“I can increase your website traffic by 100% in two months”.

“My site got 10,000 hits today”.

These are words that people wrote all the time. Naturally, my initial thoughts were, “Oh, traffic must be extremely important!” Sure enough, when I started practicing SEO and diving into the community more, many people I met constantly talked about the volume of traffic that they either could drive, or were driving to a client’s site. As you can imagine, this translated into client reports and it became a justification that some marketers used to stay in business with certain clients.

Client: “What have you done for us this quarter?”

Analyst: “Well, we are proud to say that we managed to increase the traffic to your homepage by 100%!”

Client: “So more people are looking at our site?”

Analyst: “Yes!”

Do you see an issue with the above conversation? I don’t think it’s crazy to say that this would be a typical conversation with a typical marketer and a typical client years ago. I remember constantly focusing on increasing traffic because I thought if I could show the client more people are coming to their site, they would never leave. If the client never left, then I would get more money, right?

Wrong.

I quickly came to realize that everyone was so focused on getting traffic that we never really stopped and asked ourselves if that traffic was healthy traffic. Did that traffic matter? How did that traffic help the client? What good is increasing traffic to a site by 100% if users aren’t converting?

These are the questions we should all ask ourselves because it can be easy to get into the traffic game.

Am I saying increasing traffic is bad? Absolutely not. But as marketers, we need to be mindful what kind of traffic our sites are attracting, and if that traffic is in our client’s best interests. If I have a client who’s a plumber in Seattle, what’s the use of me bringing him 5,000 hits from Texas? Sure, there’s the branding factor but if my client just wants more jobs in the area I’m not doing my job by bringing him users in Texas.

Using traffic the right way

Take a look at your client’s analytics and break down the traffic. Here are some examples of what you might take a look at:

• Top landing pages by organic
• Top queries from organic
• Percentage of conversions based on location

Take your data and begin to understand where users are coming from, what they are searching for, and what their goal is when they get to your landing page. Do they just want to call the business? Are they looking to learn more about the services you offer? Maybe they need to see some credible reviews? Whatever your data is telling you, reflect on it.

Webmaster Tools

I’m a huge fan of going straight to the source. After taking a look at the analytics of a site, why not jump into their webmaster tools and cross-analyze data? Pro-tip: be sure to link Google Search Console and Google Analytics together for more data. Some interesting data you might pull from Google Search Console could be:

• The amount of pages Google has crawled
• The amount of 404 errors found on your site
• Structured data markup across your site

Make Changes

If you see an area for improvement, start focusing in on it and make your changes one a time. Don’t make changes to 20 different pages if you’re trying to test something out. For example, maybe you are finding that people are not converting on the contact page as much as you would like (we’ve all been there). Open analytics, find what queries are driving traffic to that page, and think on ways you can improve the conversions. It sounds simple, but I’m amazed at how many people don’t take the time to do this.

The Point

The point I’m trying to get across here is that traffic is irrelevant if it isn’t the right kind of traffic. It’s much easier to get 1,000 to visit a site than it is to get 10 of those people to convert. However, when you utilize both traffic and your data to execute calculated changes you’ll start seeing the irrelevant traffic fade away and the users you are looking for to appear.

Bonus Tips

Make sure to filter out your IP and your client’s IP addresses from registering as legitimate traffic in analytics. Also, if you are getting ghost spam or traffic in analytics be sure to filter these out as well. Here is a good post on how to go about doing that. Don’t forget to add a RAW view before making these changes so you always have an unaltered view to fall back on.

I’m hopeful that as a community we aren’t just focused on driving pointless traffic to websites and instead focus on actually thinking about the user, what they want, and how we can best help the search engines serve it to them accurately.

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Of course, I resorted to sites like Moz, the Google Webmaster Blog, or random black-hat forums to learn the newest “tricks” or to figure out what I was doing wrong.

At the time I remember constantly thinking, “I must be missing something”. In other words, I would read posts by these SEO gurus and I couldn’t help but think two things.

1. Why would someone share everything they know?
2. They wouldn’t, so there must be something they are holding back.

These were some of my thoughts during that stage in my SEO life.

“Maybe if I add microdata all over my site I will rank higher faster!”

“It’s really all about link building. I’m sure these guys are fooling us all and are just buying a bunch of links.”

The True Secret

Fast forward to today and I have finally realized what the true secret is to all of their SEO success. Can you guess what it is? Domain authority? Links? The correct title tags?

Perhaps there is a magical tag that people don’t introduce you to until you’ve been working in the field for a number of years?

As you have probably guessed, none of the above are even close to the secret I’m talking about. I have come to find that the true secret to SEO success is consistency. There! I said it – the secret is out. Sorry Moz, I had to let everyone know!

Excuse my sarcasm, but hopefully you get what I’m trying to convey here. For a long time, I always thought I was missing something. The truth is I wasn’t so much missing anything as I was ignoring the obvious. Doing a good job and getting a site to rank organically takes time. Sure, there have been times where I have helped sites rank first or second in a week or two. But for the most part?

It takes months, and sometimes years.

How Can It Help?

I know, I know, this isn’t what you wanted to hear, right? The good news is that all of the things we are learning on blogs, from professionals in our industry, and from Google are still important. In fact, consistency plays such as huge part in digital marketing because it applies to all areas of the practice. Here are some examples:

• You need to constantly be keeping up to date on industry news, algorithm changes, tools, and more.
• You need to constantly be checking the analytics of your websites.
• You need to constantly be working on your websites.
• You need to constantly be trying out new methods and pushing your boundaries.

What’s the key to all of these things? Consistency. What good is it to work on a client’s website once and then not touch it for the next years?

