Did you know buying web traffic will hurt your website? Everything that you do will always have a corresponding risk involved. Even in your day to day life, cooking breakfast and driving your car around has an associated risk.
With technology, buying things online also has an associated risk that you might get into a phishing scheme. And in the same way, there are a lot of risks involved if ever you are planning to buy web traffic for your website. So, why will buying web traffic hurt your website?
Buying web traffic
Have you seen those cringe advertisements that say $5 for one million visits? Honestly, you can’t buy that kind of traffic unless it’s made by blackhat practices. When you pay cheaply for a service, then you get cheap results.
There are a lot of services that offer website traffic and there are different traffic services you might have availed of. The most popular one is Targeted Web Traffic which is a general type of web traffic service that generates pop-ups and banners for your website and targets the users that are interested in your specific niche.
Where do you end up buying web traffic?
Many people may flock to underground forums or service websites for inexpensive. They’ll get a service provider for $5 or $10 for one million hits and visits. But, most of these services are done by bots and won’t add up value to your website.
So if your website is all about beauty and makeup, the ads will target users that have recently looked up terms related to your niche. You may also alter the geo-targeting which means you can choose from which countries you want your ads to run.
Common website traffic services have the following features: choosing the number of people you need, traffic location, and period. This is all for you to customize and you typically have the option to pause or stop the campaign altogether. You may choose to spread out the traffic to three to seven days to get the most traffic.
Some services also offer hourly traffic or traffic that will be blasted only for a specific period every single day. This is perfect for niches that are a hot topic at certain times of the day.
Ways how buying web traffic hurts your website
In a way, buying web traffic can be detrimental to your website especially with web visits, lead generation, and sales. Most people reported that even with one million visits, not one downloaded their e-book or bought any products. For blogger and affiliate marketers, there are other ways of how buying web traffic hurt your website.
Generates little to no leads
What will you get with one million fake or bot visits to your website? Oftentimes, you get little to no leads at all! When you buy, thousands and millions of site traffic for $5, it’s no way to get your brand to become visible or earn revenue. What you’re doing is simply fooling your site stats to look important.
Brings little to no sales
Just because your web traffic soared overnight, doesn’t mean you’ll generate sales all of the sudden. This traffic comes from bots or generalized users who may take little interest in your products and services. When you’re launching a campaign, make sure to target your niche market and know their demographics.
Ad networks block you
If you are going to spend a lot of money buying website traffic, ad networks will be able to track it down and you might get faced with serious penalties. This is because all ad networks dislike getting fake users to view their ads and you will be banned.
You earn a spammer label
If you buy a high volume of bad traffic to your chosen ad networks, you will get labeled as a spammer. And if they add you to their blacklist, it will take a very long time for you to clean up and gain your reputation again.
Your cost per lead skyrockets
Having a successful website isn’t all about the volume of traffic you send. If you buy 1,000 web traffic but only less than 100 of them are actual customers, you are spending a lot of money on fake traffic.
Ad networks don’t pay for bad hits
If your ads rely on paying you based on the number of views, you have to know that they have filters for bot views and fake traffic. Therefore, you are never able to buy traffic to get ad credits.
Your analytics information is skewed
Having skewed analytics information will make your website less appealing. If for some time you buy website traffic for males, the analytics for that specific demographic will go up. If you choose to sell other products that are for females, your advertising will still go to the same demographics.
Google may demote you
When Google crawls your website and notices the surge of web traffic with little sales and engagements, the giant search engine may demote your page. It can tell that you’re buying web traffic with no quality visits. The worst thing it can do is to de-index your site with no notice at all.
Safe way of earning web traffic through SEO
If you’re looking for quality, safe, and long-term web visits, you need to integrate the best SEO practices you can do. What are these methods? From on-page to off-page SEO hacks, and a little dash of technical SEO, these proven methods can jumpstart your site visibility and web traffic.
Keyword optimization
SEO is wisely inserting keywords on headlines, URLs, descriptions, body of the article, and even on alt text and media titles. What’s more, keyword optimization is perusing high-performance keywords by users and able them to rank profusely in SERPs.
Create content that matters
Google prefers having in-depth, quality content on your website that’s informative, engaging, and interesting at the same time. Whether that’d be an article, video, or infographics, you’ll get enough web traffic over content that matters.
Better UI and UX for users
User interface and user experience are integral elements for a seamless web experience for prospects. If your web layout and elements aren’t easy to use and navigate by customers, they’re likely to drop and leave your site. However, if they get to click links and find information easily, they’ll likely to transact with you.
Going mobile
If you remember Google’s Mobilegeddon, the search engine made it clear that mobile responsiveness is one way to rank for SEO. So, is your site mobile? Did you know that 88% of your customers use smartphones to access websites and social media, and shop online?
Boost your page speed
In Google’s update, page speed happens to be one factor for site quality and performance ranking. A good page speed should be 3 seconds or less to hold the attention of your prospects. Besides, you don’t want to lose customers just because they keep on waiting for your page to load, right?
Social shares
Social shares account for most of your web traffic. So, are you online on your social media account? Social media marketing helps drive traffic to your site and is a safe way to amp up your SEO.
Build links!
Earn links back to your pages ‘cause that’s one way how Google decipher a quality website. Link building helps people discover your website whether that’d be through blog mentions, social media shout-outs, or business directories.
