What are you actually trying to achieve?
It sounds like a strange question.
Surely every business wants more people visiting its website?
Probably.
But traffic isn't usually the real objective.
You might want more qualified enquiries. You might want more people booking consultations. You might run an ecommerce business and want more sales. You might be entering a new market and need to build awareness.
Those are business objectives.
Traffic is simply one of the things that might help you achieve them.
That distinction matters because it changes the way you look at your marketing.
Instead of asking:
“How do we get more traffic?”
you start asking:
“What needs to happen for us to generate more of the business we actually want?”
Sometimes those questions lead to very different answers.
Not all visitors are equally valuable
Imagine two websites.
One gets 50,000 visitors a month.
The other gets 5,000.
Which one would you rather own?
There's no sensible way to answer that without knowing what those visitors actually do.
If the first website attracts huge numbers of people who have very little chance of becoming customers, while the second attracts a smaller audience of exactly the people the business wants to work with, I'd probably take the second one.
This is particularly important with SEO and content.
It's relatively easy to become obsessed with search volumes. A keyword gets 10,000 searches a month, so naturally it looks more exciting than one that gets 200.
But the smaller search might represent someone actively looking for the exact thing you sell.
The bigger one might represent somebody looking for information who will never spend a penny with you.
I'd rather have the right 200 people.
Rankings can become a distraction too
The same applies to rankings.
Being number one on Google feels good.
I've spent enough years working in SEO to know how satisfying it is watching something move from page three to the top few positions.
But again, you have to ask what that ranking is worth.
Ranking first for something commercially irrelevant isn't necessarily an achievement.
Ranking fourth for a search that consistently produces valuable enquiries might be considerably more important.
This is why I don't like looking at SEO in isolation.
Rankings matter.
Traffic matters.
Visibility matters.
But they need to connect to something the business actually cares about.
Otherwise you're just collecting bigger numbers for a report.
Look at what happens after the click
Getting someone onto your website is only the beginning.
What happens next?
Do they immediately understand what you offer?
Can they find the information they need?
Does the website give them confidence?
Is there an obvious next step?
Can they actually complete that next step without fighting with a slow page, confusing navigation or a terrible mobile experience?
You can spend a lot of money increasing traffic while completely ignoring what happens to those visitors once they arrive.
Sometimes improving that experience produces a much better return than attracting another few thousand people.
If 100 people currently visit and one becomes a customer, your instinct might be to find another 100 people.
But what if the bigger opportunity is understanding why the other 99 didn't?
Your existing traffic might already contain opportunities
This is one of the reasons I like looking properly at the data before recommending more activity.
There can be opportunities hiding in what you already have.
Pages receiving impressions but sitting just outside the strongest search positions.
Traffic landing on pages that don't have a clear next step.
High-value pages that aren't properly connected to the rest of the website.
Content attracting the right audience but doing very little to move that person towards becoming a customer.
Those aren't necessarily traffic problems.
They're optimisation problems.
And fixing them can sometimes be considerably faster and cheaper than creating an entirely new acquisition campaign.
More traffic can still be exactly what you need
There are obviously situations where increasing traffic is absolutely the right objective.
If your website converts well, your proposition is strong, your sales process works and the people arriving are becoming customers, then getting more of those people makes perfect sense.
That's a good problem to have.
Now we can look at where more qualified demand might come from.
Organic search.
Paid acquisition.
Content.
Partnerships.
Referral channels.
Whatever makes commercial sense for the business.
But we're scaling something we already understand.
We're not simply increasing a number because bigger looks better on a dashboard.
Measure what matters to the business
Marketing gives us an extraordinary amount of data.
Sometimes too much.
Impressions. Clicks. Rankings. Sessions. Engagement rates. Followers. Views.
All of those metrics can tell you something useful.
But they can also distract you from a much simpler question:
Is this helping the business grow?
That's the number I'd ultimately want to understand.
Because 100,000 visitors who do nothing aren't automatically more valuable than 1,000 visitors who genuinely want what you sell.
More traffic can be great.
More of the right traffic is better.