We all must have heard that traffic is a Google ranking factor, right?
How about sending lots of traffic via Bloglovin or NetWorkedBlogs (discontinued), would that count as a Google ranking factor?
As to the value of the sites mentioned in terms of helping in the Google ranking, we can’t tell. An experiment should be made to make such conclusion.
How about buying traffic from other websites, would that count as a factor? Again, we can’t tell.
Is not traffic a Google ranking factor?
Traffic is not a Google ranking factor when we spam our site(s) with traffic resulting to very high bounce rate.
When can traffic be a Google ranking factor?
Traffic must be a high-quality traffic. High-quality traffic is that which has a very high-quality user engagement most probably because of high-quality content resulting to a low bounce rate.
High-quality traffic does not just give you a better or higher search engine ranking in Google. It’s the reason why you want to rank in the first place.
Top 1 in SERPs vs High-quality Traffic
Therefore if you are already getting high-quality traffic from somewhere else, it is even better than ranking top 1 in the SERPs (that is the Search Engine Results Pages). Getting your keywords top 1 in the SERPS does not guarantee traffic (much so for high-quality traffic) especially if you are targeting the wrong keywords.
This is the reason why I always want to test a keyword via paid search, before trying to spend so much resources like time and money on SEO and promotion.
With a good budget for testing, we can already tell if the keyword can bring in the quality (of traffic) we are hoping for and test if the landing page can convert. If the result is positive, then we can proceed to promotion and SEO.
Conclusion
We want our keywords to rank in the SERPs because we want to get high-quality traffic, high-quality user engagement, and ultimately conversion or sales. Therefore keyword rankings are absolutely not enough. They are just metrics to help out your conversion analysis.
Moving forward, let us set our minds in writing high-quality content, initiating high-quality user engagement, and attracting high-quality traffic.