What Do You Want On Your Website – Heavy Traffic -or- Relevant Visitors?

| June 8, 2010 | 43 Comments

what do you want on your website?When you visit internet marketing forums or blogs, you see a lot of people asking, “Hey, how can I bring more visitors to my website? I don’t get much traffic. How can I possibly get thousands of visitors everyday?”

You will also see some people asking, “I am interested in bringing my target audience to my website. How can I do that and drive targeted and relevant visitors to my website?”

So… Which question is sensible and reasonable?

Some will say that just getting heavy traffic is important and some will say that only getting relevant traffic is important.

Opinions, opinions and opinions…

Well, different people have different opinions and some are good and some are bad. So, before we pass a verdict, we need to dig down deeper and see which opinion is actually viable and realistic.

What Happens If…  You Prefer Heavy Traffic?

If you drive heavy traffic to your site, then one thing is for sure that you will love to see your Analytics report and you will love to see thousands of visitors and page views.

But…Will you also be happy with the conversion rate?

It’s highly likely that your conversion rate will decline miserably. Why? Well, because even though thousands of visitors came to your site, but they were not actually interested in what you were offering.

Bringing Heavy but Useless Traffic to Your Site – An Important Example:

Let me share an example with you. A few years ago, a friend of mine created a website. To bring traffic, he visited chat rooms, forums, discussion boards and blogs and posted his links there. A lot of people visited the site, but no one purchased his products and his bounce rate increased tremendously.

Another way of tempting people into clicking your link is to start participating in discussion forums. Create this anchor text, and link it to your website, in your signature regardless of the products you are selling: “Don’t click here if you are under 18”.

People will click and leave. Your bounce rate will increase and conversion rate will decrease.

So…What is the Solution? How can You Prevent Your Conversion Rate from Declining?

The solution is simple: Start bringing relevant traffic to your website.

Relevant Visitors – Your Key to Online Success:

Don’t worry about a lot of traffic. If your heavy traffic can’t make your wallet thicker, then you don’t need it. So what if your Analytics report shows thousands of visitors a day… Remember, your report won’t pay your bills.

The energy that you put in to bring tons of traffic should be diverted to bringing relevant and targeted traffic.

One Misunderstanding I Want to Avoid Here:

One thing I want to clarify. I am not against heavy traffic. Heavy traffic is good as long as it’s relevant and targeted. So, if you want heavy traffic to increase your sales, you need to ensure that your traffic is relevant as well.

How to Bring Relevant Visitors to Your Website?

Search Engines:

The best way of bringing the targeted traffic is through the Search Engines. You need to rank high in search results on your keywords to bring relevant visitors to your website. Even if you are only getting a few hundred visitors a day, your conversion rate will be much higher when you will compare it with the conversion rate that you will get via heavy but irrelevant traffic.

So, you need to focus on optimizing your website for search engines to attract the most targeted traffic and enjoy increased sales.

Social Networking:

Social Networking is Hot these days. Facebook has changed the way we were accustomed to using the internet in the past. You can meet new people and promote your products easily via social networking.

But… Remember, stay at least 1,000 miles away from spamming when you use social networks. Utilize them effectively by making new friends. Don’t just keep on posting your links to bring traffic. Instead, talk to people, answer their questions, and when the right time comes, promote your services as well.

When you will interact with people and they will get to know you, they will also promote your products for you by referring your site to their family and friends. So, this is also a great way of making your business successful online with relevant traffic.

Conclusion:

So…Now, you know what you need to do to make your website successful. Focus on driving relevant traffic to your website via Search Engines and Social Networking and then work hard to increase it.

Ben Johnson is the Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a custom logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.

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Category: Expert Advice

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  • srinirao

    Definitely some solid ideas here. I strongly believe in embracing quality over quantity and i think that traffic is one place where that is largely applicable. About a month back we posted some news on one our sites about getting hacked and we ended up on the front page of slashdot. WE got 6000 hits in one day and only one one those people subscribed to our site, so it's just evidence that relevant traffic is way better than a ton of irrelevant traffic.

  • http://Under30CEO.com Jared O'Toole

    Agreed we've seen #s like that a lot from things like stumbleupon, digg etc…huge traffic but at the end of the day there are few if any actual subscribers or even comments on the article.

    If you do go for big traffic my advice is to make sure you target the right traffic driving sites who will send people actaully interested in your site. For us traffic from Digg is really unlikely to actaully embrace the under30ceo concept.

  • http://itarsenal.com/ Rob

    Relevance is the new path of success…the internet is becoming so common place, more and more relevance and quality are being easily deciphered…great points here. How to be relevant, or even how to figure out who you exactly want to be relevant to depending on your goals for being online is a much harder concept for me.

  • http://www.drewhawkins.org Drew Hawkins

    I like the way you emphasize quality over quantity in this post. Sure, you need an audience but if it's not the right one it's for not. Great quote: “Remember, your report won’t pay your bills.” I've seen many brag that they are great social media marketers because of high numbers. However marketing isn't so much reaching a mass audience as a target audience. This post was a great reminder in a world caught up in arbitrary numbers.

  • http://www.logoinn.com Ben Johnson

    I reckon, Social Media is the best way to bring target audience on your website, for instance if you are selling or offering any services, you can get tons of traffic from bookmarking, but from social media websites you can get targeted traffic IMAO, but I don't disagree creating a social Buzz because I believe in a famous quote “You can't predict sudden death and sudden customer from when and where it will come to your way” :) so you can't say that tons of traffic does't work.

    @ all of you: Thanks for liking and tweeting the post and sharing you views.

  • http://Under30CEO.com Jared O'Toole

    Right Drew being a marketer it has so little to do with the mass numbers and so much more to do with the right numbers. Those relevant visitors are the ones that convert to sales and actaully end up paying those bills at the end of the day!

  • http://Under30CEO.com Jared O'Toole

    Agreed Ben…I think a balance is important. You want to focus on a target audience and cater most content towards those people and increasing the strength of that core following. However running some campaigns to simply generate buzz is always a good idea just to get your brand out there a little further.

  • http://www.ryanhanley.com/about Ryan Hanley

    This is a great discussion. As my site has grown I've found that being found on Google is really the key to both General Traffic and Relevant Traffic.

    I always prefer relevant traffic but general traffic can spread your word to. I end up on sites some times I didn't mean to and find I like the content and ReTweet or Like… Spreading the word…

    I think it all comes down to being findable…

    Great post.

    Ryan H., http://www.RyanHanley.com

  • http://Under30CEO.com Jared O'Toole

    True its about being findable. Google is a great source for both. I love Google because if you get the right keywords you can endlessly drive relevant traffic to your site and it can be a lot.

  • http://Under30CEO.com Jared O'Toole

    True its about being findable. Google is a great source for both. I love Google because if you get the right keywords you can endlessly drive relevant traffic to your site and it can be a lot.

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