Ignorant dinosaurs in business think size does matter
Oh wow, look at the huge traffic to my website, aren’t we amazing to achieve this!
This is my paraphrase of what a business owner wrote last week about the 8,000 visitors their website is now achieving. They were crowing about their traffic growth, which is okay, I guess, if traffic growth is all that matters to you.
As media companies are finding in today's world of better analytics, eyeballs are not a measure, commercial activity from the eyeballs is.
I see too many small business retailers fall into the trap of chasing website traffic to achieve a big number. They think traffic is what matters. Okay, it may make one feel good. You can’t bank traffic though. All you can bank is business transacted.
The internet is a transparent place. Plenty of us can see the traffic websites get if we pay to access the price professional data access services. This access to data helps us understand traffic value, not only for our website but for others … for clients for whom we build websites, for competitors, for any website we like.
Business owners should analyse their website traffic carefully, to understand what brings visitors to their website. They need to track the traffic through to transactions for the business as it is these transactions that matter.
A website we were looking at recently achieved a significant spike in traffic. 30% of their traffic is now coming from outside Australia. They only sell to Australia. 66% of their Australian traffic is for keywords they have targeted solely for traffic, keywords that have nothing to do with what they sell.
The first keyword relates to their business accounts for 3% of their total Australian online search traffic. The traffic count itself has not changed in a year.
The website traffic growth they have chased and won appears to have no actual commercial value for the business.
My advice to local small business retailers is to chase valuable traffic over volume every day. Five visitors spending moment with you is far more important that five hundreds visitors and only one spending with you. While the five hundred may give you bragging rights to anyone who cares to listen, those five hundred visitors do not put food on the table.
Understand what brings people to your website and tune the content of your website to achieve what you want for your business. Tune is a good word here since you can tune your website to achieve what you want.l Anyone can.
Online, slow and steady wins the race when it comes to content curation in pursuit of commercially valuable website traffic.?You can bank on it.
Size doesn't matter.