SEO/SEM and the quality of your web traffic…

The people we (web designers/developers) create work for are always really interested in web traffic – LOTS of web traffic. But there is one thing that many web designers/developers and even our clients don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.

We (developers & clients alike) love counting page-views and unique visits but from my point of view, if the traffic you are attracting is poor, who cares if you get thousands of visits a day!

How can we determine the ‘quality’ of web traffic?

  1. Length of their visit…
  2. If you sell a service/product what your ‘conversion rate’ is…
  3. How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
  4. How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.

Your traffic (probably*) is poor if are people don’t hang around very long, never buy anything, never bookmark your stie etc etc.

For a starter to determining the quality of your traffic, any good stats package will answer these first few questions.

* However if your website is visually poor, crap content, products no-one wants etc etc can have a big effect too!

Be specific with the Search Term/PhraseFor instance… say you sell Acoustic Guitars and have a good rating for ‘guitars’… you’ll probably end up with a lot of ‘guitar’ traffic but this is not necessarily good.

What will happen is that the majority of your traffic is looking for information about guitars be it electric, tutorials etc but NOT necessarily about your nice hand-made acoustic guitars … AND that will be if you are lucky!

It could/would be much worse if you haver an even looser/broader search term.Now, lets get better traffic…

With this in mind you now decide to target ‘Acoustic Guitars’… with some work and in the mirky worls of SEO/SEM some luck, you get a good position in the search engines… However, you’ve now lost the top spot for ‘Guitar’!!!

But… Wait… that’s not so bad! Because now you get people who are actually interested in what you’re offering, and ultimately sales etc should go up PLUS you should get more return traffic.

Is Google/Search Engines better for business?

Basically: people who reach you from other websites/links/affiliates that you may be linked to are generally browsers, people who are being nosy and not on your site for any specific reason. This is why traffic from Search Engines generally can be much better.

Websites/Links/Affiliates CAN deliver great traffic…

Hold on… I just said the opposite above didn’t I?

OK, but if they are good resources, they can also filter/clean up traffic properly.

An example of this is if I had a link to your Acoustic Guitar selling website, and the link text reads:

‘Buy hand-made Acoustic Guitars’

Hopefully they will be more likely to want to buy from you. Whereas if my link said ‘Acoustic Guitar Information’, I’d end up sending some poor traffic to you!

My Conclusion…

Forget about dominating ALL of the search terms/phrases… instead concentrate on some ‘killer’ ones which will generate more committed traffic, as opposed to traffic which is simply passing by.

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