Increasing the amount of visitors that visits a website is one of the primary objectives of search engine optimization (SEO), but it’s not always in the company’s best interest to do so. The following are some of the reasons why.
One of the most significant components of organic search optimization is increasing the amount of traffic that is generated to a website.
After all, as SEO specialists, we are tasked with carrying out these duties.
Our job is to increase the number of people who visit a client’s website by putting into action a variety of technical improvements, strategic content plans, off-page suggestions, and other similar strategies.
Every SEO report emphasises traffic that comes from organic sources. I’m assuming that this measure is one of the foundational key performance indicators.
Although delivering more visitors to a website is a fundamental component of a robust organic strategy, it is essential to keep in mind that increased organic traffic does not always convert into a net positive. This is something that must be kept in mind.
The following are some instances in which increasing the volume of traffic to a company is not beneficial to the organisation.
Users are not finding what they are looking for, and there is a mismatch between users’ and developers’ intended purposes.
This particular one is easy to understand.
Let’s imagine a visitor is doing a search for a certain query; your website has a high ranking for that query; and the visitor clicks on a result that brings them to a page on your website.
The page that they visit, however, does not fit the objective of what they were seeking for, and as a result, they rapidly exit the website.
Because the user’s expectations were not satisfied by the outcome of the search, the searcher did not have a good experience.
We are aware that the algorithm that Google uses to display the results that are most relevant to a user’s search is always being updated and improved, but we also know that it is not perfect.
This may lead to greater bounce rate metrics, lower time-on-site metrics, and other types of data if a searcher is seeking for something, gets to your website, creates more traffic, but then rapidly departs since the content of your site is not what they were wanting.
These factors have the potential to send negative signals back to Google’s algorithm, suggesting that the result provided by your website is not the best one for the query or intent being searched for.
Either You Don’t Have a Content Strategy or You Have One That Is Poorly Executed
Would you invite people around for supper if your home was a complete disaster in every room?
Or what if you were unable to get the food and beverages prepared in time to be served at the event?
Unfortunately, if your visitors turned up while your house was in this shape, they probably wouldn’t be raving about your get-together to their friends and family back at home.
People won’t stay on a website if you attempt to drive traffic to it before you have the core improvements in place, and the same is true if you already have traffic.
Users are not going to remain around if you do not have a comprehensive content strategy in place or if you are releasing badly written material.
Users will not stay on your site for very long if it loads at the speed of a tortoise or if it is not compatible with mobile devices.
Because Google places such a high priority on this matter, the company is releasing an upgrade called the Page Experience in order to improve the company’s ability to assess how well each site satisfies the requirements of organic search visitors.
It is necessary for you to place the same level of importance on it.
Before you bring guests over, you should make sure that your SEO home is in as much of a state of order as is humanly possible.
The Number of Visitors Is Not As Important As the Number of Customers Converted
In light of the two criteria discussed above, an age-old question arises: Which is more significant, a greater volume of organic traffic or a greater number of organic conversions?
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On each side of this debate, one might provide a wide variety of arguments to support their point of view.
If you were to ask me, however, I’d rather have 100,000 visits to a website and have 50 percent of them convert (that’s a very good conversion rate, don’t you think? ), rather than 200,000 visitors and only 25 percent of them convert.
It is not enough to just aim for more traffic when developing an SEO strategy.
If we stopped there, we would be removing one of the most crucial components of the function of an SEO (if not the single most important aspect), which is to provide a higher return on investment (ROI) for companies.
If you are experiencing a rise in traffic but that traffic is not also increasing your conversion rate, then the organic results you are obtaining are not actually the best they can be.
The Website Is Being Subjected To Unfavorable Coverage
Gains in traffic might occur for a variety of reasons that you would presumably like to prevent.
If your company is being investigated or is getting terrible news, coming back to your customer and saying that you witnessed an increase of 80 percent in organic traffic month over month is not exactly going to put a great spin on things.
If there was a recent controversy that brought in a rush of visits, you wouldn’t want to emphasise that as a good gain to a customer, and you also wouldn’t want to attempt to claim that it was due to a cemented organic approach either. Those are two contradictory explanations.
The most important thing is to have a situational awareness of what’s going on from a more holistic perspective.
An Increase in Traffic Across All Channels Is Having the Opposite Effect
If we expand our scope outside the organic channel, we can quickly find additional contexts in which it would be counterproductive to increase the volume of visitors being driven to the website.
This might boomerang on you if you are sending traffic to your website via other means, such as bought traffic, but your website is not optimised in terms of its content, its technical aspects, or its user experience.
Our competitors in pay-per-click advertising (PPC) could be sending more traffic to a page that is prompting people to quit the site almost immediately while paying a higher cost-per-acquisition.
The Traffic Is Not Made Up of Humans or Desired Visitors Bot Traffic
It is very necessary to pay special attention in Google Analytics to the different traffic sources and channels.
In the event that this traffic is not coming from actual people but rather spambots, then a rise in traffic would not be considered a good development in this scenario.
It is believed that bots are responsible for 37 percent of all website activity, and less than half of this activity generated by bots may be considered legitimate.
Spambot traffic is a sort of traffic that is often made up of illicit traffic that is delivered to a website in order to distort and inflate the facts about that website’s traffic.
For more information, please see How to Filter Out Referral Spam in Google Analytics.
You’re Throwing Away Valuable Resources By Doing This
Increased website traffic might put a strain on the resources available to you at times. You might have a very strong informative piece of content that is producing a tonne of traffic, but if it is not relevant to your target, you could wind up with unexpected repercussions as a result of your actions.
This extends beyond server troubles and creates a very real cost for the frontline workers and customer care agents who have to handle calls, emails, chats, and in-person queries from individuals who are not likely to become customers.
It is crucial to make sure that the leads you are getting through search have a high level of intent and that they are relevant.
Value Creation, Not Just Traffic Acquisition
There are a variety of different types of traffic. Not all traffic has any real significance.
Although increasing website traffic is an essential component of search engine optimization, it is important to note that this assertion should be qualified in some way.
One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the generation of high-quality traffic to a website.
Reporting on gains in traffic that did not ultimately bring any value – for example, there was no interesting piece of content that drew more users, no optimization enhancement that led to increased conversions, etc. – is not a value-add.
When doing any kind of optimization, the quality of your traffic and the activities that users perform should be at the forefront of your attention.