Site traffic refers to the volume of people that visit a site. Having high traffic doesn’t instantly mean you are generating income, much like how a shop doesn’t make money when customers are just looking.
In order to improve the quality of your traffic, it’s vital to learn how metrics show us potential issues. When you understand how to interpret traffic quality, you can make changes that actually influence your success, as part of the journey towards a generally superior website.
What is Quality Traffic?
Quality traffic goes hand in hand with higher conversion rates, both made possible through optimized website content that engages your target persona. By creating SEO content that truly connects with people, as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, visitors can find their way more easily to your product.
How is Quality Traffic Measured?
Conversion rates aren’t too helpful on their own, as there’s no way to determine the reason why people weren’t interested in your product. By measuring the quality of your traffic, you see the stage of the journey visitors gave up. This allows you to make concentrated changes that improve success.
Various metrics can be used to measure traffic quality.
- Engagement Metrics
Time on Site, Pages per Session, Engaged Sessions
Obviously, when visitors are engaged with your site, they are happy to stay where they are. Intuitive navigation, relevant content and pleasant design are some of the staples for a higher time on site reading. When your site looks authentic and professional, you will see that people navigate through more pages per session.
As Google defines, an engaged session is a site visit that longer than 10 seconds, with at least one conversion event, which involves viewing a product, adding to cart, and ideally the actual purchase. If you’re seeing poor engagement metrics, you may want to make improvements to site architecture, content and user experience (UX) design, all of which an SEO agency can help with.
- Conversion Metrics
Bounce Rates, Exit Pages, Conversion Rates
If you aren’t using SEO correctly, you may be attracted the wrong crowd. Using excessive keywords, or manipulating content otherwise, may drive a short-term increase to individual pages, but visitors will likely leave without exploring further pages. This leads to a higher bounce rate, which is associated with lower conversion rates.
It’s valuable to pinpoint the precise pages that people commonly leave your site from, i.e. the exit page. Even one poorly-optimized page can cause the quality of your traffic to fall dramatically, where visitors just aren’t interested in the message. These metrics are a good indicator of SEO quality, internal structure and content relevancy.
- Audience Metrics
Geo-location, New vs Return
If you’re a local business, geo-location stats are wildly important. When you know the place visitors are inquiring from, you can implement a local SEO strategy, enabling you to specifically target an area.
For larger businesses, it’s probably better to keep track of the New vs Return percentages. Approximately 88% of online customers say they won’t return to websites with poor usability. If you’re seeing a low number of return visits, you may want make various UX enhancements, including navigation, design and newsletter CTAs.
The Effect of Quality Traffic
The mentioned metrics are good indicator of quality traffic, though there are many more stats that can give insight on how your website is performing. It’s quite easy to get lost in the numbers, which is why many businesses choose professional web services.
When you use proper SEO principles and publish posts regularly, you are bound to improve the quality of your traffic. As the gateway into your business, a website with quality traffic directly corresponds with digital marketing success.