Traffic is Meaningless, Action is Everything

Traffic is meaningless; action is everything.

Unless you plan to make a lot of money selling ads on your site, traffic is a false measurement of success. The only people you want to spend your resources trying to attract are those who are going to positively impact your business in some way, and there is a tried and true way of doing this. Only when your site starts generating many high-quality form conversions does it truly begin working for you. At that point, it transforms from a brochure into a real marketing tool.

Attracting the right people to your site is primarily a combined function of your persona development, content strategy, and the way you optimize your site for search engines. If your prospects are not showing up to your site, the quality of the site is irrelevant because no one is listening. Obviously, some prospects, clients, and potential employees who already know about you will find your site one way or another. The main opportunity your site needs to exploit is that of attracting the unaware. Your site needs to be proficient at attracting those who need your expertise but are either unaware you exist or not currently considering you. Preaching to the choir will not hurt, but it also will not affect your business to any measurable degree. That being said, if you create a site that fulfills the goals described in this book, it will surely be a valuable resource for all of your site visitors, regardless of their familiarity with your firm.

The next few blog posts, which cover SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and persona development, are more technical and implementation oriented than the other sections of the book which I’ll be covering through this blog. Even though these topics are not particularly strategically engaging, it is important to start with them because the first role of the marketing website is to attract the right audience, and that is done specifically through identifying personas and properly optimizing content for those personas and search engines.

This post is an excerpt from my book, “A Website That Works.”

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