Podcast: Play in new window
Video Blog – This week Mick expands on a clients question about some of the factors affecting how long it takes to grow your website traffic when using search engine optimisation.
00:00 Traffic and its relationship with Search Engine Optimisation
00:35 Is actually sales we want to increase – not just ‘traffic’
01:18 Factors that affect website traffic
02:00 If website in position 1 then growth in traffic may level out unless more people start searching for that term
02:50 Rate of traffic growth can increase as you start moving up through the search engine rankings
03:55 Leave a question below
—
Music credit ‘Basement Floor’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Transcript
Welcome back! In this video, I just want to quickly talk to you about website traffic and how it relates to search engine optimization.
I was having a chat this week with a client who we are doing search engine optimization for on his website. We were talking about the traffic to the site and looking at his Google Analytics. In the last 4 months we have doubled the amount of visitors to his website and he was asking how long it would take to double that traffic again. Now, when we are talking about traffic to a website and getting more traffic and doubling it, what we are really interested in, is not so much the traffic, but that we want to increase our sales and our conversations – whether that is in dollar terms or number of calls or leads coming through the door. That is what we are really after. Generally more traffic will mean more sales or more leads, but we’ve got to not lose sight of the end goal which is actually the sales rather than the traffic figures themselves. So sometimes it’s not just the traffic number, it’s also the quality of the visitors, the quality of traffic we’re getting and the sources where they are going to come from that can determine what the end profit sales are per traffic visitor if you look at it that way.
So, tying that back to search engine optimization and answering James’ question about how long it would take to double his traffic again, there are a couple of different variables that affect this. So I guess we want to look at if we’re going to search or work on terms such as “red shoes” and have your website being found for “red shoes”, there might be a lot of traffic for that term, but not all that traffic will be buying traffic. So in the same scenario, if you then search for “Nike red running shoes Brisbane” and you’re working to get on top of Google for that result, then people that come to your website are much closer to a buying decision and much more likely to purchase than people searching for “red shoes” in Google. So there is a difference between quantity and quality of the visitors that you get to your website.
Another factor that comes into play is if you are already in the top position, you are in position one on Google, then unless there is a dramatic increase in the number of people searching for the term where you rank number one, you’re not going to see a large increase over time in the traffic coming to your website for that particular keyword. There are a couple of things you do here like changing your description tags to compel people to click more frequently on your listing or working on another page or another website so you actually get two or three results in the top of Google for your products and your services – that will bring in more traffic. But at some stage you may just max out the available traffic for the search terms that you are going for and you won’t see that continual increase in traffic month after month that you see initially.
And the other thing is that sometimes your rate of growth of your traffic can actually increase as you’re working on search engine optimization and your website’s moving up through the rankings. If you’re moving up through the second page, the month on month growth and your traffic is not going to be as high as when you are starting to move up say, from position 6 to position 4 and then from position 4 to position 1. Those last few steps result in a much greater increase in traffic amount than the earlier SEO work does.
So in fact, your time to double your website traffic can actually reduce, depending on the phase of the search engine optimization you are in and where your ranking appears inside Google. So they are a couple of considerations around the question “how long will it take my website traffic to double” and there is not really a straightforward answer. Every case is different. So hopefully that gives you a little more insight about how SEO or search engine optimization can actually affect the traffic to your website and what some of the factors are for that.
Have you got a question about search engine optimization?
If you do, leave a note below this video and I’ll see if I can get an answer for you. Thanks so much for watching. I’m Mick with Redcliffe Marketing Labs and until next time, cheers!