Paid and organic traffic, answered
The questions businesses ask about website traffic, answered the way we answer them on a call.
Traffic that converts comes from answering a question somebody typed. Before buying more of it, check what the last hundred visitors did, because a weak page multiplies every channel you add.
Work it out in a minute
Six questions on one page. Names the single thing blocking it, and how long it realistically takes to move.
Questions we get
Paid and organic questions, answered including the parts that make agencies uncomfortable.
We get traffic but no inquiries. Why?
Either the traffic is the wrong people, or the page they land on does not ask for anything clearly. Those two causes look identical in a traffic report and need completely different fixes.
Our ads used to work and then stopped. What happened?
Usually audience fatigue, rising competition in the auction, a landing page that quietly changed, or a tracking break that means conversions are happening but not being recorded.
Google Ads or Meta ads first?
Google for demand that already exists, where people are actively searching for what you do. Meta for demand you have to create, where the visual and the audience targeting do the work.
How fast does paid traffic show results?
Clicks immediately, meaningful data in six to eight weeks. The gap between those two is where most budgets get wasted, because decisions get made on the first week of numbers.
Do you fix the landing pages too?
Yes, and we would rather do that before spending anything on traffic. Sending paid clicks to a page converting at one percent instead of three triples your cost per inquiry.
How is budget decided?
By working backwards from what a client is worth and what you can afford to pay for one. That gives a target cost per inquiry, and the budget is whatever generates enough data to test against it.
Should we bid on our own brand name?
Usually yes, because it is cheap and competitors may be bidding on it. The counterargument is that you would have got that click free from the organic result.
What conversion rate should we expect?
It varies by industry and offer, but for business services a well-built landing page usually sits between two and five percent, and anything under one is a problem rather than a benchmark.
Can we do this without an agency retainer?
Yes. Plenty of businesses need the account built properly, the tracking set correctly and the team taught to run it, rather than an ongoing percentage of spend.
Why do our costs keep rising?
Auction competition rises, audiences saturate, and platforms optimize toward their revenue rather than yours. Some drift is normal.
Your situation is specific. Write to hello@shaheer.io and get the specific answer within one business day.
Read next
The service itself, the working guide, and the questions we get on adjacent work.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built
Most traffic questions turn into conversion questions once there is a number attached. The inquiry value calculator puts one on it in about a minute, from inquiry volume, close rate and average deal size.