How SEO Agencies Fool You with Website Traffic Numbers

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  • SEO
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"My website traffic went up by 500% last month!"

wrote a friend of mine on their Instagram story. Shouting it out to the world was interesting..

I privately dm'd him, "How much money did it make you?"

This is the part where you're supposed to hear, "Well I normally make $1000 a month, but now we're up to $4-or-$5,000 dollars"

Do you know what his real answer was?

"Oh, zero dollars. I'm doing experiments and haven't monetized".

This kind of stuff drives me crazy guys! We've done it before in the past as well and it just feels bad to sell hype.

The truth is that getting tons of traffic or multiplying your current traffic is something we might as well refer to as number porn or social media bait.




This Wolf of Wall Street marketing is 99.9% fake created to draw you in and sell you. So why do the masses still engage? Well my answer according to Occam's Razor is, wishful thinking.

I'm going to lead by example.

In this post I'm going to show you Logic Inbound's hyped-up traffic on its blog versus what our qualified traffic looks like.

Test 1, Ranking Keyword: "How to Contact Instagram"

Although our article on this high-volume keyword is ranked high on Google, we couldn't find a way to monetize it other than just running Google Ads on it.

As a test we decided to include a banner ad for Shopify in this article, to see how many people would click on it and sign up for a Shopify trial.

The test was successful in that we got lots of clicks - 126 - on the ad a month. We don't get that many clicks from all of our ecommerce articles combined.

That's great! You might say to yourself, but let's look past the hype: clicks and traffic numbers are useless if you aren't getting an increase in ROI.

So we checked how many people actually signed up for Shopify after clicking the ad on the Instagram article.



Only 3 out of the 126 clicks lead to trial signups.

Compare that to 24 people who signed up from 113 clicks on our ecommerce articles, and you can see why quality and intent matters when it comes to traffic.



People who read our ecommerce content are looking for ecommerce solutions. People who go on our Instagram article are not. And that's the difference that absolutely matters.

How Traffic Numbers Lie

Our Instagram article gets 60,000 hits a month.

Our ecommerce content - combined - gets less than 5000 hits..

Yet when we get down to the brass tacks we get 5 times more conversions from 12 times less visitors!

Now Vlad, you might be telling me, can't you find other Instagram-appropriate niche items to sell to the 60k-hits page? Well smart reader it's true, I'm all ears to your solution. We're an agency though and our niche is much closer to Shopify than random products and services.

Besides, we did this experiment to show you how traffic volume and those hyped up social media posts are bull shit.

I personally love the quote "those who can't do, teach".

Traffic Numbers and SEO

You might ask, if we're not looking for traffic and rankings what are we looking for in a good SEO campaign?

All this leads me to my next post and how we are now at an 80% quarterly client success rate vs. a 33% success rate in the past.

Today we measure our clients' success based on one thing and one thing only: conversions and ultimately, money made.

If your marketing campaign isn't making you money and is ONLY getting you eyeballs, then you might as well pay for 4chan traffic or Instagram ads outside of the US. Hell, spend that money on margaritas and go have a good time, quit wasting it on marketing.

The truth is that most people (marketing companies included) hate doing the hard work and digging deep to find out what metrics really drive a campaign's success.

They'd much rather jump from crypto, to e-commerce, to the next billionaire story because they don't believe in the grind-it-out hard work it takes to make a business succeed.

The reason marketing companies most people hire for $500 or even $1000-a-month rarely move the needle (I'm not saying you can't win the lottery) is because digging deep takes a lot of work and expertise.

This is why we charge what we charge at our agency and custom scope everything because everyone has different profit margins, target market, competitors etc.

As a business owner you're left with 3 routes if you want to succeed:

Keep testing as many cheap companies as you can until you get lucky.
Actually pay the money it takes to pay a qualified expert who can show you they have proven results in your niche.
Learn how to do key marketing components yourself before you outsource it.

