You might have come across emails or ads asking you if you’d like to buy cheap website traffic as an SEO or sales-funnel boosting strategy. But will traffic redirected from other sites work for your business?
The word ‘cheap’ has both negative and positive connotations. Cheap could mean low quality or low cost; in this case, lower cost than other web traffic generating strategies.
When you pay for traffic, the fact these visitors have not used a search engine query and selected your website on the results pages automatically makes them less likely to convert. However, when used appropriately, buying website traffic can easily be described as a cost-efficient and immediately effective marketing strategy.
As for quality, your website, product or service is as responsible for the ultimate effect of paid traffic as the traffic provider. As long as your visitors are real people and from your selected locations and niches, you have an opportunity to convert them. The more targeted your visitors, the higher their conversion rate becomes.
Before deciding to buy traffic for your website, three questions must be answered.
Let’s look at these in more detail.
When you buy 100% human visitors, any conversion goal goes. As has already been said, you won’t get the conversion rates you might have become used to with organic traffic. That’s because paid visitors are redirects. But they are still people. And once any human lands on your page, you have around 3 seconds to convince them to stay. It doesn’t matter where the visitor arrives from, as long as that visitor is a real person.
The first and primary conversion goal paid traffic really works for is SEO. The Google algorithm – in fact, all search engine ranking algorithms – use numbers as a qualifying metric. No visitors means low page ranking, no matter how great your website.
There’s a lot of discussion about whether high bounce rates affect ratings; however, the technical aspect of measuring this metric accurately makes it highly unlikely. For example, Google crawlers can’t measure page scrolling; if a visitor scrolls through a long page of great content then closes the page, that visitor is measured as a bounce. And we know Google scores on great content. So why does longer content (on the same page) increase SERP ranking? Furthermore, Matt Cutts, Google’s former head of Webspam, said long ago that the algorithm does not take bounce rate into account.
This means that when you buy cheap web traffic from a provider, your analytics tool might give a higher than average bounce rate, but this won’t affect your SERP ranking. The opposite, in fact. Thousands of extra visitors mean higher popularity metrics.
Another goal that works well with paid website traffic is sales and signups. Yes, conversion rates are low from this traffic type, but there’s one thing it has that very few expensive marketing agencies can achieve – immediate high-volume traffic. At your fingertips.
Not convinced? Have a look at this example.
Perhaps you have a monthly marketing budget of $400 to boost your website visitor numbers – this sum only goes so far. Keyword research, paying for exclusive content, guest posting, maintaining multiple social media network profiles, website maintenance, designing new campaigns (specific campaigns can increase your budget by 100 – 500%)…there’s a lot of work and cost involved. Yes, the conversion rate will be pretty good, but can you achieve the same volume?
When you put it onto paper, it’s easier to see.
$400 monthly traditional marketing generates 1,000 visitors and a healthy 4% sales-based conversion rate = 40 conversions
$399 (UWT, 2021) gets you 100,000 targeted visitors and a rather pathetic 0.1% sales-based conversion rate = 100 conversions
But there’s an additional and extremely interesting result. You also get the Google crawlers to take note of your rise in popularity. When 100,000 visitors land on your website. In the above example, the traditional strategies generate 1,000 visitors with a healthy conversion rate, but paid traffic not only leads to conversions (albeit with a lower conversion rate), it is also an SEO strategy. Your organic marketing methods will feel the benefit.
Buy a million visitors a month and send them to a mediocre website that offers products at inflated prices and you won’t benefit from paid traffic. This marketing strategy is not a band-aid. But in this situation, you won’t benefit from your organic or social media traffic either.
All the things you do to make your website engaging for organic visitors counts towards keeping redirects on your pages, too.
Your public has plenty of choice when your service doesn’t hit the mark. That’s why we focus on authority, content and overall user experience. There’s no point buying 100,000 visitors that slow down your site because your bandwidth is limited, for example. Either drip-feed them over the course of a few days or weeks, or find another hosting service. The last thing you want from a large influx of paid visitors is to put off new organic ones or – even worse – existing customers.
You might want to design a new landing page for paid visitors. As these come from large, managed sites that cover a whole variety of topics, and as these visitors are forwarded to other web traffic provider clients, these users are used to being redirected. They need reeling in at super-speed, like social media traffic. Paid visitor attention span is often too limited to search around for an indication of what your service is; this needs to be immediately visible without any need to scroll. They are not averse to signing up or filling in forms … as long as you make it worth their while. A highly-visible and attractive offer for newcomers is the best way to get paid visitors’ attention, rather than a list of services. Enabling easy navigation to other pages is an absolute must.
Paid traffic is not a stand-alone marketing strategy. It should be part of your monthly SEO marketing package and added to other campaigns as and when they run.
Keeping a lower, monthly influx of a few thousand visitors (5 to 10 times your organic volumes, or the traffic volumes of your competitors) will establish a consistently high position in the SERPs.
Adding one-off, large volumes to campaigns you have spent energy and money on is a great way of getting your name and your offer out to the biggest possible public. Using paid traffic as a single marketing strategy does not work. It must always be partnered by other strategies.
When you buy web traffic, you should be guaranteed human visitors. Only human visitors convert. Your selected provider must also give you the opportunity to select niches from a long list, as well as age groups and locations. Ensure your provider allows you to drip-feed your ordered volumes – every visitor arriving on the same day is counterproductive unless you have a ‘one day only’ offer going on.
No reputable website traffic provider sends its carefully gathered and nurtured visitors to a site that infects them with malware or contains hate content. And beware of cheap website traffic where you pay less than $0.0175 per visitor – the company is unlikely to make money and you might have found a scam service. Managing multiple websites that allow a provider to forward millions of people to clients on a daily basis is expensive. This is reflected in web traffic prices – expect to pay between $0.02 and $0.08 per visitor.
No good web traffic supplier guarantees a high conversion rate – that’s completely up to your choice of target group, your website and your service. Keep your eye out for money back guarantees that cover incorrect processing of orders (numbers, niches, deadline, destination URL).
Competition is rife when you immerse yourself in traditional traffic-generating strategies. By now, every business owner – large and small – knows at least the basics of SEO, email, content and social media marketing. This wasn’t the case just 5 years ago, when those in the know had an obvious edge. Now the borders are blurred – every business starts on a near equal footing when it comes to website traffic generation.
It’s time to implement the strategies your competitors might be reluctant to use. Reluctance in terms of paying for traffic is primarily caused by the combination of mistrust, disbelief and the idea that this strategy is black hat.
But legitimate web traffic providers operate like any other digital service; their owners are just as invested in client trust as your own business is. Realistic expectations in terms of SEO boosting and better conversions in numbers versus low conversion rates take away disbelief (or the belief that paying for traffic is a miracle cure for a failing website).
And finally, paid traffic does not wear a black hat. While it’s an unusual and (as yet) lesser-known way to generate traffic, you still need to engage, convince and persuade every visitor. You still have to do the work. You just know exactly how many visitors you will be getting to do that work on.
This website uses cookies.