Driving traffic is a central part of digital marketing as a whole.
It's also one of the hardest parts.
Using things like SEO, PPC ads, and social media posts, your goal is to get more eyes on your content — and, of course, on your products.
But unless you're running a Buzzfeed-style site that's ad monetized, the end goal is to make more sales, and consequently, more profits.
When it comes to content marketing, however, it's easy to get caught up in vanity metrics that really don't matter much in the long run.
One such metric is traffic.
In and of itself, it isn't necessarily helpful. Simply getting more traffic won't get you anywhere.
What you really need is targeted, relevant traffic.
What's the point of getting someone to look at your website if they're never going to buy something from you?
In a recent blog post at Moz, Roy Hinkis — the head of SEO at SimilarWeb — explains why when it comes to traffic, quality trumps quantity ever time.
Focus on relevant traffic
In the past, there have been many assumptions made about SEO rankings. The most common assumption: get more traffic to your site and you’ll improve your rankings. However, as I’ll now discuss, good SEO shows us that this is far from the truth.
Improving the quality of your traffic will help improve your rankings
At SimilarWeb, we decided to remove most of the irrelevant traffic to our site (around 40%) from the total SEO traffic.
Here are some reasons that led us to remove low-quality traffic from the index. Irrelevant traffic…
- Provides 0% value to the business in terms of leads/sales
- Has a high bounce rate
- Results in low pageviews per user
- Indicates content that's not relevant to the business. Google's purpose is to complete the searcher's task and provide the best result for their query, so if you have content on your site that's not performing well in terms of ranking, CTR, bounce rate, time on the page, and so on, you should consider rewriting it or removing it from the index.
[image source: Moz]
You can see our own results here, which clearly show a significant increase in all the engagement stats:
- Bounce rate was reduced by 42%
- Pageviews per session increased by 34%
- Time on site increased by 65%
You can read more about honing your digital marketing strategy over at Moz.
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