Visitor growth is undoubtedly one of the most important goals of SEO strategies that you utilize on your website. Driving new, targeted traffic to your website each month is the only way that you’re going to be able to grow your online business. Seeing an uptick in unique visitors each month is a good sign that your SEO campaign is doing its job—it’s positioning your website in the right places with the right keywords for the right people. But how many new visitors each month is enough? 100? 1,000? How many visitors should your site get to justify your SEO? That is actually dependent on a variety of factors.
Size of business.
A multi-national, billion dollar company is not going to survive on a few thousand visitors each month. They might need tens of thousands of targeted visitors coming to their site each month in order to justify their SEO campaign and to help grow their business. On the flip side, a mom-and-pop pizza joint is more than content with a few hundred visitors each month. They don’t need hundreds of thousands of visitors each year in order to prosper. How many visitors your site should be getting is relevant to how many visitors your business needs to be successful.
Competition level.
Depending on how much competition there is in your industry, you might be fighting hard for each and every visitor you get. Take the SEO industry, for example. There are hundreds of SEO companies and consultants out there, each vying for the attention of the same visitor. I have to work that much harder to make my website stand out from the crowd and get someone to visit my company’s website. On the other hand, if you operate in a specialized niche where the competition level is low, it might just be you and a few other sites competing for traffic. Since there are fewer options to choose from, your site is more likely to get a better amount of visitors.
However, keep in mind that competition level is often relative to search volume. If your company exists in a highly specialized niche, chances are your keywords don’t get the same search volume that “SEO” does each month. Your industry might have fewer visitors to go around from the get-go, and your site will never see thousands upon thousands of visitors.
Local/national brand.
Think back to that mom-and-pop pizza joint. Their entire target audience lives and works within a few square miles of their physical location. Chances are people aren’t going to drive from three towns over for a quick slice (unless their pizza is just that phenomenal!). They don’t necessarily want even people from three towns over finding their site because the odds of them becoming customers are so low. They would never advertise in a newspaper that didn’t reach out to members of their community, so why should their SEO try to attract people that aren’t interested? On the other hand, that multi-national company is a global brand. They want to drive visitors from the US, England, Canada, France, Germany, Australia and a multitude of other countries. They have a much larger pool of potential visitors to attract then the pizza place ever would.
In the end, the amount of unique visitors your site should be getting each month is relative to your business. I have some SEO clients that get 3,000 visitors a month and others that get 30,000. Does that mean the first client’s SEO campaign is any less successful? Not necessarily. If 3,000 visitors make sense for their website and their industry they everything is right on track.
About the Author – Nick Stamoulis
Nick Stamoulis is the President of Boston search engine marketing firm Brick Marketing. Brick Marketing specializes in social SEO and content marketing. With nearly 13 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting SEO tips to the Brick Marketing Blog and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 160,000 opt-in subscribers.
Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com
I certainly understand about the needs being different for the pizza shop and the multinational company. But is there a minimum number of visitors, for any site, in order for the numbers to have any meaning in terms of benefit to the company?