Targeted Traffic and SEO - Why having targeted traffic is important for your website

After setting up a website and investing some money in getting people interested in the content, the first thing most webmasters want to see is a mass of people rushing to the site. We call a unique visit to a site a ‘hit’. However, there’s more to a website than just getting lots of hits. You need to make sure the people visiting you are actually the kind of people that are going to buy your product or use your services. If it helps, think of targeted traffic like opening up a store on a busy high street – a lot of people might see your store, but would you really count your success by people just walking through the door, turning around and walking right back out again?

Off the back of this desire for hits, many people have been able to run services that offer site owners the chance to ‘cash in’ by sending a huge amount of traffic their way. These services are often advertised in forums and through less reputable marketing websites. The one thing they all have in common is the promise of pure hits to your site that will mean thousands – sometimes tens of thousands – readers.

It might sound too good to be true, and unfortunately it is. Think about how a company would manage to get thousands of unique computers to all log on to your site for the few pounds or dollars you happen to be paying for the service. In some cases, people are drawn to your site because they are being offered something for free from other companies and have no interest in your product or services.

In other cases the whole thing is automatic and the sites appear up on a computer all day, being read by nobody. Even worse, often the traffic isn’t real at all, its software controlled “ghost” traffic that means 20,000 hits won’t mean a single sale. Schemes like this are also very likely to be against the terms of most advertising providers including Google Adsense, so using such a scheme could even get your site banned from those services.

Real targeted traffic on the other hand can make a massive difference to your site. We’re not talking about directly paying for visitors but instead making sure that the way people find your site is likely to be because they wanted to buy a product similar to yours in the first place. You may never see the same pure numbers with targeted traffic, but you’ll find a much higher percentage of conversions from it, so it doesn’t matter.

So how do you get targeted traffic and maintain a decent flow of good quality traffic to your website? The far and away best and most cost effective method for this is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO involves using many different methods, all working together, in order to increase your ranking in a search engine. In turn, this means that much of your traffic will start to come from visitors who have searched for exactly what you’re selling, and you can’t get much more targeted than that.

An SEO agency may also use a method called link baiting which can help you receive targeted traffic by creating interesting content. This might take a little more effort than just trying to throw money at traffic generation companies, but a customer who has been linked to your site because you’ve created interesting content related to your products or services is far more likely to want to buy something than some ghost computer hit that never even involves a real person.