Traffic vs. Conversion: What Should You Focus on First?

If your business isn't growing, there's a good chance you've asked yourself one of these questions: 

"Do I need more traffic... or do I need a better website?" 

More SEO? 

More social media? 

More ads? 

Or should I be improving the website I already have? 

The problem is, if you focus on the wrong one first, you can waste a lot of time—and a lot of money. 

Today, I'm going to help you figure out which deserves your attention first so you can stop guessing and start making smarter decisions. 

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Transcript

The Growth Question That Costs Money

Carrie Saunders 0:00

If your business isn't growing, there's a good chance you've asked yourself one of these questions. Do I need more traffic or do I need a better website? More SEO? More social media? More ads? Or should I be improving the website that I already have? The problem is if you focus on the wrong one first, you can waste a lot of time and a lot of money. So today I'm going to help you figure out which deserves your attention first so you can stop guessing and start making smarter decisions. Let's dive

Defining Traffic And Conversion

Carrie Saunders 0:27

in. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about traffic versus conversion and which one should you focus on first and how do we tell which one to focus on first? So let's before we dive in, talk about what each one of them is. So traffic is getting more people to your website. So more people basically walking by your storefront. This can include tactics like search engine optimization, AI optimization, any sort of ads like Google or Facebook ads. This could be YouTube videos that are point back to your website. It could be your email newsletter, could be social media posts or even referrals from other business owners or friends or family that love your products or your services. So conversion is what happens after they arrive. Did they buy anything? Did they book a call? Did they contact you? Did they join your email list? Did they schedule a consultation? So conversion is that action you want them to take next. And when you have that, that's when you get a good conversion. So in short, traffic gets people to your front door and conversion lets them walk inside and do that next step you want them to do.

The Leaky Bucket Website Test

Carrie Saunders 1:34

So we can think about our websites like a bucket. Traffic is pouring water into that bucket. Conversion is whether the bucket has lots of holes on it and things leak out. A website that converts well is going to have a bucket with tinier holes and less of that water is going to leak out. But if your website leaks trust, if it confuses visitors, if it has slow pages, if it has weak messaging or poor calls to action, then your web holes in your bucket are probably going to be very large. This could be caused by poor call to action, lots of different variables. Because if you start adding more water to this leaky bucket, the ones with the large holes, you're just going to be losing all that traffic that you worked hard for. So we don't want to buy a bigger hose if your bucket has these large holes

When Traffic Is The Bottleneck

Carrie Saunders 2:22

in it. So sometimes traffic is the real bottleneck. Some examples of how you can tell this. Your website does convert well for the people who do arrive there. Customers love it. You get existing traffic and it converts. But almost nobody knows that you exist, but the people who do end up converting. So then we want to think about traffic becoming the priority. We might want to improve our search engine optimization or our AI optimization. We might want to have YouTube videos that help feed into our website. We might want to have partnerships with other business owners or customers. We might have some sort of affiliate or referral program. We might want to make sure we're doing our email newsletters regularly. We have quite a few topics on that in our podcast on that one. So a great website that nobody visits won't grow your business either. So if you don't get enough traffic, we need to fix that. If it converts well, but you just aren't getting the sales you want because you don't have enough people showing up into your door, that's where we want to focus on next.

A Simple Decision Framework

Carrie Saunders 3:25

So I have a decision framework that's going to help you decide which one do we need to work on first. So ask yourself these questions. Do I already have consistent traffic? If no, then that's where we want to start. So use something like Google Analytics or whatever you have in your platform to analyze how much traffic do you get already? And then question number two, when people visit, do they take the next action you want them to take? If the answer is no, then you need to work on conversion. If the answer is yes, then you need to get more people in your door. You need more traffic. Do people understand what I do within a few seconds? This is really mostly key. This is a conversion thing. So I want you to listen back to episode 164 if you haven't yet with Joss Hall. It really helps your conversion if you have your messaging right. And that's a really great episode on messaging and helps people know what you do within a few seconds. You might also be missing trust on your website. So do a search on smarteronlinebusiness.com website and search for the word trust so you can find some of our episodes on trust if you need help around there. Another question is would sending 1,000 more visitors today actually increase my sales? If your answer is I'm not sure, you probably need to work on conversion before you need to work on traffic. More traffic amplifies whatever art exists. If your website converts well, great. Bring up more traffic. If it doesn't,

Why Traffic And Conversion Are Gears

Carrie Saunders 4:53

you're going to simply lose visitors and you might lose trust behind it. So work on conversion first. Now I also want to caution you on treating them as separate projects. They're not quite separate projects. They do go hand in hand because as the traffic grows, you're going to learn more about what is and what isn't working on your website. And as your conversion improves, traffic becomes more profitable. So we want to be evaluating both sides of the coin regularly as we're improving the one that seems to be needing to be improved first. So once you think of them like gears, one drives the other, they all work hand in hand and they work together. So when somebody comes to me and says they need more business, they need more sales, one of the first things I do is I always go and look at the website. What are people doing today on it? Where are they coming from? Where are they leaving the website? What is confusing to them? Where do they stop on that page? What's preventing them from taking that next step? Sometimes a tiny home page change produces bigger gains in months of SEO. On the flip side of the coin, sometimes we need better SEO to get more traffic into an already functioning well website.

What To Audit On Your Website

Carrie Saunders 6:04

So one of the biggest takeaways I want you to come away with this is don't assume which one is broken. I want you to diagnose, use the questions in this episode, re-listen to it again if you need to, and figure out which one needs help first. Is it the conversion or is the traffic? Do we need more people or do we need to plug those leaky holes? I think many business owners often feel like they have to choose between marketing or improving their website, or they just get frozen and stuck on doing, you know, which one do they want to do? But the real goal is not picking one forever, it's to identify the today's biggest bottleneck, solve that, reevaluate, and move on to the next bottleneck. And you'll probably be going back and forth. If you really do this um really regularly, you're probably gonna find, okay,

Diagnose The Bottleneck Then Recheck

Carrie Saunders 6:50

I need to fix conversion now. Okay, now the conversion is better. I need more traffic. Well, the more traffic has now created some other things that I didn't know were wrong. So now I need to go back to conversion and you know, back and forth. You're gonna probably want to be stepping back and forth between the two of them. And hopefully the questions in this podcast episode helps you figure out which one is the first one you need to work on. So, in short, ask yourself this week if I doubled my website traffic tomorrow, would I also double my sales? If that answer is no, what would stop that from happening? That's probably where you should focus first on your website. What conversion problem are you having? Business growth isn't about doing everything all at once. We do so much better when we focus on a single task at a time, and it's about solving that next big problem next, and then moving to the next problem after that. Sometimes the problem is traffic, sometimes it's conversion. And the key is to knowing which one is which and which one do you need to work on now? Because when you focus on that right bottleneck, everything else starts working

The One Question To Ask Weekly

Carrie Saunders 7:52

a little better. That's all we have for this week's episode of the Smarter Online Business Podcast. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it. And if you'd be so kind, please share this with a business friend that helps get our word out to other business owners just like you, so we can help them have effective websites that really help them sell, make the money that they need to do, help the people that they want to help, and really grow and make this world a better place.