These days, blog owners, businesses, and publishers are in search of ways to increase traffic to their website. Several find themselves considering the wisdom in buying website traffic, but this is not a feature usually included in the best SEO packages.
In fact, there are plenty of reasons why buying website traffic is a bad idea, the most important of them being that it is considered unethical in most circles. A website should provide value to its core audience, as well as to advertisers. If you simply bought traffic for yours, it could easily be seen as a form of cheating.
Another good reason why website owners stay away from this tactic is that it is frequently ineffective. Low-quality traffic is likely to do more harm than good, and could pose a major risk to your business. Following are some reasons why many publishers opt to buy traffic instead of attempting to generate it organically, as well as the risks inherent in using this strategy.
Why People Buy Web Traffic
The main reason a website owner who is able to churn out great content would want to buy traffic, is money, pure and simple. In this way, a content creator could conceivably drive lots more people to visit their pages. As with most things, there is both an ethical and unethical way to go about this.
The ethical take on buying web traffic rationalizes the act as spending money on acquiring an audience for your site, albeit in a twisted way. These audiences would hopefully convert to frequent visitors, and possibly clients or customers after that. The brand/website benefits from this, and the ethics remain sound as long as the publisher keeps putting up relevant, engaging, and useful content for visitors to read.
However, this is hard to manage in an effective manner, and that prompts many publishers to become less mindful of the audiences they target. Many simply take to pumping up and discarding websites, disregarding network and platform policies.
Who Buys Web Traffic?
Website owners who stoop to buying traffic tend to be looked down on, mainly in the web ecosystem, and sometimes also in their chosen niche. Buying cheap traffic just to spike your revenue through website visits is technically website arbitrage. Arbitrage in general is defined as simultaneously buying commodities and selling them in more than one market, with the goal of benefiting from price differences. Website traffic is a commodity from this perspective.
There are different levels of web traffic based on a variety of factors, such as session length, geo-location, etc. An arbitrager generally pays no heed to the who or what of the traffic they acquire. All that interests them is turning a profit from the visits they get, which should also offset the expense of buying traffic.
Platforms like AdWords make this nigh impossible to do, but there are ways to achieve such results on Facebook, Twitter, etc., as well as native ad networks. What they do is target specific audiences who look like they can acquired cheaply, using a number of nefarious tactics including the following.
- Inviting fraudulent clicks
- Click baiting
- Confusing navigation as a way to generate additional page views
- Misleading website visitors
- Stealing viral content out of popular sites
Doing any of this would cost a website owner their good image among parties that figure out what they are up to, and so you do not find such practices in most of the better SEO packages India has to offer.
Why This is Bad
Indiscriminately buying more web traffic to a website can garner you hate from various corners.
- Platforms hate people that buy traffic, because the act blatantly violates their policies. If and when these people do adhere to the guidelines, they still end up degrading the content with regard to quality, and said content exists ring on the platform. A majority of “You wouldn’t believe what happened next” posts have this effect.
- Advertisers, ad exchanges, and ad networks deplore this practice because of how it affects the web ecosystem. Quality takes a backseat, which is not supposed to happen. The audiences that do come in tend to be drawn to more content of the same type – disengaged, misleading, and all but useless.
- Other publishers hate when you buy traffic without backing that up with good content, because this leaves their superior practices less lucrative in the same ad market. They also have to be wary of unscrupulous publishers stealing content from their sites, which actually happens a lot. Many even go the extra mile with this by running ads to drive traffic towards the stolen content.
That was a look at how buying traffic to your website usually plays out, and how it affects other players on the web. The best SEO packages normally abstain from it in favor of better, more reliable, and ethical practices.
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