1. Testing Cheap Companies that Promise the World
If you're paying a company $1000 a month and they make you $100,000 dollars, or 1000% ROI, you're:
  • Going to get a lot of new competitors quickly that will reduce your margin
  • and/or
  • Getting a massive price increase from your marketing company next month (they most likely priced your campaign wrong internally and made an amateur mistake)
  • and/or
  • Being played, since the company you hired is doing a blackhat campaign that may soon get banned or slapped by whichever method you're exploiting (hopefully you don't get sued)
  • and/or
  • Getting lucky and actually have created a viral product aka won the lottery in which case you overpaid the cheap marketing company you hired.

Most of the time marketing companies charging $1000 or less for a campaign tell me that they're learning from their clients. Meaning they don't know what they're doing and that their clients aren't getting anything, every single time I talk to them.

I can't blame them though, because $1000 a month isn't enough for anyone to put enough work to learn the nuances of your business. Even $2000 can be a stretch unless you structure that very carefully.

2. Actually Pay the Money it Takes to Hire a Qualified Expert



Our agency charges a minimum of $3000 a month (right now - we raise prices yearly) and even that is cheap.

The reason? We try to generate at least a 300% return (we can't make promises) on our marketing campaign.

This means that $3000 x 12 months would be a $36,000 yearly spend. If we get you a 300% return we just made you $108,000.

The beauty of going down this route is that if a company has succeeded with a previous client in your industry with similar competitors, then this route can have a very high return on your investment with fairly low risk.

The downside to going down this route is that if you don't do your homework on the potential company you're hiring it can turn into a horror story. We just took on a client who hired a fake SEO for a campaign and they spent $10,000-a-month that was essentially wasted.

Make sure you get biweekly reports/meetings set up if you're going down this route. This will also help you learn the marketing channel you're investing in just in case things get sour.

I'd even recommend potentially throwing some bait questions if you sense red flags.

Ask the marketing company you're about to hire if they can implement a Facebook ad campaign knowing that Facebook ads in your industry are suicide. If they don't turn that down, then don't trust them because the world has enough greedy spammy marketing companies.

We've turned clients down on SEO many times before because sometimes a campaign doesn't make sense and will just set everyone up for failure. (I'll write a post on this later).

3. Learn How to Do the Business Growth Yourself

If your company is making less than $1 million in revenue yearly then I recommend this route a majority of the time. Getting to that $1 million revenue mark will be able to help you hire a quality marketing agency or team.

The beauty of this method is that it will:
  • Help you learn more about your industry
  • Not make you dependant on anyone
  • Get customer feedback to improve your product/service.

The hard part of this approach is that it takes a lot of work. Currently our agency is on track to do over $1 million this year, and we did over $500k last year.

I'm working every single day while my family, friends and love life are all suffering (luckily I'm blessed with their support). It takes a lot of discipline, but it works and really helps you level up as a business owner.

Note: If you're going down this route I'd highly recommend reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

Best book on business growth and traction I've read and I listen to 1 Audible book a week.

So anyways guys, that's it for today and those are some of my not-so-popular hard thoughts on the agency/marketing world and how to grow a business. As always feel free to comment down below and I'll help when I can
#agencies #conversion #fool #marketing #numbers #seo #traffic #website
  • Profile picture of the author palmtreelife
    Great read. Thanks for laying it out there clearly.

    Today we measure our clients' success based on one thing and one thing only: conversions and ultimately, money made.
    This is how EVERY online business should be tracked. Why else would someone run an online business if the goal was not to make money from exchanging value???

    I've recently expanded my affiliate reach to IG. I'm growing my account 100% on my own. No bots. I might do some sponsored posts or ads in the future, but not for the prime purpose of growing my IG account.

    I've met some very successful marketers with 2000 followers and average Joe's or people "just starting out" who have 20,000 followers. I would be embarrassed to have 20,000 followers on IG and have lower conversions than a 2000 follower account - even if it makes a little more money. It certainly isn't 10x the amount like it should be.

    I've always preached it's 10x better to have 1000 passionate fans who convert from time to time rather than have 20,000+++ followers with minimal one off conversions. It's probably an ego thing for some people. I know lots of people who will be star struck when they meet someone who has a large following. I've learned to first ask "what's your conversion rate on IG?"...then it's easy to ask about the followers. THEN see how impressive or not their business is.

