Ahrefs Traffic

What is Traffic?

Traffic refers to the total number of visitors or users who access a website during a specified date range. It’s a metric used to measure the volume of activity on a website and provides insights into the overall popularity and reach of the site.

Businesses may track different categories of traffic:

• Organic Traffic: Visitors who arrive at the website through unpaid, natural search engine results. These users find the website by searching for relevant keywords or phrases.
• Direct Traffic: Users who directly type the website URL into their browser or access it through bookmarks.
• Referral Traffic: Visitors who come to the website through external links from other websites. These links can be from social media, partner sites, or other online platforms.
• Paid Traffic: Users who reach the website by clicking on paid advertisements, such as Google Ads or social media ads.
• Social Traffic: Visitors who come to the website from social media platforms.

By analyzing website traffic data, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize their online presence, improve user experience, and drive better results.

What Is a Good Amount of Monthly Traffic?

It’s extremely difficult to provide a reliable number as different businesses will define different traffic volumes as good, depending on their goals, type of business, target audience, and many other factors.

For example, a local plumbing service company may aim to generate leads and acquire new customers from its local area, targeting 5,000 to 10,000 monthly visitors. On the other hand, a media or news website may consider this number too low: this type of business is more likely to target 500,000 to 1 million monthly page views to attract advertisers and generate significant ad impressions.

There are some general considerations to keep in mind:

• Benchmarking: Compare your website’s traffic to industry averages and competitors with similar offerings. This can provide some context to evaluate your performance.
• Website Type and Niche: The acceptable amount of traffic varies depending on the type of website.
• Growth Over Time: Instead of fixating on a specific number, monitor your traffic trends over time, aiming for consistent growth in traffic.
• Local vs. Global Business: If your business primarily serves a local audience, a smaller amount of targeted local traffic may be more valuable than a larger but less relevant global audience.
• Quality vs. Quantity: It’s essential to focus not only on the quantity of traffic but also on attracting high-quality traffic that’s genuinely interested in your content, products, or services.

Keep up with future trends and instantly compare your performance to companies just like yours, regardless of your industry. Join our GA4 Benchmark Group to measure your website traffic against your peers—it’s anonymous and free for everyone!

How to Improve Website Traffic?

Here are some effective methods to increase website traffic:

• Create shareable and linkable content: Statistics and original research represent content assets that can attract a high number of backlinks, therefore driving traffic to your website. If you manage to obtain high-authority links, this tactic will also improve your search rankings.
• Optimize old content: Update and re-optimize your older articles with new information, images, quotes, and other elements that make it relevant and useful. Add the “update date” to the article to signal to the reader that the information inside isn’t outdated.
• Create topic clusters: Choose a high-level topic based on a relevant keyword and build a pillar page for it. Then, develop multiple subtopics, linking them back to the pillar page. Organizing your content in such groups will help Google understand your website better and recognize you as a topic authority.
• Monitor and analyze: To learn which strategies for improving traffic pay off, you need to monitor and analyze traffic changes regularly—at least once a week, set aside time to check the numbers and take action if necessary.

Databox is a business analytics platform that can pull your website analytics data in one place, helping you make a habit of monitoring and reporting on website traffic.

More resources to help you improve:

• Website Traffic Benchmarks by Industry
• 7 Actionable Ways to Improve Website Traffic Quality
• 13 Ways to Convert More Blog Traffic to Customers
• 9 Ways to Break Through a Website Traffic Plateau
• Blog SEO: 47 Expert Tips for Optimizing Blog Posts for SEO