Is buying online traffic a good or a bad idea?

For many businesses around, directing good amounts of traffic to their websites can be extremely challenging. Maybe you are used to building links organically and creating an excellent content quality, but sometimes this is just not enough. Is buying online traffic a good idea?check it out

You can even try different types of software if you want to spy on the type of traffic that visits your website, such as traffic truffle. 

The key question that surges here is: should you be buying website traffic?

Let’s dive into it.

Defining paid traffic sources

With paid traffic, we are not making any references to paid advertising: we are referring to paid traffic as any website that has gained its traffic paying for it. Traditionally, publishers have bought their website traffic without caring too much about their audiences, as these acts can give you more harm than benefits. 

Moreover, buying cheap traffic for the sake of making a profit from the website visits receive the name of website arbitrage: this is when you buy or sell a product just to take advantage of play with its prices.  

It is essential to differentiate all types of traffic, as they differ between them. 

1. Bot traffic 

Bot traffic is the ‘regular’ type of traffic and comes from search engine crawlers, crawlers from different SEO tools, and other bots. Moreover, paid bots and traffic are not illegal, but their use is not well regarded nor accepted within the SEO experts’ field. Who then makes use of these practices?

• White-hat SEO agencies that want to get more traffic.
• Agencies that want to increase their CTRs manipulating its traffic. 
• Webmasters that want to monetize through ads. 

2. Organic traffic

This is one of the most popular ways to attract traffic to your website. This is part of the SEO world and does not normally have a cost, but a lot of marketing agencies and marketers spend a huge amount of money and effort to leverage their brands organically. This is done by:

• On-page SEO: publishing relevant and high-quality content, optimizing headlines and HTML tags (title, meta, headers), and so on.
• Off-page SEO. Building backlinks is the most vital part of this. You can build three different types of links: natural (editorial Given), manually build links (acquired through link-building), and self-created links (those added to an online forum or directory).

3. What are the risks of buying traffic?

On one hand, buying traffic does not give any valuable traffic or revenue for your brand, as bots won’t buy your product or service. If you are making use of these practices and find out that user signals time on a page could have a boost by these bots, you must know that there is no evidence that proves that buying traffic will improve your rankings. 

Therefore, it can harm your overall strategy by:

• Eating up your hosting plan for no reason.
• Making your website slower for your users and customers.
• Clicking on your pay per click ads, making you lose revenue.

Additionally, platforms do not trust people that perform these practices as they violate their policies and they tend to degrade the quality of the content that is there. 

4. Benefits of buying website traffic

On the other hand, we find some benefits of buying website traffic:

• The power to reach new users and a new portion of the audience. 
• Paid traffic often offers short-term results.
• Paid traffic is more predictable and can be easily controlled.

5. Therefore, is it a good or a bad idea to buy online traffic?

This will widely depend on the quality of the traffic, how much does it costs, and if you have the resources to acquire it. Are you sure that you are about to buy good quality traffic? If the answer is no, we strongly recommend you not to do it. If the answer to this question is yes, make sure that you perform the right quality check that ensures that you are not harming your site.