Traffic is important, and not just to local cops who are checking for speeders. Specifically, Internet traffic is important, and many online business owners have taken hold of this fact in order to become successful. Since the very start of e-commerce, company owners, site administrators, IT specialists, SEO professionals, and others who are involved in running and promoting websites have glommed onto the idea that traffic is king … after all, traffic equals views and visits, and views and visits equal customers, right? Well, not necessarily.

A Million Views Does Not Make a Million Customers

The issue at hand is that, even if you’re driving traffic to your site using search marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, or paying for traffic, if your site has problems with presentation, doesn’t deliver, or isn’t using best sales practices, all the traffic in the world won’t matter. Take, for instance, this scenario: Your company sells widgets, and they’re simply the best widgets on the market. You spend a ton of money to bring in new traffic, and you’re seeing hundreds of thousands of hits per day from unique users, but you aren’t seeing sales.

The problem? When this traffic arrives at your site, it is greeted with a pixelated image of the widget on a plain background with a caption that simple states, “BUY ME!” There is no additional information, no contact number, and no email address. So, while your marketing efforts drove the traffic, you didn’t offer anything further, and thus, no sales.

Driving Traffic is Not Enough

While the above example is extreme, its purpose is to demonstrate that you must add real value to visitors in order for your traffic to mean something. The bottom line? Simply driving traffic is not enough. Once that traffic arrives, you need to be able to provide useful information, whether that be in the form of content marketing (videos, blog posts, etc.,) and if you aren’t able to do so, your efforts have been wasted, both in terms of time and money. To make matters worse, visitors will likely get a bad impression of your company and its products or services, meaning you have just lost a potential customer, despite any future marketing efforts.

Traffic Alone Doesn’t Build Relationships

As today’s business landscape includes more competition than ever, it’s essential for brands to build relationships with customers in order to keep them coming back and with potential customers in order to get them to convert. Once again, traffic alone is not going to bridge this gap. In fact, traffic for the sake of traffic can actually hurt your brand and its attempts at building relationships. If you aren’t able to communicate and keep visitor interested or intrigued, that customer is going to bounce and may even turn to your competition. The key to success when it comes to traffic is to not only drive it, but also encouraging it to thrive.