Unique Visits Aren’t Everything

When doing keyword research, one of the big things that our organic SEO team looks at here at Oneupweb is search volume. The more searches per month, and the more potential hits to your site, the better right?

Not quite. Besides volume, there are two other important things you should be taking into consideration: competition, and relevance. If your business is regionally-specific, for example, your site may have a hard time competing against larger sites with a nationwide presence. You’ll also have a hard time converting on those broad terms.

If someone searches for “flower shop”, but they live in Boston, Massachusetts and your shop is located in Burlington, Vermont, then you need to think about whether you can convert on that broad term in the first place, let alone position on it.

But this is where many site owners balk. Not as many people are out there searching for “flower shop, Burlington, Vermont”, or even “flower shop, Vermont”, as there are searching for “flower shop” by itself.

So instead, they may try to go after broader terms with higher volume, and will experience difficulties trying to achieve positions and convert traffic with their small local sites.

You need to optimize for who you are. Embrace your business and your customer base! If you are a flower shop in Burlington, Vermont, then that’s what you should be leveraging. Because maybe your unique visits aren’t going to soar, but you know what will? Your amount of TARGETED VISITORS. One targeted visitor is worth just as much as (or even more than) one thousand aimless visitors.

So now that I’ve established that the number of targeted visitors is more important the number of unique ones, I want to take this one step further, and say that targeted visitors aren’t everything either. Instead of judging the success of your campaign solely by the number of visitors – unique or targeted – you also need to take into account your overall ROI.

Are you converting your traffic? And equally important – do you have adequate controls in place to measure those conversions? Not only should you be tracking every online form submission, every email, and every phone call that your business receives, but you should also be encouraging a strong call-to-action on every page on your site.

If you haven’t designed your site to be user-friendly enough to provide the information that your targeted visitors are looking for – and if you aren’t following up with analytics to measure all of that targeted traffic – then you need to go back to the drawing board. Because in the end, it all comes down to you and how you choose to connect to, and engage, your potential clients. They’re looking for you – don’t let them down.