Should Your Website Traffic Always Go Up?

Originally posted in my personal twitter thread.

SEO = traffic number go up!

Not really. Not always. It depends.

Here's a post about different stages of websites.

Now a tricky one! Can you guess what happened to this site?

Screenshot from one of the projects we launched this year above is your typical "chase graph".

Hockey stick up plz.

But that's not how most actually great websites look. These types of graphs are nice for the leads to feel like we know what we doing, but they are...

Not real. I mean the traffic is real, but the graph can look like this for only so long before it becomes a bit different.

And that next stage is rarely spoken of in marketing, web design, development and SEO communities.And that next stage is the actual strategy.

This is a healthy site that is making plenty of money with almost 0% effort. And it's ok. It's a bit declining, but costly resources are not needed. Also you can see that it has something to do with workdays and weekends having different traffic levels.

Now a tricky one!

Can you guess what happened to this site?

I'll wait.

You prob guessed on "oh no we lost rankings and the site is dying"?

Wrong.

This site has seasonal traffic and in summer it drops significantly. It's normal behaviour, this has been a constant for years.

As a matter of fact, this site is growing few % every month if we look at past few year graphs.

Another one.

It seems like this site had a huge win, then lost it and remains stable right?

Wrong. This website has been on decline for a few years. It lost 90% of traffic as it now only ranks for its brand name, no non-brand aware keywords (almost).

That spike is actually a sudden small attempt from google to bring it back to glory days (like 10% of the way).

And giving up again.

That 10x traffic win a few years back was a huge cash cow... until it ended.

Because search intent changed for the term that was making most of the money.

This project is deteriorating. And that's what we expect. We also intentionally decided to let it gradually die...

As that was the best strategy, because of the market we are in and the costs associated with bringing it back to full glory.

Which brings me to actual content, SEO and business strategy part.

When we work on sites, we don't just go "big number go up". Sure, it's a fun graph to brag with, but in reality...

Websites are like real estate, it costs money and time to operate and...

Just like with a shop in the middle of nowhere, you can only sell so much - same with website niches...

You can only get so much valuable traffic and that is usually based on the business you run and the market you are in.

There are bad ideas and bad businesses that can't benefit that much from SEO.

But usually that means that it's also a product/service that doesn't have any global need anyways (there are exceptions to this rule, yes!).

Hiring a great SEO strategist is usually closer to hiring a business consultant, rather than just a "bloke that optimizes sites and improves page speed".

We help you to make the right choices and invest your money or time wisely.

We aim for ROI. We propose plans to get leads. We tell you when we think your ideas are wrong. And we usually have data and experience to back it up.

We focus on business strategy... online.

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