Does Traffic to Your Site Improve Your Rankings?

Improve Your Rankings by Improving Your Visitors' Experience

I have always said that getting traffic to your site does very little to improve your rankings-I heard something the other day that has me re-thinking that answer.

If Google's goal is to create the best user experience by bringing the best websites to the top, then it may consider the quantity of quality traffic that gets to your site.

For example, if you have a lot of good traffic to your site, Google may give you some credit for that towards your search engine optimization efforts.

What is good traffic?

Traffic from multiple IP addresses, traffic that does not bounce right off of your site and traffic that spends a lot of time on your site. Traffic that shows your site is valuable. Maybe even filling out a form. Maybe even another reason to have video on your site.

All the more reason to build a site that is interesting to the searcher, and do everything you can to get the right type of visitor to the site.

Probably not a reason to hire people to sit around surfing your site all day long.

Does Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic count? Well, if the people who find your site via paid search spend a good amount of time there, then maybe it could have a positive affect as well.

Remember, this is all relative to your competitor's sites, and if you aren't doing a lot of other stuff right this is probably not going to make much of a difference!