If you’re in the website development business you’re aware that one of the number one requests clients have is for high search engine rankings and hits. While increasing traffic is an important goal of a website’s search engine optimization strategy, I think people get confused with the importance of high numbers. 10,000 visits a month to your website may seem like a fantastic number, but on its own its meaningless.

As an example, let’s say you’re Ford dealer with a website that gets 10,000 visits a month for the keyword ‘car’. Fantastic, right? But how many of those visits converted into actual sales? Of those 10,000 visits, 2,000 of them were people looking for car repairs which you aren’t focusing on, 3,000 were looking for car reviews or information about their own car, and 1,000 of them were trying to find toy cars for children. That leaves 4,000 visits that were potentially looking for car sales. Of that 4,000 only 1,000 of them were interested in Ford vehicles. Of that 1,000 only 30 were within three hours of your location. Out of those 30 you sold 1 car.

See what I’m getting at? You sold 1 car in a month out of 10,000 visits to your website. That’s a 0.0001% success rate.

Quantity doesn’t trump quality.

If you were to focus your keywords more effectively you could increase your success rate enormously.

Let’s try a different example. Instead of focusing on the single word ‘car’ as a keyword you try a few variations:
‘Ford car sales Toronto’
‘new Ford car Toronto’
‘Toronto Ford dealer’

After changing your keywords and using those more specific phrases your visits decreased to 3,000 visits a month, but of those 3,000 visits 2,500 of them were people in Toronto looking for a new Ford car. If we were to take the same 1 in 30 from the previous statement, that would translate to 83 car sales in that month.

While those numbers may not be realistic, it points out an important fact to search engine optimization. Quality of quantity. So next time you think about the number of visits your website is getting per month, consider the keywords you’re using on your site and consider re-evaluating them and see how much of a difference they make in your success rate.