Traffic to your website: it’s one of the most common metrics for website health, one of the things you will always see in your analytics reports, and one of the things people brag about.
Is it a good metric for business?
Yes and no.
No, because…
- more traffic without more sales just means more people not buying your product.
- more traffic can sometimes mean badly targeted traffic — in other words, the wrong people — especially if you’re working with an SEO company that focuses only on traffic.
- unless people are paying to go to your website, just having more traffic doesn’t help your bottom line.
Yes, because…
- both e-commerce and lead generation are numbers games. You’re going to have a conversion rate of perhaps 2%, so the more traffic you have, the closer you are to getting those sales and leads.
- good traffic from the right places is a sign of the overall health of your website.
- strong traffic encourages ads, sponsors, and investors.
So, on balance, you want to track and increase your traffic. You also want to make sure it’s the right traffic from the right sources. Watch out for the following warning signs:
- Lots of referral traffic from spammy sites — this can be a sign of black hat or just bad practices on the part of your SEO firm.
- Lots of traffic to unimportant parts of your website. For example, if you have an infographic you use for link bait, you want traffic to go there and then to explore your website, not to go to that page and bounce away.
- Too much traffic from outside your service area. If you own a spa in Kansas City, you don’t need lots of visits from India.
As long as your traffic is appropriate and relevant, you should feel good about traffic increases and know that work on your website traffic will pay off in the long run..
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