Why More Website Traffic Might be Bad for Your Business

Like many business marketers, driving more prospective customers to your website is probably your number one digital marketing priority. While traffic is a critically important part of any business marketing plan, it’s not the only consideration. The number of visitors to your website may not be the best way to measure the success of your marketing efforts – and could actually hurt your business in the long run. Here’s why.

The Search Engines Rank Your Site Based on Value Delivered to Visitors

Google and the other major search engines make their money based on how good a job your site does at answering questions and solving problems for web searchers, as well as how easy your website design is to navigate. Social media signals that help grade your site for relevance and authority are another crucial factor. The more satisfied the searchers are, the more likely they are to continue using the search engine that referred you – and the more likely those search engines are to send you even more traffic by rewarding your site with a higher ranking in the search results.

Why the Amount of Time Visitors Spend on Your Site and the Number of Different Web Pages They Visit are Important to Your Search Rankings

Two of the most important metrics used to determine website value are the amount of time that visitors spend on the site and the number of different pages they visit. An unresponsive website design that makes navigation difficult for mobile device users will cause visitors to quickly bounce away from your site. Unsatisfied visitors generate negative social media signals, and increase the likelihood that your digital marketing efforts will suffer from poor ranking in the search results.

How to Improve the Value of Your Site for Web Searchers

You can increase the effectiveness of your business marketing campaigns with a responsive, mobile friendly website. This means that your site will display properly no matter what type of mobile device searchers use. Mobile now accounts for over 50 percent of all searches, and this is simply too large of an audience to ignore with an outdated, unresponsive website design. As an added incentive, Google has begun to tag mobile friendly websites in the search results, and will no longer include non-mobile friendly sites in the mobile search results.