One of the most intoxicating measurements in all of marketing is “web traffic.”
It’s measurable. It’s binary. We can actually do something to affect the results. It makes us feel good to see the “hockey stick” graph of all these new visitors surfing our site.
But as any experienced marketer knows, for most businesses, nearly all of this traffic is represented by people who take a quick glance at our site and never return. They are tourists, not residents.
And yet, there is so much emphasis on driving “massive traffic” to a website. When I asked an SEO professional why he put so much emphasis on traffic, he replied with some swagger “Where there’s traffic, there’s hope.”
That’s a nice sound bite, but frankly a lousy marketing strategy. If I presented a marketing strategy based on “hope” to my boss I would probably be kicked out of the office. And, deservedly so…
