What We Mean When We Talk About Relevant Website Traffic

It’s inevitable.

We can’t talk about relevant website traffic without getting kind of meta. This post, admittedly, is meant to draw (relevant) traffic just as much as it is intended to inform and educate.

But nothing we do—or you do—should merely be about “driving” traffic.

For example, we could have seductive, compelling content that brings people to our website, but our efforts are useless if those same people aren’t also looking for inbound marketing or graphic design and branding or web development or anything we do.

And bringing in relevant traffic to your website goes well beyond what’s actually on your site.

Let’s crank it back.

Identify Your Buyer Personas, Then Speak to Them

Hopefully, we’ll only have to say this once: pretty much everything you put out into the world on behalf of your brand should have a buyer persona in mind.

Whether or not they’re your “ideal” customer, identify the people who would be interested in buying (or at least searching for) your product or service. Figure out what their motives and pain points are, who they are as people, and where they spend their time. Give them a name, too. (And keep in mind that we’ve grossly oversimplified the concept of buyer personas here.)

When you’re posting on social, writing a blog, or creating new homepage content, ask yourself, “Who am I actually talking to?”

If you can’t think of someone who aligns with one of your personas, the traffic potential is already irrelevant even if the content is killer.

There’s no way around it: truly relevant website traffic starts with thorough, accurate, well-researched buyer personas.

For Relevant Website Traffic, You Have to Have Some Social Skills

When advertising on social media, be smart as hell in your targeting.

Being smart means being specific.

Target content not just to a particular age, location, or socioeconomic status, but to those who you know already like other things related—even tangentially—to your brand.

Use your ad dollars wisely so that people who actually see your content are seeing it for a good, strategic reason. And when (fingers crossed) they make it to your website, they’ll be there intentionally—and because they knew exactly what they’d be getting when they clicked.

For website traffic to be relevant, it has to come from visits that were wholly deliberate.

Let the right people wind up on your website for the right reasons, not because you tricked them into it.

Don’t Try to Hack Your Way to More Website Traffic

Google is smart. People are, too. It should go without saying, but Google is privy to link schemes intended to sneakily drive traffic to your site or “help” with your ranking.

If links to your site are hanging out in sketchy or even just irrelevant places, being punished by the ranking gods of Google will only be half of your problem.

Sure, you might get lots of traffic to your diabetic testing supplies website via a link on a fashion blog, but your visitors will leave before the page even finishes loading.

You just can’t hack your way into relevant website traffic. People don’t want what they don’t need and were never looking for.

Be Careful What You Rank For (It Just Might Drive Traffic)

We have this “friend” who, long ago, had a very popular blog post about—we hesitate to even say it—Powerpoint Presentations.

This blog post attracted a lot of people looking for help on what the blog post was about—and unfortunately, not much more.

Was the website traffic relevant? Only kind of.

This friend was capable of doing the task-in-question, but it was (and is) far from what they wanted to be focusing on in terms of their services.

The post wasn’t “irrelevant,” at heart, but a lot of traffic (and a lot of phone calls) were garnered for a keyword that would never evolve to something more meaningful.

Just because a keyword is low-hanging fruit doesn’t mean you should go for it. You have to really want it.

It’s Just a Number

Okay, so it’s not just a number.

You want people—and lots of them—to visit your site. But trying to take shortcuts or cheat the system just to mindlessly “drive” anyone and everyone is a waste of effort. Take the the time to identify who you want to find your site in the first place. Know who you’re talking to every time, target smartly, don’t be sketchy, and be intentional with the keywords you use.