Quality or Quantity?

[Cyndalie]

Here's how I've always related the quantity vs. quality topic to the traffic/seo model:


When it comes to marketing in search engines, those with gaining a quantity of traffic in mind are first to be disappointed. Since search engines provide a user induced interest in searching for what they are looking for and finding your site, both your site and the user are pre-qualified for a sale. The user is primed and ready, they know what they want, and odds are if they find it at your site a purchase will be made, a bookmark will be set, or they will share your site with a friend.

Trying to gain a huge quantity of traffic through search engine marketing is a very time consuming effort, a long term effort that can have long term results. But do not expect 5000 hits per day for one top ten keyword ranking. Since keyword phrases must be exact matches to what your site is ranking for, there is lots of space to cover to hit a majority of phrase matches that basically say the same thing. For example - pluralization, misspellings, quotes; sometimes even capitalization can create different search results. On average, a keyword phrase ranking in the top ten will generate anywhere between 5-50 clicks per day. It doesn't seem like that many, however times that by then good keyword rankings and you can have up to 500 prequalified sales/visitors coming to your site per day.

Compared with TGP types of traffic, where 3000 visitors can result in few sales, consider what this quantity is costing you in bandwidth, time, and content. TGP marketing is often called short term marketing with short term results.

To me, quantity is traffic that has been filtered through other sites, searching for something for free, clicked on impulse or is directed to my site without user preemptive action.

Quality traffic is traffic that is looking for something my site offers which the user took action to seek out.

Both types are needed for a well rounded marketing campaign, however knowing the difference and balancing it is important.

I know this is generalized - wish I had more time to go into more detail.
Cyndalie