Here is a story for you all…feel free to skip ahead if you have heard it before or even lived through it….

A business is finally going online! It’s an exciting time for both new and old businesses alike, they spent a lot of time and hard earned money to craft what they feel is the perfect website. The business is excited to show off the website and start to blog, share it on social media, emailing all their current and past clients to check it out and doing all the legwork needed to drive traffic to a website. Many businesses at this point even start to do some paid advertising on both adwords and on Facebook.

Doing all this is going to drive people to your site, there is no doubt about that.

But I am here to burst your bubble, shatter your hopes, and dash your dreams… not all traffic to your website is good traffic.

There is a great chance your website right now has a lot of bad traffic despite all your hard work.

Now that you have had a moment to take all that in I promise after your heart drops and we piece it back together you will have more money in your pocket and a higher chance to close more leads than you do now.

You must have Qualified Visitors, if you want to have good leads to work.

We have evaluated a lot of businesses websites both ones that are B2B and B2C, and the biggest thing most of our clients and possible clients are needing and longing for is more leads or sales when they first come to us.

As a marketer and a business owner you are presented with a ton of tools to drive people to your website. Many have mastered how to get people to your website, and see greater traffic numbers as they slowly climb from your efforts. But the important question that needs to be tackled is what do they do once they are on your website?

As I noted in the intro this post seeing “more” website traffic doesn’t matter; qualified website traffic matters.

As someone who works in Internet Marketing, I spend a lot of my time looking at numbers, figuring out what those numbers mean, how to improve them and what ones are vital and what ones aren’t painting the real picture. As a marketer I can tell you I would rather see 20 qualified leads come through our website then 100 unqualified ones. To reach this goal you can’t just boost traffic. You need to tackle this with a plan and keep the big picture in mind. It’s also important to change what your value system is and what you deem as important. This means you need to drop the idea of number of visits as the key metric to your marketing, it’s a good number to know but not the end all be all of your SEO and Internet marketing.

Look For Action, Not Attention

There are two questions I would challenge you all to answer, and to answer honestly with yourself.

• Without guessing, can you tell someone exactly how many leads come off your website every month?
• When you see an uptick in traffic to your website, does the amount of qualified leads increase at a similar percentage?

To many SEO firms and people in charge of SEO for a business focus on rankings and website traffic volume. The issues with this model is it ignores what the people are doing on your website, and that’s what really matters in the end.

Think about it this way if you’re a car repair company. What good does it do you to rank in the number one spot for a phrase that very few or practically no one is searching for? Something like “Cleanest Car Shop”, while it is a good thing to advertise and let people know it’s not something many people if anyone would search for when looking for a car repair shop. Having a strong ranking in competitive keywords, and doing good research to find the right long tail keywords will help guide you in obtaining more ideal users that are more likely to become customers.

Now before you panic, I’m not saying don’t track traffic. It’s still one of the points we check and keep an eye on every month for all our clients at Serious SEM. It’s just a number you need to be smart about, a website with 500 visitors a day sounds awesome, but if your competitor with 30 a day is making more money than you who is really winning? All traffic can lead to sales and typically any drop in traffic is bad, but refocusing your efforts on the right metrics can make your job easier and much less stressful in the long run.

Whether you outsource your SEO or keep it all in house, remember to keep track of your numbers. If your SEO can’t show you the numbers and give you monthly or even weekly reports showing what the people they drove to your site are doing then it is time to start tracking your website traffic yourself and it might be time to find a new company. More traffic should lead to more leads, if it’s not then something in the chain is broken, and needs to be fixed quick!

What To Do Next

If you’re not getting qualified leads, you need to first consider what makes someone qualified. Need some help with this? Ask your current marketing firm if they are able to do this, or feel free to reach out to us and we would be glad to help you get started on this process! Once you know this you can sit down and look at your website and see what your starting point really is for getting better qualified leads. The biggest question to ask yourself as you go over your website is simply does it focus on the needs of your buyer personas?

How closely do you follow your website traffic? Do you measure it on a regular basis? How can you tell if your website visitors are qualified to do business with you?
If you need more relevant, qualified traffic for your website in order to start realizing business opportunities, click the following graphic to get your website graded by a certified inbound marketing professional, the report will give you a clear starting point on your path to better leads, and better traffic!