This may sound unsettling, but sometimes, getting more traffic to a website isn't always what's best. Don't panic just yet; we understand that driving traffic to your site is the fundamental SEO goal. In fact, you are here because you want to improve your website performance; in this article, we will be giving some reasons why having just the right amount of traffic can be better than having more. 

Generating more traffic to a website is what we do. It is one of the reasons clients visit us. As SEO professionals, it is our sacred duty to do this. We render our services to website owners like yourself to improve the performance of your site by implementing various strategic content plans, technical optimizations, and so on. 

Organic traffic is something you will encounter in every SEO report. The traffic moving into your site is, to a great extent, the most important key performance indicator. While driving increased traffic to your site may seem like the most important thing, it is also important to understand that an increase in inbound traffic doesn't always translate into a net positive. 

Here are some scenarios to explain situations when driving more traffic to a site doesn't do any good. 

This is simple to understand. Imagine a visitor is searching for a specific query for which your website ranks highly, so they click on the link and are taken to your website. Unfortunately, the page they reach isn't in line with their query, and they quickly leave. This means you have failed to please your audience because your content doesn't match their intent. 

Now Google's algorithm is always finding new ways to evolve and improve its accuracy at matching a user's query to the right page. However, it can't always be accurate. So when a searcher is looking for something and comes to your website, that generates traffic, but if they quickly leave because your content is irrelevant, this will reflect on your bounce rate metrics, reduce your time-on-site metrics, and so on. 

A combination of these things sends a negative signal back to Google's algorithm, informing it that your website's results are not the ideal option for that query or user intent. 

You wouldn't feel confident hosting a party when your entire house is a mess, would you? If your guest showed up to a messy house, they probably wouldn't be congratulating you on what an amazing party or experience they had at your crib. Similarly, when you attract traffic to your website without having the foundational SEO must-haves in place, people are not going to stay long enough for you to fix those mistakes. 

If you do not already have a well-thought-out content strategy in place or if the contents published on your webpages are poorly written or structured, you should expect users to stay. How fast does your website load? Is it mobile-friendly? These are important questions to ask before you start attracting traffic. 

Content strategy is so important that Google is launching the Page Experience update to measure more accurately how well each page satisfies users' intent. Your SEO must be in order before you invite people over. 

The argument here is which is more important, more traffic or more conversion? There are several sound points that can be made for both sides of this argument, but we prefer more conversions over more traffic. It would be better if you had 100,000 visitors on your site and convert 50% of them than having 200,000 and only 15% convert. 

The goal of SEO is to improve conversions; increasing your inbound traffic is only a means to achieving that goal. If we stop at attracting more traffic to your site, we will neglect the most important aspect of SEO which is driving more ROI for businesses.

 

If you see a rising number of traffic, but this increase isn't reflected in your conversion rates, you aren't really achieving the best organic results. 

Traffic gains can sometimes be a result of reasons you should typically avoid. When a business or website is under scrutiny or if it is receiving negative press, it wouldn't be wise to open that perfectly aged bottle of wine. The increase in traffic, in that case, is not positive; in fact, it is bad. 

Bad press can cause users to drop negative comments on posts, cause you to lose loyal customers, and your place on SERP. Generally speaking, you should avoid this at all costs. 

When we look outside of the organic channel, we can identify certain situations where it isn't ideal for driving more traffic. If you are driving your traffic via other channels such as Paid placement to a site that hasn't been optimized for content, technical SEO, or UX, your efforts can backfire. When you're using PPC, you pay for every click, so paying for clicks only to have these visitors leave as soon as they get to your page is expensive, especially because you're experiencing 0% ROI. 

It is crucial that you pay close attention to the traffic sources and channels using Google Analytics. If your website is getting its traffic from spambots and not humans, an increase in traffic would be meaningless. It is estimated that about 37% of website activity is created by a bot and more than half of this bot activity is undesirable. 

Spambot traffic is a type of bot traffic that is illegitimate. It is sent to sites that skews, and they inflate traffic data. 

Sometimes, increasing your website traffic can strain your resources too thin. You can have a really good piece of content on your site that draws in tons of traffic, but if that content isn't relevant to your audience, you may suffer unintended consequences. 

This wouldn't just stop at server issues; it can proceed to have your frontline staff and customer service agents having calls, responding to emails and chats, as well as personal inquiries from people who would not turn out to become customers. 

It is important to ensure that the leads you generate from SERP are relevant.

Not all traffic is valuable; not all traffic is a good thing; not all traffic is meaningful. The type of traffic coming to a site differs. While we put in so many resources and effort to drive traffic to a website, we do that with a caveat. 

As a fundamental part of SEO, Semalt is aware of how to get traffic to a website, but that's not all; we also need to get meaningful traffic to your website. It isn't valuable to have an increase in traffic that contributed no value, having visitors that wouldn't engage your content piece, or when you fail to have optimization improvements that lead to more conversions. 

The quality of your traffic and the actions they take is important, and we keep this on top of our minds with every optimization effort we take.