Ever heard the saying, “there’s no such thing as bad press”?
Unfortunately, this concept doesn’t apply when it comes to marketing. If you’re driving irrelevant leads, you’re not really driving traffic at all. Ensuring that you’re driving relevant traffic is crucial; without customers-relevant ones, that is- there is no business.
In this blog post, we’ll go over how to identify an “irrelevant” lead, why they don’t provide any benefit for your business, and how to start driving relevant leads to your website.
What is an “Irrelevant Lead”?
In marketing terms, an “irrelevant” lead is someone that engages with, or views, your content, that lives outside of your target audience or market. This can be due to a misuse or lack of keywords, SEO malpractices, or any number of reasons.
When creating content, it’s important to keep your target audience in mind to ensure that you’re not driving irrelevant traffic. Impacts of such traffic can be as follows:
Impacts of irrelevant traffic
1. Low engagement
When creating content, it’s important to use consistent messaging that speaks to your target audience. When people read content that speaks to them and their needs, they’re more likely to engage and convert. When you’re driving irrelevant traffic, those leads are less likely to convert, as the content doesn’t speak to them.
2. Low conversion rate
Simply put, people who are not looking to engage with your content, won’t. If you’re a pizza parlour selling pizzas, but have verbiage that relates to pasta, you’ll drive people who are looking for a product that you don’t sell! Traffic is useless if it’s not traffic that will convert, or do anything positive for your business.
3. Brand misalignment
Sometimes, irrelevant traffic is a metric to be used to put your business offering into perspective. If you’re attracting more leads outside of your target market than within it, have a look at how you’re positioning your product or service. What keywords are you using? Is this “irrelevant” traffic an opportunity to explore another lucrative target market?
4. Low domain authority
KPIs are a marketer’s best friend, and determining what is bringing in your traffic is no old hat. Unfortunately, if you are driving quite a lot of irrelevant traffic, it could negatively impact your metrics. Namely, your domain authority. Domain authority is the “score” of your website’s credibility. The higher the domain authority, the further up in the search rankings, and thereby the more visibility you receive. In the long list of metrics affecting this score is your bounce rate. If you have a lot of irrelevant traffic coming to your website, they are more likely to click off, increasing your bounce rate, and thereby affecting your domain authority.
With all this in mind, how exactly can you reel it back, and start to drive the traffic that you want? Luckily there are a lot of fixes to ensure you have your target audience in front of you when you speak.
How to start driving relevant traffic
1. Keywords & keyword research
Ensure that you’re doing continuous and competitive keyword research. Have a look at keyword trends that are prevalent amongst thought leaders and competitors in the industry. Are you ranking for those? Do you even have those keywords present in your copy? Asking yourself these questions and taking a deep dive into your content could reveal the answers you’re looking for.
2. Understand your audience
Having a firm grip on your audience is vital to the success of any business. If you don’t know how you’re selling to, chances are you’re not selling to anyone. Take a deeper look into who it is you’re trying to target, and understand what it is they’re searching for. What needs do your target audience have that your service or product offering provides?
3. Create buyer personas
Jumping off of the last point, a way to get a firm grip on your target market is by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional “customer” that you envision when creating your messaging. This is a way to quantify your target audience. Create a person: explore what their income is, their spending habits, their hobbies and interests. What does your buyer persona like to do in their spare time? What are their pain points; what are they lacking and what do they need? Asking yourself these questions, and in creating a buyer persona, is a great way to get to grips with exactly who it is you’re selling to-and start to reflect that in your messaging and product or service offering. To get started creating personas, check out this template from Hubspot!
4. A/B testing
If you’re unsure what keywords best resonate with your target audience, try A/B, or split, testing. This is the process of creating two different campaigns-in this case, two different sets of keywords-and monitoring how each of these campaigns perform. Once you gather the data and can determine which test is more effective, you can apply that logic to the rest of your strategies. In the case of keywords, be sure you start a blog and try creating two blog posts on similar topics, with varying keywords. Monitor the traffic, and determine which keywords best fit your business strategy, and resonate with your target audience.
All in all, having 100 leads seems great on the surface, but unless those leads are from relevant traffic, you haven’t got any. At the end of the day, the goal of a business is to convert leads into sales or clients. If your leads aren’t relevant, they won't convert, which brings you back to square one. Fortunately, driving irrelevant traffic is a common issue that can always be turned around!
