Increasing traffic to your website is one of the key aspects of organic search optimization.
After all, it’s our job as SEO professionals to do this.
Our role is to bring more attention to our clients’ websites by implementing various technical optimizations, strategic content planning, off-page recommendations, and more.
All SEO reports emphasize organic traffic. This metric is one of your key performance indicators, right?
Increasing traffic to your website is fundamental as part of a solid organic strategy, but it’s also important to remember that increased organic traffic doesn’t always translate into net positives.
The following scenario is an example of when increasing traffic is bad for your business.
1. Users can’t find what they’re looking for, there’s a mismatch of intent
This is easy.
Suppose a visitor is searching for a specific query. Your site ranks high for that query and they click on results that lead to pages on your website.
However, the page they land on doesn’t match the intent of what they were looking for and they quickly leave.
This is not a good experience for searchers as the results do not match the user’s intent.
Google’s algorithms are constantly improving to show you the best results for your queries, but they’re not 100% perfect.
Searchers are looking for something, come to your website, generate more traffic, but quickly leave because the content on your site is not what they were looking for.
These send a negative signal back to Google’s algorithms, indicating that the website’s results are less than ideal for its query or intent.
2. No Content Strategy or Poorly Executed
Would you host a dinner party if every room in your house was a mess?
Or what if the food and drink weren’t ready in time for the event?
If guests show up when your home is in this state, unfortunately they probably haven’t written home about your get-together.
Similarly, people won’t stick if you try to attract traffic to your website without doing basic optimization.
Users won’t stick if you don’t have a thorough content strategy in place or publish poor quality content.
If your site loads like a turtle or isn’t mobile friendly, users won’t stay on your site.
This is so important to Google that we have started updating Page Experience to more accurately measure how well each web page meets the needs of organic search visitors.
It must be that important to you too.
Before you invite people over, you need to keep your SEO House as tidy as possible.
3. More traffic is not worth more than conversions
The above two points go into the classic debate of which is more important – more organic traffic or more organic conversions?
There are many different points on both sides of this question.
But if you ask me, attract 100,000 visitors to your site and convert 50% of them (what is conversion rate?) than 200,000 visitors and 25% of them convert. I want to
Getting more traffic is not the only goal of any SEO strategy.
Stopping here eliminates one (if not a single) most important aspect of the role of SEO. It is to increase his ROI of the business.
If your traffic is increasing but your conversion rate isn’t improving, you’re not really getting the best organic results.
4. Your site receives negative press
Increased traffic can happen for reasons you probably want to avoid.
If your business is under scrutiny or receiving negative press, going back to your clients and reporting that they’ve seen an 80% month-over-month increase in organic traffic isn’t always positive.
If a recent scandal resulted in a spike in visitors, you wouldn’t want to highlight it as a positive benefit to your clients or claim it was due to a solid organic strategy.
It’s important to be contextually aware of what’s going on from a more holistic perspective.
5. Increased traffic on all channels is counterproductive
Looking outside the organic channel, it’s easy to identify other situations where increasing traffic isn’t ideal.
This can backfire if you are directing website traffic through other channels, such as paid, to sites that are not optimized for content, technology, or user experience.
A PPC counterpart pays a higher CPA, drives more traffic to the page, and may encourage user abandonment.
6. Traffic is not human or desired bot traffic
It’s important to pay close attention to your Google Analytics traffic sources and channels.
If this traffic is coming from spambots instead of humans, in this case the increase in traffic is not a positive move.
It is estimated that 37% of website activity is generated by bots, and less than half of this bot activity is legal.
Spambot traffic is a type of traffic, usually illegitimate, sent to sites that distort or inflate traffic data.
Learn more about how to filter out referral spam in Google Analytics.
7. You’re wasting precious resources
In some cases, increased site traffic can strain resources. You may have very solid informational content that drives a ton of traffic, but if it’s not relevant to your audience, it can have unintended consequences.
This goes beyond server issues to the very realities of frontline staff and customer service agents having to deal with phone calls, emails, chats, and direct inquiries from unlikely customers. cost.
It’s also important to make sure the leads you’re driving from your search are relevant and have high intent.
Drive value, not just traffic
Not all traffic is the same. Not all traffic makes sense.
Driving traffic to your website is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimization, but it can be tricky.
Driving quality traffic to your site is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimization.
Reports about increased traffic that didn’t contribute any value in the end (e.g. engaging content to attract more users, better optimization leading to more conversions, etc.) are not added value.
The quality of your traffic and the actions they take should be your top priority for every optimization.
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