Are you getting enough website visitors? Think pips!

Sometimes my website clients ask "will I get enough visitors to my website?" I think to myself "enough, compared with what?" They also ask "will I be number one on page one of Google?" On that question I think "number one out of how many similar sites?". This is not defensive thinking, it's about managing my clients' expectation to a level of reality.

As ever, "enough" depends on many things. Not least, it depends on the number of other similar websites in the same industry in the same geographical area that are attempting to attract the same audience as my client. Perhaps it should more reasonably be asked as "how am I doing compared with similar sites?"

I'll use the holiday accommodation business sector as an example, because there are extremes of website sizes. In the holiday accommodation industry, there are thousands of competing websites and, perhaps more importantly, competing web pages.

There are websites for individual bed and breakfast establishments, or a single holiday home for rent. These start from one-page sites to larger sites that don't usually extend beyond five pages or so. There are also "listing" websites such as JustSuffolk.com, which has over one hundred places to rent, so it has over one hundred pages. Then there are the agencies, with dozens, or hundreds, and sometimes thousands of properties, with a consequently huge number of pages.

It's really not reasonable to compare a five-page single-property site with a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages. It's not reasonable to compare apples with pears, let alone grapes with pomegranates (think pips!).

The bigger the website, the better they are placed for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - just because they will have to mention the key words holiday, accommodation, bed and breakfast, self catering, etc. many times. They are not "cheating" in any way, it's just because of the number of properties they advertise. So, because of their inherent SEO advantage, they usually fare well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So when a client with a single property website asks if his visitor numbers, or his position in Google SERPs are good, I explain that it's really not easy (not possible, in some respects) for a single property website with just a few pages, to compete with larger, multiple-page websites.

What is more important to the website owner is that the visitor numbers on his own site are seen to grow, as the website becomes better known, and that the level of enquiries and bookings or sales are good.

Think of these simple comparative statistics for two imaginary websites:
One receives 100,000 visitors, from which the owner has 100 enquiries, which lead to 10 sales. The second receives 10,000 visitors, from which the owner receives 1,000 enquiries, which lead to 100 sales. Which website would you prefer to own?

Although high visitor numbers are a very important part of the success of a website,  they are not the be all and end all. What is far more important than visitor stats, is the success of the business.