How Do You Attract Visitors Instead of Traffic to Your Site?

A skier wearing a helmet on a snowy day with plenty of sunshine invites us by holding a hand towards the beautiful mountains in the background. A wonderful scenery. *

One day I noted that there is a difference between traffic and visitors.

Then I have described it in more depth.

Yes, I’m talking about the Web not street traffic.

This time I’d like to elaborate on that crucial difference.

While traffic and visitors may seem like the same thing – or at least a synonym – they are not the same.

You have to make a conscious decision and ask yourself:

How do you attract visitors instead of traffic to your site?

What is traffic?

When I banned Google on my blog it occurred to me that you get only traffic from Google in the most cases but rarely visitors.

Google traffic is like that information highway people used as an early metaphor to describe the Web.

People rush around in a frenzy, they pass along your website while they are on their way somewhere else.

Sometimes they will stop for a few seconds to check out your facade and the neon signs that advertise your business.

A few searchers will jump out of their car and check out your site, take a look but then quickly disappear without doing anything.

Only few of people will remember you or come over again.

Optimization for Google is like catching the eye of these stressed out hurrying masses.

Website owners hoping at least a bunch of those racing rats will have a minute left for you while on the hunt for what they want.

Usually what those people want is not what you want.

Should you bow to the pressure from this traffic and give them what they demand?

Should you mainly optimize for so called search intent?

Catering fast food for fast traffic?

Should you offer something quick and dirty for people to drive in and stop for a minute?

Most website owners do it.

They attempt to go after the people who quickly pass their business.

Businesses focusing on SEO try to make

the neon signs as large as possible
the pricing as attractive as possible
the products as appealing to the larger public as possible.

In the end we have dozens of awfully similar businesses lining the street which is the Google search results page.

And people just choose the first one that appears in sight, the biggest one, the one on top.

Unfortunately there is no “top” by now for most lucrative search results.

On top there are Google ads and services that require “paid inclusion” too.

Don’t forget the often huge AI summaries on top!

So even if you rank #1 organically you mind wind up below the fold.

This way actual Google users have to scroll down and look closely to find you.

At the end of the day you get a small percentage of the people viewing a given search result.

Google takes the biggest part of the cake, after all they own the search results and can place their own properties above you.

Thus each day it becomes more difficult to get after the traffic so that more and more people scramble to get it.

The competition gets fiercer for the few breadcrumbs that Google leaves on the table.

Those who can’t or do not want to pay their way to the top have to fight each other to get some meager traffic.

Google makes money through ads not search results

Of course I do not want to explain the obvious changes Google has implemented over the recent years.

Soon Google might have no organic result left though.

Google may go “paid inclusion” completely or at least hide organic results so much that almost nobody will notice them.

After all they have the search monopoly in most parts of the world so they can dictate the prices.

More importantly they have the “organic” search traffic monopoly.

Some in the SEO industry would say “Google doesn’t owe you a living”.

They try to justify the so called “free market” approach of Google.

By “free” they mean beyond democratic control and entitled to do whatever they please.

After all Google is a black box top down organization with no oversight.

People tend to overlook that when one corporation controls the whole market, the market is by no means free.

I don’t talk politics or economics here.

I agree with the Google apologists here: Google not only doesn’t owe you anything, they do not care at all for you.

You may go bankrupt after a Google algorithm update and nobody at Google will even notice if you kill yourself afterwards.

In the UK lawmakers finally recognized it and require Google to disclose major how ranking work.

You’re not suicidal yet and you actually want to stay in business for the long run?

Then you have to care and to start attracting visitors now not just traffic.

Who is your visitor?

The visitor metaphor from analytics is much better to visualize the typical person visiting your site.

First of all, it’s an individual. We are also talking about real human beings here.

In case you represent a small business you can even name some of the people who visit you on your site.

As a big business you can create so called buyer personas.

They are based on real people and try to mimic what your typical visitor might look like.

In the best case you have a so called ICP instead. An Ideal Customer Profile.

Let’s take a step back though. When it comes to blogging we can focus solely on visitors as of now.

Once you know how a visitor of yours might look, things like

gender
age
income
interests

even

religious
political
sexual

preferences might matter.

After all you want to know who you invite to your shop don’t you?

