Here's why there's only one type of traffic you should target with SEO

Numbers mean nothing.

You can’t pay your bills with 1000 page views; you need people who will pay you money to do what you do.

This might sound obvious, but you’d be amazed how many people seem to think still that it’s the volume of traffic over the quantity of traffic that makes the difference.

I am writing this post because I just posted a video to Linkedin about a great little SEO plugin I designed and the clever team in the studio built – WILO.

It’s a plugin that does one thing: it helps people improve the internal linking structure of their websites.

As part of the video, I discussed how one page on my site had gone from 11 to 15 ranking keywords.

After I posted the video, I thought to myself, “Really? 11–15, that’s like four more keywords.”

Yes, that’s four more keywords, but that’s probably enough.

The point I am making here is that whilst it might only be four more keywords, the new keywords are the right ones that will bring warm new leads into the business.

You only need to rank for what matters.

If you are a service-based business (the only type of business I do SEO for), you will know that having too many new companies can be as problematic as not having enough.

If you genuinely care about providing the best service, you can’t scale up at the drop of a hat; you have to find the right staff, get them up to speed and so on – it’s not like selling shit things for next-to-nothing, it’s about building a brand where your clients are blow-away by what you do.

All these idiots that send you SEO emails about 10x your business overnight do not apply to people who want to provide top-level service; they apply to companies that have a large client churn, as what the offer is crap.

Do you provide a shit service?

If your business plan is to win new clients by overpromising and underdelivering, then you need to rank for everything.

However, if your business wants the right type of client for the right type of service and one that will stay with you down to your sheer awesomeness, you need to choose your keywords wisely, and you don’t want to rank for everything.

Use SEO to get the traffic that matters.

1000 visitors a week means nothing if you don’t get a decent lead.

10,000 visitors a week means less than nothing if the above remains true.

So, when working with an SEO expert to improve your site’s SEO, you first need to nail the keywords you want to rank for.

Improving your average keyword position is bullsh*t.

You, like me, probably don’t care if your average keyword position goes up by five places.

It’s a nonsense metric that shoddy SEOs use to demonstrate that they are achieving slightly less than nothing.

What you want is your converting keyword to rank in the top three and stay there—that’s all it’s about.

10-15 top-three ranking keywords with commercial or transactional intent could bring your small business more new leads than you can cope with, so focus on getting these keywords and only these keywords ranking – fu*k everything else.

Choose your Keywords wisely.

So, Dave, we’d like to rank #1 for the keyword ‘solicitors’.

Really? Do you want to spend lots of time and money ranking for a keyword that an idiot would use to search?

Choose your keywords based on the intellect of the person you are trying to get onto your site.

Here’s why.

You’ve probably received spam emails from some prince who wants to pay you $12m if you supply your bank details to help him move the money.

These types of emails are littered with spelling mistakes and bad grammar.

You probably read these emails and wonder why, with all the mistakes, anyone (seriously, anyone) ever falls for this stuff.

You’re right, but the spelling and bad grammar are there to get rid of you.

These spammers don’t want people who notice this stuff; they want dimwits who are driven by greed and the possibility of money for nothing.

The speaking and grammar errors in these emails help the spammers by only generating responses from idiots they can manipulate – they don’t want to waste their time on you.

These emails are not for you; and you can do the same with your keywords.

Want a no-bs conversation about your SEO?

I will quite happily rant at you for 30 minutes about how great SEO can be when it’s done properly. It’s not all about numbers, it’s about being clever and planning things properly.

Let's have a chat

Choose your target keywords to choose who clicks through.

The first thing to mention here is that if I search for something and find your site only to bounce back to the search 400 milliseconds later, Google will know that, and if that happens too often, your site will slip in the SERPs.

This means that if you plan to rank for a keyword, you’d better be sure you have some great content for me when I arrive on your site.

Here’s a good example of the nuance of keywords.

Annual report design
Annual report designers

The same? No. Similar? No.

These two are miles apart in terms of search intent.

The first keyword, Annual report design, is an informational keyword – the person using this keyword is researching the design of annual reports – there is a very high chance that they don’t want a report designed; they just want to look at report designs.

Now, in this case, if they click through to your site and it’s all about the Annual report design process, how you do it for your clients, the benefits and so on, with a few examples of designs, they are much less likely to dwell on the page than someone who wants a report designed.

This is an overly simplified example, as in theory, you can legitimately rank for both, but you get the point.

This is how forensic you need to get with your SEO – you cannot spend too much time thinking about the intent of the keyword you are trying to rank for.

So, where do you start?

I find that common sense is often the best place to start with optimising your site for keywords.

You know your business and your clients, you know the language they speak, so use this to try and identify more long-tail searches that will bring you more targetted traffic that will dwell longer on your site and are more likely to become clients.

Dave

Dave is a WordPress SEO expert with over 20 years experience in designing, building and optimising WordPress (and non-WordPress) websites for people who are serious about SEO and want to generate more new business from their websites. He's run a creative agency for 25+ years, employs 17 staff and enjoys a good rant about SEO.