    I'm working every single day while my family, friends and love life are all suffering (luckily I'm blessed with their support). It takes a lot of discipline, but it works and really helps you level up as a business owner.
    I'm happy (sad?) to know I'm not the only one going through this. I had to pull out a nice date night on the beach last night to ensure the police stay away from the home a little longer. I have my fiance's full support, but she's Latina so she can support and still flip out. Apparently, that's normal.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by palmtreelife View Post

      Great read. Thanks for laying it out there clearly.



      This is how EVERY online business should be tracked. Why else would someone run an online business if the goal was not to make money from exchanging value???

      I've recently expanded my affiliate reach to IG. I'm growing my account 100% on my own. No bots. I might do some sponsored posts or ads in the future, but not for the prime purpose of growing my IG account.

      I've met some very successful marketers with 2000 followers and average Joe's or people "just starting out" who have 20,000 followers. I would be embarrassed to have 20,000 followers on IG and have lower conversions than a 2000 follower account - even if it makes a little more money. It certainly isn't 10x the amount like it should be.

      I've always preached it's 10x better to have 1000 passionate fans who convert from time to time rather than have 20,000+++ followers with minimal one off conversions. It's probably an ego thing for some people. I know lots of people who will be star struck when they meet someone who has a large following. I've learned to first ask "what's your conversion rate on IG?"...then it's easy to ask about the followers. THEN see how impressive or not their business is.



      I'm happy (sad?) to know I'm not the only one going through this. I had to pull out a nice date night on the beach last night to ensure the police stay away from the home a little longer. I have my fiance's full support, but she's Latina so she can support and still flip out. Apparently, that's normal.
      ha that's funny palmtree. Much appreciated, great question to keep in mind for Instagram followers def agree there. There's no shortcuts I've ever found and I don't know people will ever quit looking for them.
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  • Profile picture of the author DURABLEOILCOM
    99% of these SEO Companies are rip off scammers. Rankpay being the one of them. SEO is a fugazi.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by DURABLEOILCOM View Post

      SEO is a fugazi.
      I'd say I agree with you for the most part, but SEO can still be a great way to grow a business, you just have to be very careful like any other marketing channel. Most marketers just love to spam.
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  • Profile picture of the author sgalla414
    Thanks for shedding some light on the SEO agency's number hype.. it is easy to get star struck by the traffic numbers but you're absolutely right, an audience of 2000 engaged followers is far more valuable than 20000 passive followers.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by sgalla414 View Post

      2000 engaged followers is far more valuable than 20000 passive followers.
      100% quality beats quantity.
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  • Profile picture of the author savidge4
    Originally Posted by Logic Inbound View Post

    Now Vlad, you might be telling me, can't you find other Instagram-appropriate niche items to sell to the 60k-hits page? Well smart reader it's true, I'm all ears to your solution. We're an agency though and our niche is much closer to Shopify than random products and services.
    As much as I get what you are saying... I have issues.

    #1 WHY would you being an agency that is niched closer to Shopify have an article about contacting IG?

    #2 In this example are you really that different from the "friend" you bashed about a 500% increase in traffic? Sure you converted... but wasn't the point of the article just to get traffic? and then it happened to work out that by slapping the same offer you have elsewhere on your site actually converted a few times?

    #3 Would it not make more sense to spend your writing energy and stay with the context of your Agency and create content that matches.

    I am all about focusing on lower hanging terms that may get far less traffic but greater conversion of that traffic. I will take a page that gets 100 visitors a month and converts 10% over a page that gets 5000 visitors and 3 conversions every day of the week - AND staying with in CONTEXT of the site as a whole is just an added bonus.
    Signature
    Success is an ACT not an idea
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by savidge4 View Post

      As much as I get what you are saying... I have issues.

      #1 WHY would you being an agency that is niched closer to Shopify have an article about contacting IG?

