Clients come to us all of the time with the mistaken belief that more website traffic equals more business or a website that ranks higher in search engines.

If you use cPanel, Linux hosting or have been around awhile, you may have heard about Attracta and similar programs. But what you may not realize is that not all traffic is good or even beneficial traffic.

There are a few reasons why increasing website traffic is not necessarily a good thing:

• Increased traffic can strain your resources. If you don't have the infrastructure to handle a sudden influx of traffic, your website could slow down or even crash. This could lead to a loss of legitimate traffic, customers and damage your reputation.
• Increased traffic can lead to low-quality leads. If you're not careful about how you attract traffic, you could end up with a lot of people who are not interested in your products or services. This can be especially harmful and waste your time and money on marketing campaigns that don't generate any results.
• Increased traffic can lead to spam and bot traffic. If your website is not properly secured, it could be targeted by malicious spam and bot traffic. The more bot traffic you have, the higher your chances of malicious traffic - DDoS (denial of service), server penetration, brute force threats and viral infections.
   

Each year search engine ranking and traffic changes. Prior to recent years, increased traffic meant a popular website and that in turn pushed your website higher. But now, increased traffic can signal to search engines that your website is spammy. More traffic doesn't mean higher rankings or more customers.

It's important to remember that website traffic is just one metric that you should use to measure the success of your website. Other metrics, such as conversion rate and customer satisfaction, are also important.

If you're not seeing the results you want from your website, it's important to analyze your overall strategy, look at your content - is it attrracting the right visitors? Look at your infrastructure, are there issues with navigation, links and forms not working properly?