Let’s talk about website traffic. The Holy Grail of digital marketing. Everyone wants it and once they have it, they want more of it. When you open up your GA it’s the first thing that you look at. When you talk to a new digital marketing agency it’s the first thing that you tell them you don’t have enough of. We have become almost obsessed with traffic. But…is your business improving? Are you getting more sales? Are you getting more leads?
Traffic Is Important, But It’s Not The Goal
To get real results from your digital marketing you have to start with the real goal. Traffic is important, no doubt. Without it, you have absolutely zero chance of attaining your goals. But, you have it and not attain your goals. Traffic comes in two flavors; high-quality traffic and low-quality traffic. High-quality traffic is full of people that fit the profile of your customers and they are in the right stage of the buying cycle, based on the page that they are engaged with, on your site.
Low-quality traffic if full of people that 1) are not the profile of the customers that you do business with, or 2) they aren’t in the stage of the buy cycle that is relevant to the page that they landed on.
Want More High-Quality Traffic?
Makes sense, but getting it takes some analysis of the traffic that you’re currently getting. First, this may seem counter-intuitive, it’s important to try to figure out why you’re getting that low-quality traffic. Granted, you’ll never get rid of all low-quality traffic, but you sure can reduce the amount that you’re getting.
The first step is to determine if there are commonalities among the people within the low-quality traffic group. Are they all coming from your Facebook page? Or, maybe you’re getting low-quality traffic from social channels, in general. Or, maybe it wasn’t the person that was low-quality but where they landed on your site.
Or, maybe it wasn’t the person that was low-quality but where they landed on your site. Maybe, they landed on a page that talked about a product or service that you offer, that wasn’t what they were looking for. Or maybe their experience with the page that they landed on was really bad, so they just left.
All of these things have to be considered as you start to tweak the type of traffic that your site is getting.
Focus On The Goal
Traffic is just a means to the end. Ultimately, the goal is more sales, more leads, more members, etc. All of your online efforts have to improve your business, or it’s a waste of time, money, and effort. The first step to any digital marketing strategy or website design/development is to get more business. To do that you have to have conversions. But, don’t just focus on the final conversion of a sale or a quote request, or a contact us request. Yes, these are indeed the ultimate conversions, however, there are a lot of conversions that happen earlier in the buying cycle.
At the top of the sales funnel, prospective customers may visit your site simply to learn about your company or your services. As they move down through your sales funnel, they may download some type of information that you have on your site, like a case study or a white paper. These are all conversions as the customer goes through their decision-making process.
It’s important to make sure that you have the right kind of information on your site for all of the types of conversions that your prospective customers will go through. Because if you don’t provide it, you will have spent a lot of money to generate low-quality traffic.
More Information
We’ve been working with clients for a very long time on how to generate a better quality of traffic to their site. In fact, we’ve even written a white paper on the topic and you can get your copy of this white paper for FREE!
