STFU about traffic
by Brian Turner
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!
One of the huge pitfalls of marketing these days is that too many persons and companies are chasing traffic - rather than targeted traffic.
It’s reminiscent of the late 90’s dotcom boom, where the focus was simply on gaining visitors - without worrying about any kind of call to action (CTA) being achieved.
And what’s more worrying is that it’s not simply small fish that are doing this - but big fish, too.
Pitfalls of traffic
I’ve recently seen small websites try to bring in traffic, even if entirely untargeted. For example, I recently found one of my site’s Alexa profile page republished deep on a website about fishing equipment.
It’s got to be asked - what the hell does an Alexa page about a marketing company have to do with the fishing tackle industry?
It gets worse, though - some online newspaper publications have been aggressively chasing low quality backfill to bring the visitors in. CNN is one very big fish that is now republishing syndicated press releases on its site. The question that needs to be asked is what actual benefit does CNN have from doing so?
Especially when junk duplicate content could accidentally end up taking the place of its higher quality content on search engines? In such an event, what sort of brand projection will CNN be encouraging?
It’s a general problem though I’ve seen on discussions across business forums - traders desperately asking for help with traffic, applying schemes that will bring in untargeted traffic, and all the while not a single attempt to ensure its targeted.
True, these tend to be younger companies that probably have to learn from experience, but it’s a dangerous position to start with - to seek general attention, rather than attention from a targeted market audience.
Guaranteed Way to Get 100,000 visitors per month!
If traffic for traffic’s sake is all you want, then getting high volume untargeted traffic is very easy.
Platinax accidentally found this out a couple of years ago with a live test on how Google Images works.
The idea was simple - on a news item about a celebrity, the image accompanying the item was given a couple of adult keywords. These adult keywords were repeated in the text.
The aim at the time was not to generate traffic, but to simply create a test on how Google Images work. If was out of context for easier testing, with the aim of seeing how keyword associations could rank an image on Google Images.
It took 3 months for Google Images to update before the results came in - and flooded in they did.
The result was a huge influx of traffic, sourced from adult keyword searches, mainly from Google Images.
And the traffic was entirely useless.
There was no improvement to CTR on ads, no return visitors, no subscribers to feeds, no new members to the forum sourced from this.
Just a large volume of useless, bandwidth burning traffic.
If that’s what you want - go ahead - repeat what happened here. Add celebrity images with adult keywords, sit back, and watch your server get burned up. With no benefit.
Targeted traffic is the key
The key isn’t to have traffic - it’s to have traffic that is so targeted as to increase the chances of a Call To Action - CTA - whether it’s news subscribers, sales, lead conversions, ad CTR improvement, return visitors, or similar.
Where the traffic isn’t targeted, you lose out on all of that.
In my SEO business, I have a small SEO client who gets an average of 30 uniques per day according to Webalizer. That means actual human visitors are lower.
Sounds like a failure, right? I mean - 30 uniques tops per day? Pathetic, right?
However, the traffic is incredibly targeted towards buyers of a certain type of industrial product, where each individual sale is worth tens of thousands of pounds.
They rank top for all their major brands and keywords - the traffic is targeted, and only targeted.
What’s really funny is that the company secretary and tech support help had to go behind the company director’s back to set up the SEO. They knew it made sense, but he distrusted the internet entirely.
Now he loves it, is setting up his own brand-centered sites, and I’m his best friend.
The bottom line on traffic
The only worth traffic has is if you can convert it to some desirable action. Traffic volume has no intrinsic value.
Therefore any serious business needs to really focus on creating and presenting a website that delivers to a targeted audience.
You need to deliver on what your potential customers may want to find, may need to see.
If you do that, you have a potentially good website, where it’s actual success is measured by the returns generated from it.
If you simply focus on traffic volume, you’re just shouting out at crowds, and they’re not listening. In fact, you’re probably better off just STFU.
After all, you won’t be selling much unless you do.
Discuss this in the Internet Business forums
Story link: STFU about traffic
Add to Bookmarks:
Related stories:
Leave a Reply
Previous: « What makes an Entrepreneur?
Next: Report highlights failings in SMB’s IT security »
Visited 199 times, 3 so far today