Visitor Traffic - Highly Qualified or High Volume?
August 16, 2007 on 9:42 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web
Both can be quite good, but you have to have a plan.
My first official Search Engine Optimisation gig was with a big company in Golden, Colorado. We sold online reports on doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes based on data from Medicare and other sources. When I started the project, we had about 40 different landing pages on a few different sites, all pointing to the home page of the main site, and about 700,000 doctors in the database.
I eventually built a customised page for each and every one of those doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes. Including category and organisational pages, it came to 1.4 million pages, and up to 800,000 of them were indexed within 3 months. It was awesome.
High Volume Visitor Traffic
The plan was to get the traffic first and then work on the conversions. With such a large-scale project, that was what made the most sense, and we eventually were able to “cash in” with our optimisation efforts with better user tracking and streamlining the checkout process, enabling users to buy a report with around 4 clicks.
Not every business has that kind of time and effort available though. Even though everyone loves more traffic, if it’s not targeted and qualified traffic, it is really only good for their numbers. Everybody LOVES great numbers, and it looks great on my Success Stories but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re making any money off of my efforts.
Start with a plan.
Before you spend any real money on networking and marketing your site, start with an idea of who exactly you want to bring to your site. 10,000 hits a day are great, but if only 3 of those result in sales, your conversion rates are going to suck.
Highly Qualified Traffic
By targeting for more specific traffic, either via Social Media sites or even Pay-Per-Click Advertising, you significantly raise your chances of a higher conversion rate. If you’re bringing in 100 visitors, but you got them from sources that have already qualified them (to a certain extent) then 5 sales makes your Conversion Rates look a whole lot better.
SEO isn’t just about Higher Traffic numbers, Targeted Traffic, or even the ensuing Conversion Rates. It’s about a plan, and that’s what you need to start with.
Figure out who you want on your site, then go out and get them.