I keep seeing website traffic talked about like the goal is simply to get more of it, and I understand why because it’s an easy number to measure, it makes a nice graph in a report and, on the surface, more people finding your business sounds objectively better.
But I’m getting less and less interested in traffic as a metric by itself because I’ve now seen enough examples where the SEO is technically “working” and the business still isn’t getting what it actually needs.
I have a client where we started getting into the top local results for some of the searches we had been targeting, which is exactly what you want to see when you’re doing SEO. We moved up. Google was clearly understanding the site better. The business was showing up where it hadn’t before.
Except when I looked more closely, there just weren’t that many people searching those terms in the first place, and some of the inquiries that were coming through weren’t particularly good fits anyway.
So now I’m sitting there looking at something I could very easily report as a win, because from an SEO standpoint it is one, while also thinking: okay, but is this actually helping the business?
That changes the question for me.
Instead of asking, “How do we get more traffic?” I’m much more interested in asking, “Where is there enough search demand, and are those searches coming from the kind of person this business actually wants to work with?”
Those are not the same thing.
You can rank really well for something with very little search volume. You can increase traffic around a topic that attracts the wrong audience. You can publish a blog post that suddenly brings in hundreds of visitors who never look at a service page, never click a call-to-action and never become a client.
And none of those things necessarily mean the SEO was done badly. That’s almost the point.
Sometimes the SEO does exactly what you asked it to do, and then the result teaches you that you were asking the wrong question.
That’s where I think SEO becomes much more useful than just “let’s get you higher on Google.”
I want to know what people are actually searching for, what Google is already starting to associate with the business, which pages are getting visibility, whether that visibility is turning into the right inquiries and, if it isn’t, what that tells us to do next.
At this point, the next move isn’t automatically to do more SEO around the thing we already proved we can rank for. It’s to take what we learned and test a better direction: look for areas where enough people are actually searching, where the intent is closer to the kind of customer the business wants, and then watch what happens as we build visibility there.
Maybe that becomes the better opportunity. Maybe it doesn’t. But now the next decision is based on what the market is actually showing us instead of continuing to push a keyword just because we managed to rank for it.
And I think that’s the difference between doing SEO and actually managing it over time. A one-time round of optimization can get the site into better shape, but the useful part comes after that, when you can see how Google responds, what people search for, which pages get traction, whether the right inquiries follow and what all of that should change about what you do next.
That’s the part I find interesting because now SEO isn’t just a scoreboard, it’s information.
I still want the rankings. I still want the traffic. I just want them to tell us something useful about where the business should go next, because I don’t want to spend six months celebrating a traffic graph if the business is still asking why things feel slow.
