Why 'Getting More Traffic' Is Terrible Business Advice
"We just need more traffic." I hear this at least once a week. A business owner calls, convinced that their problem is visibility. If only more people visited their website, their problems would be solved. More traffic equals more enquiries equals more sales. Simple mathematics, surely?
Except it isn't. And chasing traffic before you've sorted out everything else is one of the fastest ways to waste money I've seen in twenty-five years of business.
The obsession with traffic is the digital equivalent of opening more tills when your shop is selling products nobody wants. You're optimising the wrong part of the system. And in my experience running a strategic digital growth consultancy, it's almost always a distraction from the real work that needs doing.
The £8,000 Traffic Experiment
A construction business came to me last year after spending £8,000 on Google Ads over six months. They'd quadrupled their website traffic. Result? Two enquiries, neither of which converted.
The problem wasn't the advertising—the agency had done decent work driving clicks. The problem was what happened when people arrived. The website message was confused, the value proposition unclear, the pricing hidden, and the contact process awkward. They'd successfully driven hundreds of people to a shop that wasn't ready for customers.
When we dug deeper, we discovered more fundamental issues. Their service offering tried to be all things to all people. Their pricing was misaligned with the market they were trying to serve. Their sales process was chaotic. They hadn't clearly defined who their ideal customer was or why those customers should choose them over competitors.
More traffic didn't fix any of this. It simply broadcast their confusion to a larger audience.
The Traffic Obsession Trap
The reason "get more traffic" is such popular advice is because it's easy to say, easy to measure, and easy to sell. Digital marketing agencies love traffic goals because they're achievable and look impressive in reports. "We increased your traffic by 250%!" sounds brilliant, even if revenue hasn't shifted.
But traffic is a vanity metric. It makes you feel like you're making progress whilst potentially achieving nothing meaningful for your business. It's activity masquerading as progress.
Consider what traffic actually represents: people who clicked a link. That's it. They haven't bought anything. They haven't enquired. They haven't even necessarily read your content. They just... clicked. And you're paying for each of those clicks.
Traffic without conversion is like footfall in a retail store where nobody buys. It might indicate location visibility, but it tells you nothing about whether your proposition works. In fact, high traffic with low conversion often indicates that you're attracting the wrong people—and that's worse than attracting nobody at all.
What Traffic Can't Fix
From twenty-five years in senior management, including private equity exits, I've learned that sustainable business growth comes from fundamentals, not tactics. And traffic generation is pure tactic. Here's what more traffic absolutely cannot fix:
An Unclear Value Proposition
If you can't articulate why someone should buy from you rather than your competitors, driving more people to that confused message won't help. I worked with a professional services firm whose website traffic was healthy but conversion was dismal. Their homepage tried to appeal to five different customer types with three different service models. More traffic just amplified the confusion.
Poor Product-Market Fit
Your offering might not match what the market wants at the price you're charging. I've seen businesses spend thousands driving traffic to services that nobody wants to buy at the prices they've set. Each click is just another person confirming that your offering isn't compelling.
Operational Inadequacy
Your business might not be ready for more customers. Perhaps your fulfilment is chaotic, your customer service overwhelmed, or your sales process broken. A trades business once asked me to help them "scale" with more traffic, but they were already struggling to deliver on time for existing customers. More traffic would have destroyed their reputation amongst a larger audience.
Wrong Audience Targeting
You might be attracting people who will never buy from you. Budget shoppers when you're premium priced. Consumers when you're B2B. People in the wrong geography or industry. More of the wrong traffic is worse than no traffic—it consumes your time and gives false signals about what's working.
The Real Cost of Bad Traffic
Chasing traffic before you're ready isn't just ineffective—it's expensive in ways that don't show up in your marketing reports.
Time cost - Every unqualified enquiry consumes hours qualifying, quoting, and following up with someone who'll never buy.
Opportunity cost - Budget spent on traffic is budget not spent on improving your offering, training your team, or developing genuine competitive advantages.
Credibility cost - Poor reviews from customers you shouldn't have served damage your reputation with customers you should be serving.
Focus cost - Traffic obsession distracts from meaningful measures like customer lifetime value. You optimise for clicks instead of building relationships.
I've watched business owners become depressed because "nothing's working" when actually, their traffic is fine. They're just measuring the wrong things and ignoring the fundamentals that determine whether traffic converts to revenue.
What Should Come Before Traffic
If "get more traffic" is usually bad advice, what's good advice? These fundamentals need sorting first:
Crystal-Clear Positioning
Know exactly who you serve and what problem you solve for them. Not vague demographics, but specific customer types with specific needs you're uniquely equipped to address. When you have this clarity, your marketing writes itself.
