As much as the last chapter should have awakened you to the crucial importance of getting lots of traffic to your site, you shouldn’t think for a moment that it is the whole story – it is not!

Even more important than the amount of traffic you get is the quality of that traffic. And by quality, I mean targeted traffic.

What is targeted traffic?

Simply put, targeted traffic is traffic that you actively choose based on metrics. Let’s say you have a wedding dress store that sells local dresses. What would targeted traffic mean for your business?

It would mean a largely female audience from your local area who are engaged. It's better to have 20 visitors a day that fall into that category than it is to have 1 million visitors from another country who are already married!

There’s more to high-quality traffic too. Just as important as the demographics is the means through which you acquired that traffic, the impression you make on the visitors, and the way in which you market yourself after gaining that traffic.

The best type of traffic is actually repeat traffic: returning visitors. This is something that is missing from so many approaches to building traffic, but there are several crucial reasons that repeat traffic trumps everything else:

• Repeat visitors have experienced more "touches" – that means they have interacted with your brand more times and should have higher engagement and trust. In other words, they're much more likely to buy!
• Repeat visitors are extremely targeted. You know they must be interested in what you’re talking about/selling because otherwise, they wouldn’t have come back!
• Repeat visitors give you a constant supply of business. If those visitors are coming back to your site repeatedly, this means recurring income and a more stable and resilient business.
• Repeat visitors are likely examples of direct traffic. This means they’re visiting your site by simply typing in your URL rather than going through Google or social media. While Google and social media are extremely valuable tools that you should invest time in, they are also third parties. That means you’re relying on those platforms remaining available in order for your business model to work. This puts you in a risky position!

There’s one more factor to consider when thinking about quality traffic, though, and this potentially stands in opposition to repeat traffic. That is user intent.

Intent is a CRUCIAL word when it comes to SEO, conversion rates, marketing, and everything else. However, it’s also a term that is only recently being given the importance it deserves, and it’s a term that many people still don’t fully understand.

What is intent, and why does it matter for your business? Essentially, intent refers to the reason that the traffic is coming to your site. This impacts on your CLV (see the next section), meaning that it impacts on conversion rates, also known as sales.

Because in order for someone to buy a product, they need to be the right person looking at the right product… but this also needs to happen at the right time.

Who is more likely to buy a hat? The person who searches for:

• Buy hats online
• How to repair an old hat

The answer is, of course, the first person. Both people wear hats, but the first person is actively looking to buy a hat right now. Thus, the intent matches our content/store, and this becomes a person that we very much want to bring to our site if we are paying for advertising.

That said, the person who searched for the latter term might still be a better long-term customer. This is because they are a big fan of hats and likely to buy many more in the future. So both types of traffic have their merits, but it’s important to understand the difference.