Tactics to increase traffic to your website, blog or social media profile can no longer be counted on the fingers of one hand. The foundations of traffic generation – SEO and ads – still create the platform on which our online businesses are built. However, more and more of us turn to alternative methods to get the edge. One of these is opting to buy targeted traffic from a traffic provider.
One can look at paid traffic as an additional advertising route – a way to introduce thousands to hundreds of thousands to your pages either as a one-off or as a regular feature of your marketing strategies. While you can’t expect conversion miracles from targeted web traffic, you can expect an influx of human visitors to arrive on your pages (and so boost your SERP ranking) when you use the services of a reputable provider.
But exactly how safe is it to use targeted traffic? Can you get banned for using it?
Paid traffic is not illegal. It’s not exactly white-hat, either. But it isn’t a metric for a search engine algorithm on any network. You won’t get banned or fined because you use paid traffic; these algorithms decide whether suspicious activity is occurring on your site based on other factors.
One of the alarm signals for these algorithms – in terms of traffic – is a sudden, very abnormal level of activity. This means that the traffic you buy should either less than quadruple your current daily or weekly visitor numbers, or it should be drip-fed over time. Most non-targeted and targeted website traffic providers will deliver your paid visitors over a period of up to 30 days. Another alternative is to order traffic on a monthly basis – while the first surge might raise Google’s eyebrows, your subsequent paid traffic volumes will soon lower them.
Some sources mention how the high bounce rate of paid traffic could be a potential source of negative feedback, particularly on Google. It has since been shown that bounce rate calculations are too unreliable to be used in the search engine algorithm. What is more, many websites – especially startups – experience high bounce rates whether traffic is paid or not. So if your paid traffic decides not to stay too long, or loves your pages and hangs around, neither behaviour will affect your ranking.
There is one way in which your targeted traffic could cause a problem and the source of that problem is your server or website. If either are unable to deal with a surge in traffic, other search engine algorithm metrics can be negatively affected. Think of slow loading times and downtime – both of which indicate a negative user experience. User experience is the most important scoring metric of the Google algorithm and of high importance on other, smaller engines.
The key takeaways for those who want to buy targeted traffic and not raise any red flags?
- Order one-off traffic volumes to accompany another campaign
- A test one-off shouldn’t be more than 4 x more than your normal traffic rate
- When ordering high numbers, order recurrent monthly traffic
- Drip-feed your traffic over at least one week
- Ensure your website can deal with a high number of visitors on one landing page
- Ensure your server can cope with these visitors, too
- Don’t neglect your SEO, social media, guest posting, and email campaigns
Getting ahead of your direct competition is tough. Using every strategy, including paid web traffic, can help you edge your way past them.
Whether you want likes for your Facebook profile, real or bot visitors for your website, or comments on Twitter, all are available online at a price. Follow the above tips and you’ll never need to worry about getting banned when you use targeted website traffic.