      #2 In this example are you really that different from the "friend" you bashed about a 500% increase in traffic? Sure you converted... but wasn't the point of the article just to get traffic? and then it happened to work out that by slapping the same offer you have elsewhere on your site actually converted a few times?

      #3 Would it not make more sense to spend your writing energy and stay with the context of your Agency and create content that matches.

      I am all about focusing on lower hanging terms that may get far less traffic but greater conversion of that traffic. I will take a page that gets 100 visitors a month and converts 10% over a page that gets 5000 visitors and 3 conversions every day of the week - AND staying with in CONTEXT of the site as a whole is just an added bonus.
      #1
      It was a test we conducted in our early days on large traffic numbers that we did ourselves so we can debunk the myth of large traffic numbers vs. quality keywords and traffic. We chose IG because we were thinking of getting into IG advertising and saw the keyword as easy to rank for so it was a good target.

      #2
      It did convert, but we're reporting the facts vs. blatantly hyping up false traffic. If traffic doesn't convert well I'm not going to pretend like it does.

      #3
      Yes it definitely does make a lot more sense, but we still conduct tests from time to time.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ndyama
    If you are doing SEO for quite a bit of the time, it really should be already known to you anyway all this cheap and dirty tricks about anything like that. Your traffic should grow fradually and if there is spikes there should be a valid reasons. Always check the refferers.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by Ndyama View Post

      If you are doing SEO for quite a bit of the time, it really should be already known to you anyway all this cheap and dirty tricks about anything like that. Your traffic should grow fradually and if there is spikes there should be a valid reasons. Always check the refferers.
      Def do agree here, people always want spikes vs. gradual growth.
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  • Profile picture of the author sgalla414
    I think the problem is these high traffic numbers that SEO agencies are posting about is they're likely targeted at beginner/ newbies to internet marketing. These people don't know any different, they're star struck by the big number and "possibility" of a big payout from all that traffic.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by sgalla414 View Post

      I think the problem is these high traffic numbers that SEO agencies are posting about is they're likely targeted at beginner/ newbies to internet marketing. These people don't know any different, they're star struck by the big number and "possibility" of a big payout from all that traffic.
      100% big numbers fool a lot of people, even some people who spend thousands of dollars a month like in my example we just took over for a company that was paying their last SEO 10k a month for 6 months and got no real results.
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  • Profile picture of the author NateOlsen
    This is why I have mainly focused on Maps SEO. It generates more calls than clicks.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by NateOlsen View Post

      This is why I have mainly focused on Maps SEO. It generates more calls than clicks.
      Hey Nate, yeah the map pack is great to start with for local companies. Ranking landing pages and blog posts still works as well though.
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  • Profile picture of the author leadpeep
    This is brilliant!

    At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by leadpeep View Post

      This is brilliant!

      At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.
      True! You gotta be careful there as well, but true. The other danger is white labeling agencies who overcharge I'll write about that next.
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  • Profile picture of the author Trafficstorm
    This is a very informative article with lots of exceptional information.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by Trafficstorm View Post

      This is a very informative article with lots of exceptional information.
      Appreciated always happy to help
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  • Profile picture of the author noellehort
    Thats very saddening to hear that the industry is so filled with snake oil salesmen! shame, but its good the genuine ones!
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by noellehort View Post

      Thats very saddening to hear that the industry is so filled with snake oil salesmen! shame, but its good the genuine ones!
      Definitely agree. In the long run, this is why I think my company is going to win because caring and transparency are a core value.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gistcribb
    [DELETED]
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  • Profile picture of the author JackSpencer
    Thanks for update
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  • When it comes to SEO, it is very important that you get reviews on the seo agency first.
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    Website Design | App Creation | Video Marketing | Social Media | Web Hosting

    ==> SlashTouch.Com

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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by Makabongwe Maseko View Post

      When it comes to SEO, it is very important that you get reviews on the seo agency first.
      That's true and especially legitimate reviews in your niche. This takes a lot of work and a lot of time there and I don't think a lot of business owners do this
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  • Profile picture of the author codyhay
    I guess it's the relevant traffic in the end which actually counts towards the business set sales goal. What's the use of bulk traffic if it's not going to convert into meaningful leads. It will just drain your site bandwidth.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by codyhay View Post

