Reasons why you should Avoid Relying on Traffic Metrics of Competitors

The traffic on the website is one of the criterions which help the small business entrepreneurs to determine the feedback or effectiveness of a website or a blog in addition to handling the queries asked by the end users and the response they get from them. This means that traffic is the yardstick, which is considered as an equivalent of the success one expects to achieve in terms of providing access to the certain content to the people or internet users.

Furthermore, some of the business owners or websites prefer to use internet tools to assess the level of the traffic generated by a website and the traffic or response of the contemporaries is also measured. However, if you are new when it comes to SEO, you may feel threatened by the high traffic your peers get or if their results are better than your expectations. For example, most of the beginners in the digital marketing business get intimidated by looking at the traffic data of contemporaries and end up feeling insecure. This means that overreliance on the data or tools to compare the traffic levels of your market may lead you to miscalculation or overestimation of your contender’s capabilities. For instance, when the tools measure the traffic outcome or levels, most of the tools don’t distinguish if it is the relevant traffic or not. In addition, it is often neglected if the marketing targets are being met or not.

Various Kinds of Traffic

Even though the result of your competitors’ traffic may show unprecedented viewership or click rates, however, it does not guarantee if the related traffic is being generated or if the traffic is actually helping run the website. For example, in the past decade, people used odd keywords to find the relevant content or sometimes the keyword diverted users to completely different website. The main point is that if you don’t seem to generate the required or expected results in terms of traffic, it does not define the worth of your content. Because the viewership level of the relevant users is something that can influence the chances of success or failure rather than blindly relying on the traffic outcomes. To put simply, there are various ways of increasing the traffic and some of the mechanism are not very useful. This is why it is necessary to distinguish if the traffic is generated from the relevant or right data or not.

High Traffic and Queries

Although commonly people associate the high level of traffic with the increased queries of the users, however, the latest research has shown contradictory results. For example, researchers have shown many instances where the traffic was quite high, however, when the rate of queries was investigated, the results were disappointing. This means that if you or your contemporary’s website is generating high traffic, it does not necessarily mean the users are accessing the website to find answers to the queries. Similarly, if one delves into the details, it becomes apparent that the traffic generation increases as a result of few blog posts or related links in some cases, while in some cases content explaining the direction to browse the website is mentioned, which can increase the viewership without contributing to the main content of answers of the questions asked by the users.

Furthermore, the difference between the number of queries answered and the traffic generation is not underlined in the digital marketing by a couple of small and known websites and brand as well. This means that the flaw is persistent in the digital marketing. Some of the experts believe that in some of the cases the content level plays a big role in attracting the traffic, however, when it comes to the primary function of answering the queries or question, the purpose is not fulfilled.  In other words, the traffic may be increased by using unauthentic mechanisms or tools. Hence, one should not completely trust the finding of the websites or resources that consider the traffic generation as an indicator of success or failure.

Unclear Marketing Strategy and Goals of Contemporaries

If one surveys the result of research done on the big companies like Amazon SEO, it becomes clear that the business plan of the companies or digital marketing firms have narrowed down objectives. And the game plan to achieve the objectives, a particular strategy is chosen by the experts. For example, some of the company focuses on enhancing the quality of the products and so on and so forth. This means that the reports or surveys conducted by one’s company to estimate the level of traffic by the peer groups or company may make the task of figuring out the secret or hidden strategy meaningless, as the data obtained as a result of the research may not help to answer the main question related to the success due to the nuanced nature of the queries.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the traffic driven metric or yardsticks should not be used to analyze the business plan of your peers and to formulate your marketing strategy, as the process of interpreting the data is complex and it cannot easily tell you if the traffic generated by you competitor was helpful or relevant for the viewers. This means that the better way to improve your business outcomes is to figure the marketing tricks and strategy you want to pursue to improve the outcomes. Moreover, it is important to know what changes are taking place in the market, because if you are able to read the main trends and changes, you would be in a better position to respond to the new dynamics. In addition, if you post the pertinent content to help the users and the quality of the content is up to a standard, the result of your websites will be increased manifolds. This is not to say that the indicators of traffic are completely useless, however, the main point is to highlight the demerits of over-relying on the metric of traffic to make judgments and to finalize the business choices.