One of my first posts here was about how to treat the people who visit your blog.

What was the main point?

Treating people who visit your site like an amorphous mass of “traffic” is wrong.

Then I explained it in more detail:

You have to think about each and every person visiting your blog or site as an actual human being and guest.

You have to be

• personal
• polite
• friendly.

Today I want to elaborate on the topic of traffic vs visitors and show you an example.

When social media traffic became the most important traffic source

There was a time on the Web years ago when for many sites social media traffic was more important than search traffic.

It was during the heydays of Facebook around 2013, before the algorithm started throttling organic reach.

At the same time Google traffic diminished considerably due to growing clutter above actual search results.

These reports were true but they didn’t apply to all

• types of sites
• countries
• markets
• and topics.

Some things work well on social media others don’t.

Also – as mentioned above – social media algorithms throttle organic reach by now.

Did social media kill the search engine star?

Some website owners reported that they get more visitors from Facebook than from Google.

Think viral websites like BuzzFeed or ViralNova. Others reported negligible numbers from social sites.

These numbers are highly selective and depend on the market yet I don’t want to argue with them here.

My focus in this article is on the difference between the traffic and visitors metaphor.

Let’s take a look at the actual “traffic” coming from social sites.

I have been a staunch supporter of social media and its traffic a few years back.

Thus I was more than once arguing that social media traffic is the best around.

It’s still true in a sense.

Yet it depends on the goals of your site as suggested above.

Ecommerce sales do not work well via social sites e.g. – Pinterest being the exception here.

So even if your traffic is still mainly social in nature which is the exception it doe snot mean it makes money like search.

Does social media yield low quality traffic?

For some use cases or types of sites the social media traffic is of low quality.

What does traffic quality mean?

Can you ascribe quality to actual people?

It means that the people who arrive via Facebook or X/Twitter are only slightly interested.

They are just checking things out without commercial intent.

Searchers on the other hand are often highly determined to buy something.

One way to determine the quality of traffic is considering the bounce rate.

Yet it’s a fuzzy metric you can’t compare from site to site really.

Another way of finding out whether the traffic actually makes sense for you is the the visit duration.

It’s called that way on Umami analytics I use.

What does it mean in plain English?

It answers the question:

How long do your visitors actually stay on your site?

Well, visitors from social media usually stay for mere seconds on seo2.blog even when they don’t bounce.

The number is even lower for some sites – think Reddit – while niche social communities can perform better. Why?

It’s because their members are already “qualified” traffic.

Boring topics are not the problem

You could argue it’s my fault and social media users don’t care for search engine optimization and similarly boring topics.

Yet I had several viral posts on social media and some of them are not even dealing with SEO.

Many of them get updated over the years.

And it sparks renewed interest on social media.

Often search traffic leads to social media traffic and vice versa btw.

So I only distinguish in such a way to make a point.

What we see here is that these visitors are indeed traffic not guests, they don’t even drop in, they just move on.

They pass your website while moving somewhere else.

Mere seconds are indeed abysmal, even on a blog like mine which also gets off topic traffic (Google Image search for instance).

So yes, both social media traffic and search traffic (or both combined) is fickle and moves on quickly.

People check you out quickly or find what they want and move on.

Other users, aka real visitors stay 10 times as long.

You should aim to get these real visitors not traffic that moves on.

People who stay in their car and just slow down without even leaving their car are not the perfect clients.

The exception is of course a McDrive type of business.

I’d prefer to be a restaurant, not because my nick-name is Chef.

It’s because I want to offer my guest more and a better service instead!

I’m tired of just getting the stink of the traffic exhausts and a few bucks.

Thus I ask you again:

• Are you after traffic or visitors?
• Do you want people to drive by your site, slow down a little and go on?
• Or do you want real visitors who stop by and stay for a while?
  

Plus I also elaborated in another post on how to get visitors instead of mere traffic.