Traffic doesn't pay the bills

A founder came to me a while ago convinced he needed more traffic. He’d been quoted for an SEO retainer, he’d read that content was king, and he wanted to get going.

So I asked a few boring questions. How many people visit the site each month? How many of them get in touch? And of the people who get in touch, how many become customers?

He knew the first number. He had a rough idea of the second. He had no idea about the third.

That’s the most common pattern I see, and it’s why I say the same thing so often my clients start quoting it back to me. Traffic doesn’t pay the bills. Customers do.

The maths nobody does

Say your site gets 2,000 visitors a month and 1% of them enquire. That’s 20 enquiries. Double your traffic and, if nothing else changes, you get 40.

Now leave the traffic alone and get the site converting at 2% instead of 1%. You also get 40. Except you haven’t paid for a single extra visitor, and every pound you spend on traffic later works twice as hard.

The second option is almost always cheaper and faster. It’s also less exciting to sell, which is why you rarely hear it first.

Three questions to ask before you buy more traffic

1. Would a stranger know what you do within five seconds? Open your homepage on your phone. Read only what’s on the screen before you scroll. If you showed that to someone who’d never heard of you, would they know what you sell, who it’s for and why it’s better?

2. Is it easy to take the next step? Count the taps it takes to get in touch. Check the form works. Check someone actually reads what comes through it, and how quickly they reply.

3. What happens after the enquiry? This is the one that hurts. Plenty of businesses have a perfectly good website and lose the sale in the follow up. Slow replies, no reply, or a reply that doesn’t answer the question. More traffic just means more people let down.

When traffic really is the problem

Sometimes it is. If the site converts well, the follow up is sharp and there simply aren’t enough people finding you, then search, paid media and content are the right tools. I’m not anti traffic. I’m anti buying it before you’ve checked where it’s going.

What we did

For that founder, we left SEO alone for the first few months. We researched his customers, rewrote the story the site was telling and rebuilt the journey from landing to enquiry. The site started converting. Then, and only then, it was worth sending more people to it.

Want to see what this looks like with your own numbers? Try the Traffic doesn’t pay the bills calculator. And if you’re not sure which problem you have, send me your site and I’ll tell you what I see.