Website Traffic is Not the Endgame - Only the Beginning

I frequently hear mortgage folks talking about their website traffic levels as if traffic were the ultimate goal of Internet marketing. But this is not the case. Web traffic is only one step in the Internet marketing process. Once those people reach your website, you have to get them to respond in some way (through lead generation). Then you have to capitalize on their initial action (through proper follow-up).

During phone consultations, I’ve encountered a lot of real estate agents and mortgage brokers who swore up and down that they needed more website traffic. “I’m not getting any leads from my website,” they would say. “So I need more traffic.”

My initial response to this is always the same. Wait. Slow down. Back the truck up. There is a fundamental flaw in the following statement: “My website doesn’t produce leads so I need to increase my traffic levels.” The flaw is that this statement completely leaves out the entire concept of lead generation. Traffic generation is one thing. Lead generation is something else entirely.

When I speak to people with this complaint, I inquire about the person’s traffic levels. How many visitors do you get through your website every week? More often than not, there will be silence on the other end of the line. And therein lies the first problem. If you don’t know how many visitors you’re getting, how could you possibly know that you need more website traffic? Secondly, as I’ve already mentioned, this kind of logic completely ignores lead generation.

A Website Traffic Scenario

Let me give you an example. I once worked with a real estate agent who swore she was not getting enough website traffic, based on the fact that she wasn’t getting any leads through the site. But she really had no idea how many visitors she was pulling in each day, so I checked for her. We installed a website analytics program onto her server and waited a week for it to gather data.

After a couple of weeks, the results were clear. She was getting more than two-dozen unique visitors every day. In a small town, where she lived, that’s more than enough website traffic for a real estate agent … if you actually capitalize on it. But she clearly was not capitalizing on those traffic levels. She didn’t understand the concept of website lead generation, so we focused our efforts on that. We implemented many of the techniques I explain in the lead generation tutorials on this website.

Long story short, she gets about the same amount of website traffic as before. But she also gets a couple of emails every day, and each month a couple of those emails turn into clients.

Website traffic is not the endgame. It is a step along the path to your ultimate goal.