I once had an article go properly, unexpectedly big.
It ranked. It brought tens of thousands of people. On every dashboard that measures marketing, it was the best thing I had ever published.
It was also, commercially, the worst.
The readers were nowhere near being buyers. Not the wrong industry, or the wrong budget. The wrong species of visitor entirely.
None of them were going to commission a website or a marketing strategy. They were never going to enquire about anything.
And the damage was not just that the traffic was worthless. It was that the traffic taught search engines what the site was about, and they believed it.
The rest of the site, the parts about brand and websites and marketing, got quieter.
Nobody sets out to optimise for the wrong thing. It happens because traffic is easy to count and enquiries are not.
So the number that is easy to move becomes the number everyone watches. Then it becomes the number the work is judged on. Then it becomes the goal.
By the time you notice, you have a content plan built entirely from keywords that were available rather than buyers who were interested.
Before anything gets written, one question:
Would I be pleased if this reader booked a call?
Not “could this rank”. Not “is there volume”. Would I be pleased.
It is a blunt test and it kills a lot of good-looking ideas. That is the point. Every topic it kills is one that would have brought people I cannot help.
Five hundred founders who run real businesses are worth more than fifty thousand readers who were never going to buy anything.
The second number looks better in a report. The first one pays for the year.
Growth that points at the wrong people is not slow growth, and neither is a problem your customers never report. It is movement in the wrong direction, and it costs you the ground you already had.
The same logic drives how I approach SEO for service businesses. If your site has this problem, it tends to show up as visitors who never enquire. I have written about the five reasons that happens, and the first one is this exact issue.
Most founder-led businesses are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a decision about what matters. The Founder-Led Marketing Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you which of seven areas is holding the rest back.
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