Google’s algorithm has over 200 signals.

It’s our jobs as digital marketers to know those signals as best as possible, and apply/tweak them on our client’s websites in order to meet their goals for ranking. So, I encourage you to not give up on whatever site you are working on now. If something isn’t working out, press on and figure out a solution. Be consistent, be diligent, and don’t be lazy.

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The issue marketers faced back then was describing how effective their campaigns were. For example, how would a marketing executive tell a business owner the increase in revenue that their billboard campaign provided? Sure, you can put together some numbers and statistics based on how many people live in the city, how many people drive by the billboard everyday, and how many sales the business has had since the campaign. But let’s be honest, these figures are after all, well – figures.

The Real Value

So what was the value in these campaigns? The answer is simple: brand increase. It was all about brand. How do people perceive your brand? Do people get happy when they see your logo? Are people excited when they step into one of your stores?

Fast-forward to the marketing industry today and you will notice a similar trend. Sure, there are very measurable methods that you can take with a marketing campaign that work wonderfully. For example, search engine optimization or pay-per-click are both great investments and can show you exactly how much money an agency has made you. But I’m not talking about these methods.

Social Media

I have noticed some trends with social media. Many companies are on social media, much like many companies had billboards and radio spots years ago. And much like those companies’ years ago, companies today are struggling with measuring how much worth social media is bringing them. Not only that, companies are struggling with standing out and communicating what their brand is to the general public.

There are very helpful tools out there to help with social media. Tools like Buffer, FollowerWonk, and Bitly are all great examples of how marketers can utilize social media while providing numbers and context behind campaigns. However, I would argue that social media provides so much more than just showing a client how many clicks their website received. Social media has the power to sway mass amounts of people into feeling something about your brand.

Is Brand Increase Measurable?

Can we measure brand increase? That’s really the golden question isn’t it? My answer to that would be yes, in many ways we can. At the same time, should we be trying to quantify something that means so much more than a number or a figure?

Perhaps “traditional marketing” isn’t so traditional anymore. Maybe certain components of marketing are making a full circle. Maybe we should be focusing more on quality, and increasing brand rather than throwing up another post because that’s what everyone is doing. Regardless, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens with social media and brand awareness in the coming years.

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Instead, why not just be honest? Unfortunately, this happens all too often during interviews.
This is a typical scenario: have a candidate come in for x role, one of our employees who does job x asks them a series of questions, the interviewee hops around the questions (and doesn’t give a straight answer). Why? Why not just be straight forward? If you aren’t qualified for a position, don’t apply. If you are approached with a job offer and know that you can’t perform, make sure to let them know your level of experience.

The good news is that it’s getting more and more difficult to lie about what you do. I always like to test people on what they say they do. “Oh, you know technical SEO? Awesome! Here’s a site I need to run an audit on, can you briefly run me through some of the main issues/errors on the site and how you would go about fixing them?” This would be a normal question at an interview. This question might be the only one you need in order to truly see how good the candidate is at a technical SEO audit.

The Point

The point is, people just need to stop lying. There have been multiple times when clients contact me directly about a company that says my work isn’t good enough. I always love these kinds of emails, but sadly nine out of ten times they are illegitimate. The one time that someone does have something legitimate, it’s an opportunity for me to improve on my work. Why would any professional be scared of that?

Bottom line: if you can’t perform a certain task, stop saying that you can. Instead, take the time to learn how to perform that task well. This will save everyone time, money, and any embarrassments.

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The story goes on to uncover incredible yet scary revelations and technologies that are created by the company Mae works at. Recently, I had the honor to visit the Fremont Google campus in Seattle. While reading this book, I couldn’t help but notice similarities between what Eggers wrote, and what I saw.
Now, I am in no way saying that technology is bad or that tech companies are horrible.

However, things are becoming more and more connected. In essence, “The Circle” is about connecting everyone to everything all the time. I would argue that some companies have this same goal in mind in today’s world.

But is it a bad thing?

I, for one, don’t necessarily want everything I have to be connected to the internet. Another example would be an employer not knowing my personal social media accounts. Sure, there’s the argument of, “well, what are you trying to hide?” Nonetheless, it makes me a bit uneasy thinking about how much more difficult it has gotten to stay “off the grid” in recent years.

As I was walking through the campus of Google I literally saw a place that I would never want to leave. Free cold brews? Free video games? Whatever hardware/software I want for my computer? A gym? I mean, why leave?

There are negatives and positives to technology, and I love it just as much as the next person. This doesn’t mean that we can’t acknowledge some of the risks associated with technology.

If you are interested in reading the book, you can pick it up here.

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Organic Conversions

Let me give you an example of an organic conversion – the company that I used to work for provided marketing for plastic and cosmetic surgeons. Often times when I would go into the doctor’s social media accounts and there would be a handful of unread messages (usually on Facebook) with legitimate questions from potential patients.

“How much would a liposuction procedure cost?”

“Doctor, I’m very interested in x procedure but am worried about the recovery process. Can you answer some questions?”

These are examples of people reaching out to the doctor (or practice) directly and no one seemed to care. Why not? Because social media has a stigma (especially amongst professionals such as doctors and lawyers).

The Answer?

It’s simple: social media is an extremely effective tool to connect with your audience. The best way to utilize this connection is to provide great content and answers for your audience, and let them reach out to you. In turn, this creates a process where your leads automatically become much more solid.

In the example with the doctors, the best thing to do was to train their front-office employee (or someone) to monitor their Facebook account throughout the day. As soon as a message or comment would come in, the employee would see, and (if they can) reply.

The bottom line is that people don’t like feeling like they are forced into a buying decision, so don’t force them. Instead, let them come to you organically.

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