Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:45 pm

This was a question that was asked in a Linkedin group that I belong to recently and oddly enough was also the basis of the question I was asked by a client yesterday who wanted to know how they could get more visitors to their site. I imagine that it’s also a question that many website owners will have asked themselves at some point or other (or will do in the future).

Image by Sean MacEntee, used under Creative Commons License Original here

This article is aimed at showing you why this is the wrong question to be asking.

1st of all you need to define “enough traffic” – I have some clients who get a small (100’s of visitors) a month but convert a large number of these into sales and are happy with this rather than get millions of visitors and no conversions. Of course I want them to get more visitors and keep or even improve the conversion rate but Google reports that there are only 100’s of searches a month for their service so unless they can somehow increase the number of people searching for their service that’s not very likely.

Of course you could increase your traffic by buying visitors although I should tell you that in the past (several years ago) I carried out experiments where I brought 50,000 visitors to a site.  The results were as I had expected, but it was worth spending a few pounds to make sure, the visitors came into the site and left straight away so they were really of no use apart from “bragging rights” that the site in question had had over 50,000 visitors in a month.

I, and many SEO professionals that have been in the industry for any length of time and understand the process, firmly believe that your main emphasis should be on the end result (the number of conversions however you count this – it could be a sale or a visitor filling in a contact form for example) and not on the raw numbers of visitors.

Having said that I have listed a few basic thoughts as to why a website might not be getting “enough” traffic below :-

1. The site pages are not optimised correctly, if at all, and are not being found in the search results – this may include bad SEO having been done in the past meaning that the pages on your site have been penalised for some reason (bad links, poor quality content, duplicate content or some other reason).

2. The pages have been optimised but for the wrong things – ie, they have been optimised for phrases that no one is searching for.

3. The description and title in the search snippet is of poor quality (spelling for example) putting people off of clicking on the result.

4. The search snippet isn’t engaging people enough to make them want to click on the result.

5. The site doesn’t have enough pages to generate the number of visitors that you are wanting (it’s more difficult for a single page site to get a lot of visitors that it is for a site of, say 20 or 30 pages).

There may well be other reasons why you are not getting enough visitors but in my experience these are the first things to look at, but remember just having lots and lots of visitors doesn’t mean that your website is working or is successful.  The mark of a successful website is, in my view, a healthy conversion rate.  What do you think?  Is the number of visitors a mark of a successful website?