      I guess it's the relevant traffic in the end which actually counts towards the business set sales goal. What's the use of bulk traffic if it's not going to convert into meaningful leads. It will just drain your site bandwidth.
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  • Profile picture of the author Amogh Bahula
    Been there done that! I was part of an SEO agency for 5 years so i know a bit! It is amazing how clients fall easily to the numbers trap! Even if there is no tangible ROI in profitability metrics, some clients seem unable to let go of that service! 7 years ago i created an youtube channel for a client and uploaded some 30+ videos. It was for some cosmetic surgery related keywords that went on the get 35K subscribers, 5 million views in 7 months - 3 mil on a single video and rest on 25 other videos on the channel. Guess how many signups came from this channel - zero, nada, zilch!!! Most of the commenters seemed to be hyperactive teens and some weirdos with nothing better to do! Moral of the story - quality matters over quantity! I would take 20 page views a day with 2 of them signing up then 20K views with 0 signups any day.
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Originally Posted by Amogh Bahula View Post

      Been there done that! I was part of an SEO agency for 5 years so i know a bit! It is amazing how clients fall easily to the numbers trap! Even if there is no tangible ROI in profitability metrics, some clients seem unable to let go of that service! 7 years ago i created an youtube channel for a client and uploaded some 30+ videos. It was for some cosmetic surgery related keywords that went on the get 35K subscribers, 5 million views in 7 months - 3 mil on a single video and rest on 25 other videos on the channel. Guess how many signups came from this channel - zero, nada, zilch!!! Most of the commenters seemed to be hyperactive teens and some weirdos with nothing better to do! Moral of the story - quality matters over quantity! I would take 20 page views a day with 2 of them signing up then 20K views with 0 signups any day.
      Wow that's crazy to hear and awesome to know. Thanks for sharing :-)
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  • I gave up on SEO about 10 years ago
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      What's your website and why did you give up? We have seen leads come in from SEO and real campaigns that went well.
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  • Profile picture of the author Megha Sachdeva
    Thanks for sharing ,

    as these days marketing companies are making fool of company and the way you have chosen to correct it , is totally appreciable thanks for your eye opener post .
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Much appreciated! :-) im trying to build my agency to be the most transparent we can be.
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  • No SEO isnt just fake . Many SEO service providing agencies don't know how google algorithem works how it stores and retrives he info from its data base . when you hire an improfessional SEO service provider Then how you can have a huge traffic diverted to your website . Advanced SEO service providers know The internal working of search engines . As i have been working on these algorithem since last few years . i can assure you its not fake . The person you just hired for SEO service is just a scammer
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      You do realize I own an SEO agency right? Read the article please...
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    • Profile picture of the author Logic Inbound
      Never hired anyone we are an SEO agency read the article
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  • Profile picture of the author luciesmazanska
    wow congrats! this article rocks really!
    I agree there are so many scams out there unfortunatelly

    even if we are a targeted traffic providers I hate that other 99% of "marketers" did a "great" job in the past so now nobody believe the rest 1% of real marketers who know what to do.
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    ★★★★★
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  • Profile picture of the author RobertRay
    Thanks for this article. It is really important to find professionals.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ravi Talwar
    Great written by you, thanks for sharing with us
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  • Profile picture of the author Ravi Talwar
    That's sad many companies now making us fool, so beware those ones
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  • Profile picture of the author pramodtapu
    It s good article about SEO
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  • Originally Posted by Logic Inbound View Post

    "My website traffic went up by 500% last month!"

    wrote a friend of mine on their Instagram story. Shouting it out to the world was interesting..

    I privately dm'd him, "How much money did it make you?"

    This is the part where you're supposed to hear, "Well I normally make $1000 a month, but now we're up to $4-or-$5,000 dollars"

    Do you know what his real answer was?

    "Oh, zero dollars. I'm doing experiments and haven't monetized".

