Downsides of traffic? How is that a thing?!
To the majority of businesses and entrepreneurs, there are only advantages of boosting the number of people who visit your site. With more potential customers, you can do everything from improving lead generation and conversion rates to raising awareness of the brand. The latter is the lifeblood of your success as it creates fresh opportunities for reliable sales.
However, there are pros and cons to everything in business, and boosting traffic to your website is no different. Without considering the pitfalls, you can quickly end up like 75% of companies that go bust after fifteen years. If that isn’t a reason to continue reading, nothing is!
Spikes & Downtime
The leading cause of customer distress is downtime. Technology is so advanced that shoppers expect the user experience to be seamless, and if it isn’t, they’ll go to a competitor. Therefore, spikes in traffic could ruin your company’s reputation since you may not have the capacity to deal with the demand. Several bosses see it as a positive problem, yet it isn’t since word of mouth travels and consumers will quickly realize that the experience is substandard. If you can’t deal with double the number of visitors, you shouldn’t make a surge a priority.
Denial of Service Attack
Yes, web traffic is a liability from a cybersecurity perspective. Why? It’s because of something called a Denial of Service attack, where hackers paralyze your server and network by increasing the number of visitors to the point where your platform crashes. The scary thing is that it can happen to anyone and there isn’t much you can do to stop it, other than add to your bandwidth. However, you can limit the damage if you buy IP address as a backup. Then, if you are a victim of a hack, it’s easy to switch to a network that isn’t unresponsive since the Internet Protocol is separate.
Qualified Vs Random
Not all traffic is created equally. Due to click farms and things of that nature, it’s not out of the ordinary for traffic to be unauthorized and inorganic. Essentially, it may be internet bots that aren’t human. One of the reasons this is problematic is Google’s SEO algorithm that picks up on habits that don’t add value to online users. Also, you’ll experience a drop in conversion rates – they aren’t real – and no impact on your bottom line. Sadly, 80% of all website traffic for SMEs is reported to be made up by bots, which is why it’s essential to focus on appealing to qualified web users with an effective marketing plan.
Measurement
In plain English, it’s challenging to measure the tools that increase traffic effectively. Plus, the goalposts are constantly changing as search engines are always tweaking their algorithms. As a result, not only is it hard to figure out if traffic is unnatural, but you’ll struggle to understand which strategies are useful. The key is to analyze the data using analytic software as the numbers are where the answers are hidden.
Did you think these issues with traffic existed? Now you know, how will you combat them?
