What is more important search ranking or traffic?

On the surface of things, it is easy to say that rankings are inversely proportional to traffic, i.e., the lower your rank on a search page, the higher traffic you can expect. So traffic, in the end, becomes a more important metric. But this proposition is dependent on a lot of other variables and might not always hold true. As a result, which one of the two metrics is more important is impossible to say in absolute terms. Each of them is a function of the other and a function of several other factors that determine the success of a company’s digital marketing campaign.

When is traffic more important than ranking?

When you are targeting the right audience and are getting traffic that helps you achieve your goals of lead generation or conversion, traffic is indeed important. However, huge amounts of incoming traffic with a very low conversion rate don’t do you much good.

Traffic is an indicator of success when people who reach your website actually benefit from your content and engage with it. This happens when the source of that traffic is the correct keyword. Therefore, if, say, you have a website that sells vintage gowns, and you optimize your site to get traffic from the keyword ‘dresses’, you may be delighted by the surge in value of this metric but it might not do you much practical good.

At Pat’s Marketing, we use this experience to ensure that we use keywords that not only get in a fancy number of visitors to your website but also lead to higher conversions. We measure the success of our SEO campaigns by the additional profit we generate for our clients and not solely by how much traffic we are successful in sending to their sites.

A High Rank Doesn’t Always Translate to Higher Traffic

The question here is, with which keyword are you ranking in the top few search results? For example, if you optimize a page for a particular keyword that in itself gets loads of searches each day, you will still get more traffic from it being at the bottom of the page than you will from being on top for a much less common keyword.

Seasoned SEO experts suggest using a combination of low, medium and high competition keywords for optimizing incoming traffic. Because, if you are using all high competition keywords, it can be incredibly difficult for you to keep up your position on page 1 at all times; and with too many low competition keywords, you will easily get top rank but it will not rise your traffic much. Pat’s Marketing uses a combination of low, medium &high competition keywords.

It’s also interesting to note that certain low traffic niche keywords lead to higher conversions compared to high traffic generic keywords.

Improve Website Content to Benefit the Most from Your Venerable Rankings and Traffic

Both rank and traffic are crucial to your digital marketing efforts. Flawless content, however, is what helps sustain them both. If your content is not appealing enough and engrossing enough, bounce rates on your websites will go up and your success with achieving both these metrics will fall flat.

Your content ought to be very well-written, and at the same time have a sharp strategy behind it. Every piece you write should help your prospective buyers take a step ahead towards completing your sales goals. Therefore, the final success of SEO, SMM, SEM and PPC depends on the finesse of your content strategy.

In the nutshell, ranking is important if it corresponds to a higher amount of traffic. Traffic is important when it leads to an increased number of conversions. So, we can rightly say that neither ranking nor traffic is important enough if you don’t see a surge in the number of people who engage, buy, subscribe or whatever it is that you ultimately want them to do on your website.

It is crucial to understand that when you are putting in efforts in a digital marketing campaign you need to keep patience and remain consistent in your efforts. At Pat’s Marketing, our Toronto SEO experts are masters in their work. They have the knack for identifying right keywords, make a fool-proof SEO strategy that ups your website rank on SERPs and get you the quality traffic that generates excellent ROI.