What is the difference between traffic and quality traffic?

A lot of potential clients I have spoken to recently have talked about how Search Optimization, Social Media or Pay-Per-Click Advertising doesn’t work. They hire a firm which is able to increase traffic to their company’s website, but they are not seeing any increase in business. There are two main reasons this could happen:

Your site isn’t convincing people – the conversion is horrible;
You are driving the wrong traffic to your site

Let’s discuss driving the wrong traffic to your site. The wrong key phrases First, if your site is optimized for the wrong key phrases that get on the first page of Google, you may get a ton of clicks but none of the people who searched that phrase were actually looking for your product or service. This also applies for Pay-Per-Click – you pay to have your site listed on the search engines, but your Ad could be showing to an audience with no interest in your product or service. The wrong link locations Second, one tactic in Search Optimization is building inbound links. An SEO firm may place your link on sites all over the web like design galleries, people are clicking to your site but with no interest in your product or service. In this case, Social Media is another source of bad links – you might be able to share your links to an audience or have them post it on various sites, but it could be the wrong audience. The conclusion So if the quantity of traffic is the only indicator of success, you might be wasting your money. These tactics may increase your traffic by 100% or 500%, but it may not be quality traffic and very few actually contact you or buy. This isn’t to say that increased traffic is not a goal or that some of those people may buy or share your site with those who will, but there is a big difference between traffic and quality traffic.