Traffic and SEO

When performing SEO or hiring a consultant, most online business owners are concerned with improving their rankings for specific keywords. If they don't know what keywords to target, they look to an SEO consultant to help them find the right mix of keywords to begin targeting for optimization. The hope is that improving rankings for the right keywords will result in increased traffic to specific areas of their website. Increases in website traffic means more potential sales.

Since much of the success of a website is measured on traffic and conversions, are we too focused on keyword rankings and not enough on overall site traffic? Should we consider overall site traffic as a measuring stick when performing organic search engine optimization? I have listed some thoughts below on the topic with pros and cons for each.

Cons of Measuring Traffic and Organic SEO

There are many factors to consider when measuring SEO performance with site traffic. Does your site have other external marketing that effects your overall traffic? (social media, email marketing, monthly deals, seasonality, radio, billboards) Some of these non-SEO marketing tactics can lead to natural linking, which improves SEO. Non-SEO marketing tactics also lead to brand awareness, which contributes to increased click through rates on organic search results.

Pros of Measuring Traffic and Organic SEO

By using traffic to measure performance, is the shift in focus now to generating traffic through viral tactics? Viral tactics tend to have a greater immediate impact on gains in traffic than do other more long term SEO tactics. If we are too focused on moving keyword rankings, we lose sight of the ultimate goal of bringing in new visitors.

More Thoughts on the Subject

• Measuring SEO Traffic Success from Search Engine Watch
• Measuring SEO Success from Practical Ecommerce
• Measuring SEO from Yoast