If you have a solid website, getting more of the right audience to visit the site is a great thing. If you get more of those kinds of folks on your site, you’re likely to make some sales. However, if your sole focus is on gaining more website traffic, you’re gonna have a bad time.
As I shared back in 2024 (and it’s gotten much more pronounced since then), most Google searches don’t lead people to websites, and social media sites hate links. Getting traffic to your site is getting tricky.
If you try to focus solely on website traffic, a few things are going to happen:
- You’ll share links on social media because “even though not as many people will see it, at least I can track the clicks”.
- You’ll likely go after more visitors instead of just the right visitors. Your traffic may rise, but your sales will fall. You want the opposite, with fewer visitors but more sales.
Searching on AI platforms may lead to websites, but often just leads people to the info that they need (which may include your phone number or address). If people learn via AI that you have a great solution for them, and then they are given your phone number, does the website visit even matter?
Rand Fishkin said this last year, and it’s also become more pronounced since then:
“And so the big differences, two big differences. One, optimizing for traffic is straight up dumb. It it’s just a bad idea. It doesn’t make sense. And number two, the way to improve is not to get more visits to the website, which was the way that we sort of pounded on things in in 2012.
The way to improve is to improve your marketing and the experiences people have off of your website.“
Your site still needs to be awesome, because it needs feed Google and the AI platforms, and people that end up on your site need to very quickly understand what you do, but if “more traffic!” is your main goal, you’re probably overlooking a lot of things.
