC
- How long people stay your website
- Your conversion rate – if you sell stuff.
- How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
- How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.
You know your traffic (probably*) sucks if are people leave right away, don’t buy anything, never bookmark your site etc ..
You can determine what the numbers are for the above points, with a good stats program.
* People could also be leaving because your website sucks – bad usability etc.
THE MORE SPECIFIC THE SEARCH TERM/PRASE – THE BETTER
Let’s say you sell Irish Setters and you have good rating for the key word: ‘dogs’. And since lots of people search using the ‘dogs’ key word, you get lots of ‘dog’ traffic.
I called it ‘dog’ traffic because what you find, is that the vast majority of your audience is NOT looking for Irish Setters, most are looking for information about (all the) other types of dogs in the world …. and that’s if your lucky!
Who knows, maybe they are looking for information on bad stocks (a la stock market,) or maybe on not so attractive women … it’s hard to say with such a loose/broad search term.
OK, LET’S GET BETTER TRAFFIC
With this understanding, you now decide to target ‘Irish Setters’, and with work and luck, you get good position in the search engines. But now, you’ve lost your top ‘dog’ position … dog dangit!
But is it really bad news? Well no, because you now find yourself getting people who are actually interested in what you are offering (Irish Setters) and as such, sales go up AND you get more return traffic.
WHY GOOGLE TRAFFIC IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS
To the point: people who reach you from other websites are typically ‘browsers’. These people are not ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on anything specific, they are simply snooping about not ready to commit … that’s why search engine traffic CAN BE much better.
HOW WEBSITE CAN DELIVER GREAT TRAFFIC
That said, some websites can deliver great traffic, if they are designed to filter/clean up traffic properly.
For example: if my website has a link to your Irish Setter selling website, and the link text reads:
‘Buy superb Irish Setters’
Chances are that people who click through from my website to yours, will be more likely to want to buy an Irish Setter from you. If on the other hand, my link text read: ‘free Irish Setter Information’, the quality of the traffic will decrease – you’ll be getting a bunch of free-loaders!
CONCLUSION
Don’t waste your time chasing sucky traffic … go for the ‘killer’ traffic.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
April 21st, 2006 at 5:33 am
Isn’t any traffic good traffic? Doesn’t the amount of traffic I am getting increase my rankings? Which in turn increased my chance of good traffic? Isn’t this what things likes Alexa is all about? How much traffic? Dogs and all?
April 21st, 2006 at 7:00 am
Hey! Stop giving away all our secrets!
(just kidding!)
I think this article is great… it’s so hard to convince clients that SEO and marketing go hand in hand… you can have a great looking site, with well optimized pages, super relevant links, but if you’re not putting in the effort to get found for EXACTLY what you have to offer with good Internet marketing, then your traffic conversion rate will literally suck the bag.
It’s great to be found in the top 5 for “Irish Setters”. But to be found for “Buy Irish Setters” is far better! (On that note, I’d hate to discredit a page or two on “Free Irish Setter Info” – you never know what you might get out of that, including any number of possible links and link text… you can ask people to link to you with the text “Buy Irish Setters” instead of the other way… even if it’s the free information that got THEM to your site in the first place!)
April 21st, 2006 at 8:59 am
@Lara,
Giving away free information is the life-blood of many websites – including Killersites.com. I am not telling people not to give away information, I am justing talking about traffic quality …
Good point.
April 21st, 2006 at 9:26 pm
“WHY GOOGLE TRAFFIC IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS” -?
Google and phrases like, “I Googled-it” have become commonplace. Yet, traffic from other search engines are as important, if not more important, depending on your target audience and website’s goal.
For example, a ComScore report from last July showed that searchers using MSN’s search engine are almost 50% more likely to buy from an e-tailer than other Internet users.
April 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 am
Just a quick note, I as a web developer understand what
SEO stands for but is the average newbie gonna know? My son recently has taken a liking to Flash8 and enjoys your site but he was clueless as to what SEO meant. As a rule of thumb, I try to always spell out what an acronym stands for before I use it.
Otherwise, good article !!
SEO = search engine optimization
April 22nd, 2006 at 9:32 am
Jim,
You’re right! I will make sure to define the acronyms from now on.
CIAO
Stefan
April 24th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Brilliant, I never really thought on that too much.
Now i realize how important it is.
April 25th, 2006 at 2:34 am
Really nice post. It is better to to give away free information about related topics as this will help millions of newbies.
“Awesome”
April 25th, 2006 at 2:42 am
@Kym:
“Isn’t any traffic good traffic? Doesn’t the amount of traffic I am getting increase my rankings? Which in turn increased my chance of good traffic? ”
No, no and maybe.
The last ‘maybe’ needs comment: if you get lots of traffic and people talk, maybe you’ll find yourself getting some good traffic at some point.
That said, you still should go for the good/killer traffic.
Hope that helps,
Stefan
May 12th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
I love this site, and the content it has. Thanks for the useful pertinent original content! I have a client very interested in SEO. So far I have been using the ” update your page often, use useful pertinent orginal content” and have a great looking site for SEO. Can others recommend links to read more about SEO and how to explain it to clients? Thanks again. Dave
May 12th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
@Dhgatsby:
“Can others recommend links to read more about SEO and how to explain it to clients? ”
I will putting out more stuff very soon.
Thanks,
Stefan
February 9th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
This is a great topic. In the social networking field, this is extremly important. When you target junk traffic, and even if your conversion rate is high, it really doesn’t mean anything. You end up with junk members and junk profiles. But a Quality traffic results in great profiles, high percentage of returning visitors.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Great article. Very usefull information for people. This is exactly what we try to tell people.
John,
December 22nd, 2007 at 11:03 am
I have to agree that search engine optimization is very important to promote your web site.
Your example of dogs and Irish Setters is sound advice. If your site is about Irish Setters, you will get quality traffic if you SEO it for Irish Setters. If you SEO it for dogs, you would be wasting Internet bandwidth and getting much non related traffic that pertains to your site.