How to do a website traffic quality audit

I often speak to businesses who tell me excitedly about their growing website traffic, and their plans to increase it even more.

But this is where I usually pause the conversation and ask the question: What’s the actual goal here?

Because traffic for the sake of traffic is pointless if it’s never going to grow your business.

Look, which would you rather have:

• 10,000 visitors a month who are never going to become clients?
• Or 300 visitors a month who are firmly inside your target market, highly motivated, and far more likely to take action and pay you for your services?

Many website owners choose the first by accident, simply because they haven’t looked closely enough at who is currently landing on their site, and tweaked their visibility strategy accordingly.

So before you invest more time (or money) into your SEO, run this quick mini-audit to gauge the quality of your traffic, so you can decide on the next steps.

A 5-minute traffic quality mini-audit you can do right now:

These are the three questions I always ask clients when we start working on their website strategy:

1. What are the top search queries bringing people to your website?

Look in Google Search Console. Are these the types of queries your ideal clients would be typing into Google? Or are they random searches that aren’t related to what you offer?

Also, consider whether these queries might be from your peers or competitors (this is quite common if you write a lot of industry-focused information in your blog).

These are the types of queries you might expect to see, and how you can figure out the search intent behind them.

(Haven’t got GSC set up yet? No idea how it works? I’ve got you - here’s a guide)

2. Which pages or blog posts bring in the most organic traffic?

If your most-visited pages are niche blog posts that don’t connect to your actual paid service, these readers are highly unlikely to be interested in what you have to offer.

I often see a website with one or two blog posts that bring in the majority of the website traffic, but they’re not attracting potential clients, just people interested in the subject.

3. Where is your traffic coming from geographically?

If you only work with clients from the UK but more than half your traffic is from the Australia or India, your analytics might look healthy on paper, but these visitors are never going to become clients.

I once worked with a business who couldn’t work with clients from North America for insurance reasons, but the vast majority of their website traffic was coming from the USA. This is a very common thing to happen once you start getting very high amounts of traffic (10,000+ visitors a month).

Next steps:

Once you’ve checked your search queries, top landing pages and traffic locations, you’ll usually fall into one of three camps. Here’s what to do in each scenario:

1. My traffic is qualified, but it’s not converting

Good news, this is the easiest problem to fix.

If the right people are already finding you but you’re not seeing as many leads and enquiries as you’d like, the issue usually sits with your website experience.

Depending on where the majority of your traffic is arriving, you have two possible starting points:

1. If most of your website traffic is landing on blog posts:

Your job now is to convert this traffic from passive readers to potential clients. Here’s a guide.

1. If the majority of your traffic is landing on your home, about, or service pages:

Your site isn’t doing enough to convince the visitor to take the next step towards working with you. Here are the main things to fix.

2. My visitors could be interested in what I offer, but they’re outside my service area

If your content is attracting the right type of person but from the wrong location, you’ve also got options:

EITHER:

Ignore the poor fit traffic and refine your messaging for local visitors. Make it unmistakably clear where you’re based and who you work with. Then make sure you provide clear next steps to guide those local visitors deeper into your site and towards getting in touch.

OR

Leverage the global audience you’ve accidentally built. If you’ve got steady traffic from outside your region, this is a strong foundation for creating a paid product like an eBook (or you could even write a physical book!). You’ve solved the hardest part, which is finding an audience. Now you can give them something they can buy regardless of location.

3. My traffic isn’t coming from potential clients at all

If the wrong people are landing on your site... it’s time for a complete rethink.

If you’re determined to focus on organic search, consider which route you want to focus on:

Blogging with intention. Target long-tail search terms your future clients are likely to be typing into Google three to six months before they need you. This helps you get in front of people earlier in the buyer journey. Here’s a guide on how to find useful keyphrases for blog posts.

Optimising your key service pages. This drives less traffic overall, but the people who arrive have much higher buying intent. The search terms you should be targeting for this strategy need to be commercially relevant (rather than purely informational). Here’s a guide to finding the perfect keyphrases for your service pages using my favourite keyword research tool.

Both routes work, and in many cases, the best strategy is a mix of the two.

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Sometimes, the positive stats can make you feel like you’re doing all the right things, even when the numbers don’t translate into real enquiries. This is a trap. Traffic volume is easy to measure and increase, but improving traffic quality takes more intention and strategy.