Prioritizing Quality over Quantity website traffic

When it comes to website traffic, it may be hard to believe that quality visitors over quantity matter. You may think, “Why should it? I’m getting loads of traffic, it should be helping me.” Lots of traffic is awesome, but it doesn’t always help if you don’t know the quality of your visitors. 

It’s great that your site is attracting a lot of traffic; however, are you ensuring that the site visitors are quality visitors who are genuinely interested in what you’re advertising? Lots of visits to your website can be really encouraging, but only if those visits are turning visitors into customers and impacting your conversion rate in a positive way. 

To increase leads to your website, it’s common sense that you need to know how to drive traffic to your site. If you’ve gotten the traffic, awesome! You need to know how to check the quality of those visitors. These metrics can be analyzed in Google Analytics, or through your SEO and PPC efforts. In this blog post, we’ll explain the benefits of quality visitors and how you can check the website traffic quality.

Benefits of quality traffic over lots of traffic  

Tracking quality traffic leads to more accurate data 

Imagine sifting through two million page views full of untargeted visitors who are unlikely to engage with your website. Cool, there are two million visitors, but your bounce rate will be high because not many of those visits lead to conversions. On the other hand, even 5,000 (or 500!) page visits with quality visitors that are willing and likely to engage will significantly help your website more. 

With quality website traffic and lower bounce rates, it’ll be easier to digest and decipher your website data because it will be more accurate. With the more organized metrics, it’ll be easier for you to see what’s working with your content, SEO efforts, etc. and what needs adjusting. The data pool you’re pulling from is smaller, and it’s easier to make decisions. 

Quality traffic keeps your ROI high

It’s possible to achieve high-traffic goals, but only focusing on the number of visits can be deceiving. Are visitors just clicking through to your page and bouncing/leaving quickly because they are not finding what they are looking for? Your return on investment will suffer if your bounce rates are high and your conversion rates are low. 

Branding for website traffic isn’t just taking out an ad or throwing your name all over the Internet, it’s advertising your school or business in a way that shows you are a better choice than the competition. To do this, you need to make sure you’re marketing to the right target groups and that your content is engaging enough to keep these audiences interested. If you spend time attracting these smaller groups in your high quality traffic data, you’re ROI will see benefits. Make sure you’re pumping your hard work into target audiences that matter, even if the audience is only 500 of the 3,000 website visitors you’ve gotten. 

You can efficiently optimize your content to fit a certain audience 

Once you have deciphered which visitors will engage with your site and which will not, it’s time to plan your website content to match the needs of your audience. Are your quality visitors parents? Or are they faculty? What questions is your target audience asking and trying to answer when they do an internet search? Analyze the current content of your website and see what needs fixing to attract these quality visitors and keep them engaged. Does your site load too slowly? Is your school blog content relatable? Perhaps there’s old content on the website that is attracting visitors, but no longer applies to the mission of your school. All of this information is important to know. (Try taking our website test to see if your school website makes the grade.)

Build out content that will naturally bring these visitors to your site organically through searches. This means optimizing your SEO for these audiences and writing content that applies to them. Gear your content to the right groups, and the right groups will engage.

How to determine the quality of your website traffic 

Metrics matter, and so does the avenue you’re using to measure your traffic metrics. Google Analytics and other data measuring softwares can be overwhelming to dig into, so here are important metrics to highlight when you’re trying to understand your traffic. 

Bounce rate 

If you notice visitors are staying on one part of your homepage and then leaving, you need to start tracking your bounce rates. At what point do visitors move from quality traffic to disengaged visitors and leave your website? A tool to help you understand your bounce rates, besides Google Analytics is Hotjar. Hotjar is a software that helps you iron out issues in your website design. They use heatmaps to help you see exactly where visitors are staying on your website to help you locate the most interesting elements and adjust the ones that never are visited. Understanding what your visitors look at scroll past, and ignore is crucial in understanding your site’s bounce rates. 

Average time on page 

We can assume that if a visitor is spending a lot of time on your website and clicking through your content, they are quality visitors who will engage with the site. This is a good metric to track to understand what on your website pages is attracting the most high quality traffic. 

Lead conversions 

With school enrollment always in the back of school marketer’s minds, lead conversions is always an important metric to track. Lead conversions basically are a telltale sign of how successful your school marketing efforts are and if your prospects are turning into conversions. This is the first metric you should track when determining the quality of your website traffic. To measure conversions, set up goals in Google Analytics so you can identify what a conversion on your site means (sign up for a visit, fill out a contact form, etc.)

Number of page views 

Some pages on your school website are probably more popular than others. Some pages/posts are probably bone dry and receive no views. What you decide to optimize will depend on the page views and what users are skipping over. A goal is always to see a high number of page views for your site, but if the traffic is unqualified, there’s no point. 

Contact Us

Want to boost your small school or non-profit’s quality website traffic but don’t know where to start? Not to worry – we’re offering FREE, personalized 15-minute consultations to help you prioritize what needs to be done to reach your website goals. Contact us today to take the first step in achieving the website of your dreams.