YOU DON’T WANT MORE TRAFFIC.

You might think you do, but you don’t.

SEO firms will promise it to you. Marketing agencies will show you gorgeous looking case studies: “We increased traffic by 1,115%!”

You will read blog post after blog post after blog post promising that if you just do X, Y and Z from their top 10 list, your traffic will explode like a majestic firework made out of money – all your business problems will be solved. And after all that brainwashing, it might even say so in your own messy handwriting, printed in your book of marketing goals for 2014 – “Improve website traffic”.

When it comes to most things in life, I’ll take quality over quantity any day. That includes business prospects.

For most coaches, consultants and small businesses today, the website should be a pillar in their marketing strategy and a primary sales channel.

In the day and age of inbound marketing – creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product – heavy web traffic that includes a high number of unique visitors to your website might look good, but if those visits aren’t from quality leads – people who might actually buy what you’re selling – it’s nothing more than traffic for traffic’s sake.

To get quality leads, you have to know exactly who your ideal client is. By developing buyer personas for ideal clients, you can better attract quality leads. 

You don’t want more traffic. Scratch it out.

1. You want better-targeted traffic, not more traffic.
2. Sometimes, earning better quality traffic (and more money) means reducing the amount of incoming traffic by being exclusive to your market.
3. To capture that targeted traffic, you need to know who that market is. That means building personas – and then building a brand around them.
4. There are other, better success metrics to focus on: Leads, sales, cost per lead, return purchases, sentiment analysis and so on. Don’t get distracted by traffic’s big shiny disco ball.

You don’t want more traffic. In fact, sometimes you might want less.

You can wind up with a lot of nice-looking numbers and spend countless hours of admin time trying to vet leads.

Traffic on its own is worthless.

It’s the things traffic is supposed to do for you that make it valuable: leads, sales, brand advocates.

These are what you actually want more of. 

The fallacy here is that more traffic will definitely lead to more of those things.

You get more of those things when you increase your targeted traffic.