It may be a bad idea to invite the 77 year old Catholic Republican to your Gay bar for example.

As an independent consultant I am not a big business.

I am small enough to reach out to real people.

Why? To get to know them, find out what they care about and attract them by giving it to them whatever it is.

I can even afford to invite some of visitors personally to visit my site. It still happens occasionally. How exactly?

I say “hello world” and some people reply.
I “small talk” here and there like I usually do.
Or I also ask a question and directly invite individuals to read an article.

Is this scalable? If you have a social media manager or a team, yes.

You can invite people personally but not all the time

I usually do not invite people personally.

Even my day has only 24 hours.

I have done that in the past occasionally but in some cases mostly because I wanted people to share my articles on social media.

It never was the obnoxious vote begging some people practice but it was already a bit much.

That’s why I refrained from doing it later on.

It’s better to attract these people organically anyway as you want to find out what they truly like without pushing.

I ask people to come over, we write back and forth and sometimes they later came over.

Sometimes they also do not just visit me, but also engage with my post.

Such a comment can be very helpful.

Engaged users tend to ask for more information on some aspect of the post.

Yet there are probably many other people who care about it so I might elaborate on that point in my next post.

Larger companies have to do

market research
surveys
social media monitoring

to find out what their audience wants to see. I can ask members of my audience directly.

I have written a lot lately about how peer-to-peer SEO is a very important part of your strategy these days.

You have to understand though that your peers are your equals.

They probably know as much or almost as much about your niche, industry or topic as you do.

So it’s really difficult to attract them each time.

You are not only trying to convince your peers to visit you.

The invitation must go out to the people who know enough to care but don’t know too much. I do not write each of my posts for

For example Paul is much more advanced than I am on IFTTT. I can’t teach AJ Kohn much about Google optimization.

Jason Acidre probably tried more link building techniques than I did.

I’m delighted when they visit but I don’t expect them each time.

Of course you want the peer review by your equals to find out whether you are still on top of things or whether you err.

Then hopefully they will comment and make you think again.

The much larger part of your audience needs an invitation as well though. You can’t ask them all personally to visit you.

The invitation must be implicit.

You have to bring whatever they like to the table to attract them. You can’t stalk them and invite each time.

Attracting the silent majority of your potential audience

How do you attract the visitors you want to attract once you know mostly your few peers?

Can you get occasional engagers who make up 9% of a typical audience? Can you reach the 90% of lurkers as well?

You have to listen a bit more closely to those voices that aren’t that loud.

I mean not everybody is hugely popular with a blog or a highly interconnected social media maven.

That’s why I listen more closely when someone from another trade comments here or shares my articles.

I try to guess the reasons why a person has decided to comment on or to share this one post.

Then I dig deeper into my analytics tools to follow their path.

This one person who might be representative of many others is also really crucial.

You can’t just write for your peers. They are not enough of an audience.

The people who actually want to implement your advice are as important.

Even the negative feedback from people matters a lot.

For example one person who was not tech-savvy enough to use my IFTTT applets complained to me that I “spam” him.

What happened?

He just copy and pasted my recipe including my own blog feed address instead of replacing it with his own.

I learned again that my audience are not only other SEO geeks who can code.

The seo2.blog is also for people who just want to use things like search without having to think about them.

There are many examples like that.

Another guy complained that there is no X/Twitter feed on my blog.

There was one on my homepage but he only read one article so he overlooked it.

Also he got angry that I didn’t have a mobile version of my site. This is again a highly valuable feedback.

I had been using my theme for 5 years, back when mobile wasn’t that important. I changed to a responsive theme back in 2012.

Also I never added the typical social media buttons to my site which are obligatory by now. Nowadays I use AddToAny.

Some people are voicing their demands directly.

Yet many people will just leave put off by the lack of what they expect, be it technical issues or your actual offer.

To find out what they want:

You need to visit their social media profiles to find out more about them.
You don’t have to follow them as you can’t read about every industry your readers are in.

Yet you should take a closer look of what they share beside your post.
You will want to take a look at their website.
You have also to research what search term they used to find you.
You have to check out which posts are the most popular with your subscribers.

Do you know what’s popular with your audience of recurring visitors?

I don’t mean just your few peers of friends. Not yet?

Don’t go just after the amorphous mass of traffic. Act now.