You Can Double Your Website Visitors and Still Not Grow. Here's Why.
What really happens when you optimise for volume
When hardly anyone visits your website, it feels like nothing else matters.
Numbers are down. Revenue isn’t picking up. You can practically hear a breeze blowing the tumbleweed across your storefront. What you need is to get more people through the door, and you’re ready to throw the kitchen sink at it.
Because when web traffic is low, it feels like everything else is downstream of that one number.
No visitors means no enquiries.
No enquiries? No sales.
No sales? You guessed it—no business, no income, no paycheck.
The solution is obvious: you need to get more people in.
But what if there was more to it than that? Is it possible that “more visitors” wouldn’t fix the issue?
Our first instinct is usually the wrong one
When the graphs are all pointing downward, we’ll usually reach for the lever that will stem the bleed of visitors.
We’ll think of:
Running more ads
Posting more on the socials
Sponsoring influencer shoutouts
etcetera…
None of these is a bad solution. They’ll certainly get more eyes on your business.
There’s just no guarantee they’ll produce the results you want.
You might be thinking, “My traffic is dropping off. Therefore, I just need more traffic. Isn’t it obvious?”
Wrong.
If you’re optimising simply for more traffic, this is a fine approach. But what really matters more—the number of people visiting your business, or the number of people becoming customers?
More visitors = same results
In reality, more people seeing your business doesn’t immediately mean more people will buy from it.
If you get thousands of extra visitors who arrive without any idea of what they’re looking for, nothing will change.
That’s why many businesses can increase their traffic but still not feel the effect on their bottom line.
The thing we wrongly assume about traffic volume
Our “conversion rate” is an excellent metric to track.
But it can mislead us if we believe all our visitors arrive in the same way.
Let’s say we own an eCommerce store called “Premium Hot Tubs” which gets 1,000 daily visits. Our conversion rate is around 1.5%, so we average about 15 hot tub sales each day.
Wouldn’t shooting up to 10,000 daily hits mean we’re suddenly making 10x the sales?
Well, it depends.
Firstly, congrats on increasing the traffic by an order of magnitude; no small feat already. But where did it come from? If we pay for adverts on Instagram, we’ll certainly get a few hits. It just won’t often be the case that, even for those who clicked on the ad, they were browsing Instagram and suddenly realised they needed to buy a hot tub.
By contrast, someone who searches somewhere on the internet for “buy premium hot tubs” is already in a completely different mindset. They weren’t casually browsing; they were actively trying to solve a problem they already had.
If our listing for “Premium Hot Tubs” made itself visible at that point, we wouldn’t be interrupting the user. They might, in fact, be very happy to see the listing.
Far fewer people are going to find the site this way. But we’ve filtered the extra visitors we get to the ones who are most likely to become customers.
Fewer clicks.
Fewer visits.
But massively more sales.
Conversion rates definitely matter. But the mistake is assuming they’re always transferable.
The answer is “qualified traffic”
Not all visitors were made equal.
Whilst some visitors won’t exactly be there to intentionally waste your time, it’s still true that you’ll get visitors who were never going to convert at all. And when you’re putting together a plan to increase traffic, you want to target those who are likely to convert.
You want to qualify the traffic you’re bringing to your website.
So, how do you filter your traffic for people who are more likely to convert? Here are a few solutions:
#1. Capture existing demand
Make sure people see you at the moment they’re already searching for what you sell.
This could be with:
Search engine optimisation (SEO), which would mean you’d appear at the top of sites like Google when people search for what you sell. There’s a massive amount of demand in almost every market, but it’s not yet evenly captured.
You could sell within niche marketplaces where buyers attend only when they already want a product like yours.
The key here is not to try and create desire.
You should meet it where it already exists.
#2. Market yourself to problem-aware audiences
Imagine writing a detailed guide on fixing slow websites.
If you release it to a general audience, most are going to scroll past it because it’s not a problem they care about in that moment.
But if you promote it on a webmaster’s forum in a section dedicated to troubleshooting, fewer people will see it—but more will click and read. The message hasn’t changed at all; just the audience.
Here, you’re not persuading them to care about your solution.
You’re meeting them after they already do!
#3. Market to people who have opted in
Even with qualified traffic, not everyone is ready to buy immediately.
But sometimes, people hang around in a way that says, “I’m taking an interest, and I give you permission to sell to me later when I am ready to buy.”
Imagine sending the word out to:
An email list built around a specific problem
A social media audience who chose to follow you because they liked what you were creating
A community you built on Discord, Telegram or WhatsApp around what you do
It takes time. But people who know what you do are going to trust you a heck of a lot more than people who have no idea who you are.
Volume doesn’t always deliver on the promise
It is true that, online, everything is downstream of traffic. We function in an “attention economy,” and it feels like the only solution is to get the numbers up.
But if your numbers are low, simply “getting them back up at any cost” might not be the right fix.
Hence, doubling—or even 10x-ing—your visitors can definitely help, but it may still not cause your business to grow.
It’s when the right people see your offer at the right moment that the chance you’ll sell skyrockets.
If you aren’t bringing in the right customers, more traffic is just noise.
But when you qualify your traffic and your leads and then worry about volume, growth stops being an accident.
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