Getting both organic and paid traffic isn’t easy. Business owners struggling to get consistent traffic might make the mistake of settling for traffic irrelevant to their business or pages. While seeing those higher numbers in Google Analytics might feel good, it’s a waste of your time and money if they’re not leading to conversions.
Here are five reasons it’s better to focus on relevant traffic, even if you get less traffic overall. 
1. Makes ROI Easier to Achieve for Ad Campaigns
When it comes to traffic, quality matters more than quantity. That goes for both organic and paid traffic.
However, it’s even more critical for paid traffic, as you are spending money on each click or visitor. If you drive a lot of irrelevant traffic, you will spend a lot of money on your ad campaigns for low returns, making it difficult to achieve a satisfactory ROI.
That goes for any type of paid ad campaign, whether it’s on Google, Facebook, or elsewhere. It also doesn’t matter what your ultimate conversion goal is. It could be to drive sales, email signups, phone calls, trial membership signups, or anything else.
ROI can come in many forms, not just money. For example, if your ad campaign’s goal is to get more likes on your Facebook page, but the traffic you’re driving has no interest in your Facebook page, you will fail at achieving your goal.
You need to take a granular approach to determining relevance. For example, a particular demographic might be relevant to your business overall. However, you must also consider relevancy to the specific ad, landing page, and offer.
For example, while a sub-audience might be part of your broader target audience, would they be interested in the specific sale you’re offering right now? Does this service interest them? Does the sales copy on the actual ad and landing page catch their eye?
By drilling down and focusing on sub-audiences that are most relevant to each specific ad campaign, you will increase your ROI. This can sometimes be difficult, but split-testing can help. For example, you might target several distinct sub-audiences with the same ad. Then, see which sub-audience responds better to your ad.
That’s one of the reasons retargeting works so well. With retargeting, you show people offers they have already viewed. For example, someone might visit your landing page in which you promote a specific software. You’ll then run advertising campaigns on Google and social media targeting people with ads for that software.
Because the traffic you will get is so relevant (they have explicitly expressed interest in the software already), you have the highest chance of achieving a good ROI.
2. Gives Better Chances for Conversions
Relevant traffic increases conversions regardless of the medium. That goes not only for paid traffic, as explained above, but for organic traffic as well.
That starts with your keyword research. Consider two keywords, one with buyer intent and one without. An example of a keyword with buyer intent might be “motorcycle jacket deals” or “best price for armored motorcycle jacket.”
Compare those keywords with “motorcycle jacket,” which doesn’t necessarily have buyer intent. Someone typing that keyword into Google might simply want to know what a motorcycle jacket is. A more extreme example of a keyword that does not have buyer intent is “how to wear your motorcycle jacket correctly.”
Someone searching for the latter keyword probably already owns a motorcycle jacket. It doesn’t mean the traffic isn’t worth targeting, as the searcher may be interested in buying additional equipment, such as reinforced motorcycle jeans with knee pads.
However, targeting keywords with buyer intent will generally lead to increased conversions. Not all of your conversions will be sales-focused, and that’s okay. However, whenever you target a keyword, ensure the content you’re writing is relevant to the searcher and the traffic is relevant to your desired conversion.
The same goes for traffic coming from other sources. For example, if you’re driving traffic to your blog posts from your email list, it’s critical to ensure that traffic is relevant. Mostly, that has to do with where you are getting your email subscribers.
If you are getting email subscribers by giving away a free ebook or lead magnet, those subscribers might not be interested in spending money. That’s one of the risks of using free stuff to get people to sign up for an email list. A better idea might be creating an email list consisting of previous buyers.
Alternatively, promote trial membership offers to people who signed up for freebies.
As an aside, that’s why buying email subscribers is such a bad idea, as those subscribers won’t always be relevant to your business. Even running solo ads is risky, as you never know how the solo ad seller created their email list and which sources they used to get their subscribers.
3. Makes Repeat Sales More Possible
Another reason to focus on relevant traffic is that it makes repeat sales more possible. Someone who is not a chess fan might buy a chess book as a one-off decision. Perhaps your sales page piqued their interest, and they wondered how it would feel to get better at chess and beat their friends. However, they may quickly lose interest and never finish the book.
On the other hand, someone who is a chess fan will continue buying chess books from you, as they may spend a great deal of their time focusing on learning new chess tactics and strategies.
The same goes for any course or product, whether physical or digital. For example, someone who is not a coin collector might buy a rare coin because they thought it was cool, but they will likely only make such a purchase once.
On the other hand, an avid coin collector is constantly seeking to expand their coin collection and is always on the lookout for new deals.
4. Builds Brand Reputation and Authority
Focusing on relevant traffic will help build your brand reputation and authority. Part of brand building is knowing which demographics to focus on. You can only establish a reputation among people who actually know something about the topic and/or are passionate about it.
People who are fans of a martial art (like boxing, for example) will appreciate your expertise and experience in the niche if you write informative blog posts about different ways to get better at sparring or how to find an excellent trainer to hold the mitts for you.
Someone with no interest in boxing won’t appreciate how good your insights are because they have no relevance to them. They also don’t know enough about the sport to fully appreciate your advice.
Let’s provide a similar example.
Someone with a background in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu will appreciate the significance of your brown belt or black belt, knowing how long it must have taken for you to get there.
On the other hand, someone with a background in a martial art that awards brown or black belts much quicker than in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (where it can often take 10+ years to get a brown belt) might not realize how much work you had to put in to get where you are now.
If you want to become an authority, you must choose a specific niche or sub-niche. If you try to be a jack-of-all-trades, you will spread yourself out too thin, and it will be harder for people to look at you as one of the premier authorities in the niche.
5. Increases Your Page Rankings
Finally, focusing on relevant traffic will increase your rankings.
When you do keyword research, you must choose keywords relevant to the search intent of the searcher. We already discussed buyer intent, but there can be other things people search for (how-to tutorials, tips, videos, etc.).
If your article title and content match the search intent of the reader, you will get a higher click-through rate on Google. Furthermore, you will get people spending more time on your page and your website in general. All of these factors show Google that your page is relevant to the search term, and it will thus award you higher rankings.
Remember, Google’s algorithms consider user behavior when calculating which sites to rank higher.
If the traffic you focus on isn’t relevant, you will get a lower click-through rate. That shows Google that your site isn’t interesting or doesn’t provide the correct answers to people using the specific keyword in question, and it will demote you in the rankings.
There are other reasons you may get a lower click-through rate other than relevance. For example, a dull and bland title may fail to attract people’s attention.
Conclusion
Writing content relevant to the industry will also help you build backlinks. When other bloggers and influencers in your niche find your page, they will link to it if it provides relevant, intriguing information.
Building local and global backlinks is critical for SEO. One of the benefits of relevant content is that it drives organic backlinks, even without an outreach campaign. These backlinks are more natural and are better for SEO.