Often organic traffic can increase for a website while goal conversions stay the same, that’s a main reason why web traffic isn’t all there is to on page SEO. Many SEO client’s aren’t dazzled by organic traffic increases, they want to see how that increase in organic traffic, increases goal conversions. If you owned a brick and mortar store, and everyday you had the store full to capacity but no one ever bought anything, you’d go out of business pretty fast. That’s the same for a website in regards to web traffic and goal conversions. Let’s go through a few reasons web traffic isn’t the best metric to measure success with.
Web Traffic Doesn’t Help Unless It Converts
If an SEO agency or freelancer talks up a big boost in organic web traffic, when goal conversions don’t improve, that’s a problem for the business! The whole point of organic web traffic is to target potential users with intent to contact or purchase from the website. When web traffic floods a webpage and doesn’t convert, it really just creates a headache in analytics and forces SEOs to look into conversion rate optimization. If the contact information isn’t visible or the content doesn’t resonate with the user, that user traffic isn’t helping the website. Goals are the business objectives of a website.
Often when goals aren’t being completed, there’s a problem with the user optimization or keyword research. When content isn’t researched correctly, generic keywords can be used that target too broad of an audience. For example, if you sold ” mens polo shirts ” only but were targeted ” shirts for people ” or even ” shirts for sale “, you’d not only have a hard time competing for that keyword. You’d also have a lot of web traffic from people who wanted to buy shirts but not just polo shirts. You need to narrow search intent down by choosing targeted user keywords to craft content around.
Organic Traffic Is Easy To Manipulate
Not to scare you, but there are bot farms where row after row of smartphones are used to pose as legitimate user traffic to various websites for a service fee. Often these services are used for positive reasons, such as to stress test websites to find possible user issues to fix. But there is the blackhat SEO side of things where agencies and freelancers will purchase said services to inflate metrics reports. If Google products are being managed and monitored, these ” warning flags ” will stand out. You can tell from abnormal spikes in web traffic that doesn’t continue.
Unless you’re a news website, traffic will remain somewhat consistent and the ebbs and flows can be seen. When a ” spike ” in traffic occurs and doesn’t happen again, that’s a warning flag to investigate. It could be bot traffic from search engines or other cloud based services like AWS, or it could be something more worrisome. Sometimes it can be what’s called ” referral spam ” where either bots will visit the website to make analytics records the referral URL or bots will bypass the website and just hit the Google analytic servers only to record the referral URL. The endgame is to basically advertise freely in a spammy way.
Good SEO Is Measured By Goal Conversions
When SEO is done properly, all checkboxes are checked off and users find everything they intended to from SERPs. In a brick and mortar store, often when a potential customer is satisfied with a product and the answers to questions they may have, a purchase occurs unless they’re window shopping. The same can be said about a website, when SEOs do their job, content is marketed in SERPs to entice users. These users find exactly what they wanted to find in the webpage content and often follow calls to action in order to make a purchase or otherwise contact the website.
Does Your Website Get Organic Traffic Without Goal Conversions?
Contact SEOByMichael to schedule an SEO audit and Analytics audit to see where goal conversion optimization can be done!
