Website not getting more than 3000 unique visits per month? Your SEO & marketing is all wrong.

It's not uncommon for new webmasters to be unsure about the levels of traffic their website should be generating.

Or worse, have no idea how much traffic is coming and going on their website or where it's coming from, why it's there and what it wants.

All of these things are vitally important to know. But, I'm getting ahead of myself...

The first thing any new website needs, once it has been designed and built and put online, is traffic. Putting a new shop on the high street might be sufficient for a shop to start attracting customers with no further effort, but the Internet is not like that.

You could have the world's greatest website (perhaps the plans for an operational water engine) and no one would ever visit it.

How can this be the case? Surely, if there is something worth looking at on the Internet, people will find it and it will become popular. This is not the case, for a number of reasons:

1. the Internet is vast and there is almost no way for people to come across new websites unless they are actively marketed in one or more ways
2. the Internet is full of gimmicky webpages that make people initially cynical and cautious about the quality of all websites
3. the vast majority of traffic congregates around a few popular websites
4. Marketers are paid big bucks to ensure their employers websites appear before your website in the Search Engines

The list goes on and on... but you get the picture.

So you have to market your website and pay attention to its SEO features, inbound marketing and social media integration as well as understand your website's traffic patterns through the use of Analytics.

If there is anything you didn't understand in that last sentence then I recommend reading What is SEO? - a complete guide to all aspects of SEO, for beginners.

There's quite a lot involved in getting a website up to competitiveness in the online market. Remember, that any traffic you get is traffic away from someone else's website.

You have to look at it as a competition with everyone else in your niche. You can't simply sit back and say Well, I know my site is interesting so people will eventually wake up to it. Whether you want to compete or not, other people will compete with you.

Assuming, however, that you do have a properly SEO optimized website and you are properly utilizing social media and inbound marketing techniques, there is not reason a new website can't start off with around 3000 - 4000 new unique visitors every month.

This might sound low to you, but bear in mind that if your website is properly set up to convert traffic, you could be looking at tens or even hundreds of new customers each month. That's not bad, right off the mark, is it?

I quoted visits, not hits mind you. Hits are often quoted as a measure of traffic because a single visit can cause hundreds of hits, the number of hits is therefore always much higher.

If you see a website quoting hits, they may be giving you a false impression of their traffic - I could, for example, cause a single page visit to create a million hits on my server and then quote my hits as if it were an indication of traffic.

Work in terms of visits or pageviews because this is a better indication of the number of human eyeballs on your website.