How much traffic does my website need?

Do you know how many visitors your website needs before you start you start generating business? This article will address this. It is for people who have a website offering a service or a products. (As opposed to website where people are trying to generate money through advertising on the site through Google Adsense or Clickbank.)

What we need to know is the conversion rate, the percentage of visitors that go on to buy or make an enquiry. The short answer, from my own experience is this: for a service that you offer where you require a potential customer / client to contact you before they get a price the answer is about 3% for a typical website. So 100 visitors would mean 3 enquiries. For a site that sells products and facilitates the ability to buy online that jumps up to 10%. So 10 out of every 100 visitors would buy.

Now for the longer more detailed answer. There are many things that affect this conversion rate. The two main things for a website are: how well targeted is the traffic / where is it coming from and how well is the site optimised for converting it’s traffic.

Where Is The Traffic Coming From

Traffic from a search engine is the best. The reason for this is because the person using the search engine is actively searching for your products or service. This is a two-fold effect. (1) First of all it means they are a potential client in a position to buy. (2) The other thing which people often under estimate the value of is that as well as being in a position to buy they are actively looking for someone to buy from. This is very valuable and should not be underestimated.

You could advertise on other related websites. For example if you sell widgets then you could advertise on a site called widget-fans.com. This seems to make sense as the first of the two benefits above (1) will be matched to a degree. However they are on widget fan site for a specific purpose like to read an interesting looking article. They are busy at the moment and were not expecting to be pulling out their credit cards and buying widgets online. So the second benefit mentioned above (2) is not met. Obviously you will still get visitors to your website but the conversion rate of those visitors will be lower. Keep this in mind when buying advertising from other websites.

When targeting traffic from the search engine you will need to think carefully about which keywords you want to rank for. The more relevant they are then the higher the conversion rate will be. If you come first for something obscure that doesn’t accurately describe what you do then you may still get visitors to your website but they wont buy from you.

There are other ways people use to promote their site like pop-ups for your site and sneakily redirecting people to your site. The conversion rate for these sort of techniques will be extremely low. So low that you would need millions of “visits” in this way. If everyone used this type of marketing then no one would ever end up on the website they were looking for. It can never work in reality.

How Well Does The Site Convert Traffic

You may think you have a great site because you have good info on all the services you offer within the “Services” section, info on how good your company is on your home page, some quality customer testimonials on your testimonials page and clear contact details and enquiry form on a “contact us” page. What you really have is a website that requires visitors to find their way round at least 4 different pages to get the info they need to make a buying decision. On average people will decide based on the 1st page they land or they will go back to the search engine. Each page should contain everything the visitor needs to make a buying decision.

So if you offer various services then each service should have its own page but every one of those pages should have testimonials, contact details and an enquiry form.

For further information look up “landing pages” or “splash pages” as these type of pages do a very good job of converting visitors in to customers.

Conclusion

If you offer a service where people have to enquire before you can give them a price then your conversion rate can be up to about 3%. If you wanted 15 good leads a month then you would need 500 visitors a month. 500 @ 3% = 15. This is 500 visitors from relevant sources and keywords. Don’t include traffic from other sources as this wont have the same conversion rate.

Leads in this way have a high chance of converting to clients. If you convert 2 / 3, manage to retain each client and do work for them every month then after 12 months your company would be doing work for 120 clients each month. For someone that offers a service like an Accountant or Internet Marketing (as I do) this is a lot of work!

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