    This kind of stuff drives me crazy guys! We've done it before in the past as well and it just feels bad to sell hype.

    The truth is that getting tons of traffic or multiplying your current traffic is something we might as well refer to as number porn or social media bait.




    This Wolf of Wall Street marketing is 99.9% fake created to draw you in and sell you. So why do the masses still engage? Well my answer according to Occam's Razor is, wishful thinking.

    I'm going to lead by example.

    In this post I'm going to show you Logic Inbound's hyped-up traffic on its blog versus what our qualified traffic looks like.

    Test 1, Ranking Keyword: "How to Contact Instagram"

    Although our article on this high-volume keyword is ranked high on Google, we couldn't find a way to monetize it other than just running Google Ads on it.

    As a test we decided to include a banner ad for Shopify in this article, to see how many people would click on it and sign up for a Shopify trial.

    The test was successful in that we got lots of clicks - 126 - on the ad a month. We don't get that many clicks from all of our ecommerce articles combined.

    That's great! You might say to yourself, but let's look past the hype: clicks and traffic numbers are useless if you aren't getting an increase in ROI.

    So we checked how many people actually signed up for Shopify after clicking the ad on the Instagram article.



    Only 3 out of the 126 clicks lead to trial signups.

    Compare that to 24 people who signed up from 113 clicks on our ecommerce articles, and you can see why quality and intent matters when it comes to traffic.



    People who read our ecommerce content are looking for ecommerce solutions. People who go on our Instagram article are not. And that's the difference that absolutely matters.

    How Traffic Numbers Lie

    Our Instagram article gets 60,000 hits a month.

    Our ecommerce content - combined - gets less than 5000 hits..

    Yet when we get down to the brass tacks we get 5 times more conversions from 12 times less visitors!

    Now Vlad, you might be telling me, can't you find other Instagram-appropriate niche items to sell to the 60k-hits page? Well smart reader it's true, I'm all ears to your solution. We're an agency though and our niche is much closer to Shopify than random products and services.

    Besides, we did this experiment to show you how traffic volume and those hyped up social media posts are bull shit.

    I personally love the quote "those who can't do, teach".

    Traffic Numbers and SEO

    You might ask, if we're not looking for traffic and rankings what are we looking for in a good SEO campaign?

    All this leads me to my next post and how we are now at an 80% quarterly client success rate vs. a 33% success rate in the past.

    Today we measure our clients' success based on one thing and one thing only: conversions and ultimately, money made.

    If your marketing campaign isn't making you money and is ONLY getting you eyeballs, then you might as well pay for 4chan traffic or Instagram ads outside of the US. Hell, spend that money on margaritas and go have a good time, quit wasting it on marketing.

    The truth is that most people (marketing companies included) hate doing the hard work and digging deep to find out what metrics really drive a campaign's success.

    They'd much rather jump from crypto, to e-commerce, to the next billionaire story because they don't believe in the grind-it-out hard work it takes to make a business succeed.

    The reason marketing companies most people hire for $500 or even $1000-a-month rarely move the needle (I'm not saying you can't win the lottery) is because digging deep takes a lot of work and expertise.

    This is why we charge what we charge at our agency and custom scope everything because everyone has different profit margins, target market, competitors etc.

    As a business owner you're left with 3 routes if you want to succeed:

    Keep testing as many cheap companies as you can until you get lucky.
    Actually pay the money it takes to pay a qualified expert who can show you they have proven results in your niche.
    Learn how to do key marketing components yourself before you outsource it.

    1. Testing Cheap Companies that Promise the World
    If you're paying a company $1000 a month and they make you $100,000 dollars, or 1000% ROI, you're:
    • Going to get a lot of new competitors quickly that will reduce your margin
    • and/or
    • Getting a massive price increase from your marketing company next month (they most likely priced your campaign wrong internally and made an amateur mistake)
    • and/or
    • Being played, since the company you hired is doing a blackhat campaign that may soon get banned or slapped by whichever method you're exploiting (hopefully you don't get sued)
    • and/or
    • Getting lucky and actually have created a viral product aka won the lottery in which case you overpaid the cheap marketing company you hired.