Validated Value Proposition
Confirm that what you're offering is something your target market actually wants at a price they'll pay. This means talking to real customers and honestly assessing whether your offering stacks up. Traffic generation before validation is printing thousands of flyers before checking whether anyone wants what you're selling.
Functioning Conversion Path
From first contact to closed sale, your process needs to work. Fix a process that converts 5% to one that converts 15%, and you've tripled your business without buying a single additional click.
Operational Capacity
You need the capability to serve more customers well. Driving traffic before you have capacity is like revving the engine before engaging the clutch—noise without forward motion.
Measurement Infrastructure
Know what's actually working—which traffic sources deliver customers who stay, spend, and refer. Without this understanding, more traffic just generates more data you can't interpret.
When Traffic Generation Actually Makes Sense
I'm not suggesting traffic doesn't matter or that you should never invest in generating it. But it should come later in the strategic sequence, not first.
Traffic generation makes sense when:
Your fundamentals are sound. You know who you serve, what you're offering them, why they should choose you, and how to convert enquiries into customers efficiently. Now you're ready to scale something that works rather than amplify something broken.
You've validated product-market fit. You have evidence that your offering resonates with your target market at your price point. You're not hoping traffic will solve this problem—you already know the answer.
Your conversion infrastructure is optimised. Your website, sales process, and fulfillment systems have been tested and refined. You're converting a healthy percentage of prospects, and you understand what drives that conversion.
You have capacity to serve more customers well. Your operations can handle increased volume without quality degradation. You're not hoping to "figure it out as we grow"—you have systems ready to scale.
You can measure and attribute effectively. You know which traffic sources deliver profitable customers. You can tell the difference between visits that matter and visits that don't. You make decisions based on contribution to business goals, not just traffic volume.
When these conditions are met, traffic generation becomes a genuine growth strategy rather than an expensive distraction. You're pouring fuel on a fire that's already burning, not trying to start a fire by pouring fuel on wet wood.
The Strategic Alternative
Instead of starting with "how do we get more traffic?", I encourage clients to start with "how do we serve our ideal customers exceptionally well?"
This leads to different questions:
Who exactly are those ideal customers?
What problems do they need solving?
Why would they choose us over alternatives?
How do we deliver extraordinary value?
What would make them refer us enthusiastically?
Answer these questions well, and traffic becomes easier. Not because you're buying more of it, but because you're earning it through reputation, referrals, and content that genuinely helps your target audience.
I've seen businesses transform their growth by narrowing their focus, deepening their expertise, and serving a specific market segment exceptionally well. Their traffic often increases, but as a result of excellence, not as a substitute for it.
The businesses that grow sustainably are those that solve real problems for specific people better than alternatives. The traffic follows the value, not the other way around.
The Consultancy Approach
This is why strategic digital growth consultancy starts with business fundamentals, not traffic tactics. When a client comes to me wanting more traffic, we begin by auditing whether they're actually ready for it.
Often, we discover that the real opportunity lies in improving conversion rates, refining positioning, streamlining operations, or developing more compelling offerings. Sometimes we find they're already getting enough traffic—they're just not converting it effectively.
The traffic conversation comes later, once we've built something worth driving people towards. And when we do focus on traffic, it's strategic—targeting specific segments with specific messages through specific channels, all connected to clear business objectives beyond "get more visitors."
This approach isn't as immediately exciting as "let's run some ads and triple your traffic." But it's how sustainable business growth actually happens. And after twenty-five years in business, I've learned that doing the right things in the right order beats doing the exciting things in the wrong order.
The Bottom Line
More traffic feels like progress. It isn't, unless everything else is working first.
It's like buying a larger megaphone when your message is confused, your offer is unclear, and you're not sure who you're trying to reach. The megaphone doesn't fix those problems. It just broadcasts them more loudly.
Before you invest in traffic generation, invest in making your business worth visiting. Clarify who you serve and what makes you different. Build an offering they actually want at a price that reflects genuine value. Create a conversion process that turns interest into revenue. Develop operational capability to deliver excellently at scale.
Then—and only then—does traffic generation become a sensible investment rather than an expensive distraction.
Because ultimately, traffic is what you earn by being excellent at serving a specific market segment, not what you buy to compensate for not being excellent. The businesses that understand this difference are the ones that grow sustainably rather than spinning their wheels loudly in expensive mud.
And that's worth remembering next time someone tells you that you "just need more traffic." What you probably need is better strategy. The traffic will follow.
Thanks for reading,
Ollie.
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