    Most of the time marketing companies charging $1000 or less for a campaign tell me that they're learning from their clients. Meaning they don't know what they're doing and that their clients aren't getting anything, every single time I talk to them.

    I can't blame them though, because $1000 a month isn't enough for anyone to put enough work to learn the nuances of your business. Even $2000 can be a stretch unless you structure that very carefully.

    2. Actually Pay the Money it Takes to Hire a Qualified Expert



    Our agency charges a minimum of $3000 a month (right now - we raise prices yearly) and even that is cheap.

    The reason? We try to generate at least a 300% return (we can't make promises) on our marketing campaign.

    This means that $3000 x 12 months would be a $36,000 yearly spend. If we get you a 300% return we just made you $108,000.

    The beauty of going down this route is that if a company has succeeded with a previous client in your industry with similar competitors, then this route can have a very high return on your investment with fairly low risk.

    The downside to going down this route is that if you don't do your homework on the potential company you're hiring it can turn into a horror story. We just took on a client who hired a fake SEO for a campaign and they spent $10,000-a-month that was essentially wasted.

    Make sure you get biweekly reports/meetings set up if you're going down this route. This will also help you learn the marketing channel you're investing in just in case things get sour.

    I'd even recommend potentially throwing some bait questions if you sense red flags.

    Ask the marketing company you're about to hire if they can implement a Facebook ad campaign knowing that Facebook ads in your industry are suicide. If they don't turn that down, then don't trust them because the world has enough greedy spammy marketing companies.

    We've turned clients down on SEO many times before because sometimes a campaign doesn't make sense and will just set everyone up for failure. (I'll write a post on this later).

    3. Learn How to Do the Business Growth Yourself

    If your company is making less than $1 million in revenue yearly then I recommend this route a majority of the time. Getting to that $1 million revenue mark will be able to help you hire a quality marketing agency or team.

    The beauty of this method is that it will:
    • Help you learn more about your industry
    • Not make you dependant on anyone
    • Get customer feedback to improve your product/service.

    The hard part of this approach is that it takes a lot of work. Currently our agency is on track to do over $1 million this year, and we did over $500k last year.

    I'm working every single day while my family, friends and love life are all suffering (luckily I'm blessed with their support). It takes a lot of discipline, but it works and really helps you level up as a business owner.

    Note: If you're going down this route I'd highly recommend reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

    Best book on business growth and traction I've read and I listen to 1 Audible book a week.

    So anyways guys, that's it for today and those are some of my not-so-popular hard thoughts on the agency/marketing world and how to grow a business. As always feel free to comment down below and I'll help when I can

    First, I actually read your post from beginning to end.

    Second, It was very informative. Opened my eyes to a lot of shady stuff going on in the SEO world.

    Third, I have a question for you regarding the Instagram article campaign you talked about. Do you think the click-through numbers on the banner would have been higher if the banner was promoting a service or product relating to Instagram?
    I mean, I really understand why you got a low click-through on that banner. The individuals that were clicking on the Instagram article were looking for information on Instagram; NOT Shopify. The fact that you got 3 clicks was a miracle in and of itself.

    Finally, I will subscribe to follow you and I hope you keep posting quality threads in the future.

    Stay cool and successful..
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  • Profile picture of the author friedal68
    read through your article, good in details
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  • Profile picture of the author Amarjeet Verma
    Nowadays SEO's making fool with the help of bot traffic. They purchase bot traffic and will show you matrics as you want to see.

    Even they can show you organic traffic with the keywords via bot traffic. But Google easily can identify that traffic and maybe kick on your website.
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    See How I Rank This Website No#1 on Google With Only 3 Exact Match Anchor Text Backlinks Packers and Movers in Pune - One of the Backlink is Here in My Signature!

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  • Profile picture of the author cearionmarie
    Thanks for sharing this one. This is definitely a good read.
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    Cearion Uy - Marketing Advisor
    www.influencerauditor.com

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  • Profile picture of the author kevinsaptel
    I still didn't get your point what you exactly want to say
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