Walk In Traffic

A Walk In is either a customer that happens to travel past your store and decide on the spur of the moment to drop in or they are a person whose original soul has departed his or her body and has been replaced with a new soul, either temporarily or permanently.

In this blog we are referring to customers. So please put your marketing thinking cap on.

Once upon a time, long long ago, in a land far far away a website would receive a far bit of walk in or drop by traffic. These are people that just happened to locate and visit your website through the vagaries of the internet.

Those days appear to be long gone. Unless you do something to deliberately promote traffic to your website it is most likely that you will receive zero traffic.

Let's look at some numbers to see why this might be.

If you expect to get traffic from a walk in they will need to see your page in the search engine results page. To see your page in they search engine results page, they need to have done a search. So what is the average number of searches performed per day?

• Google    91 million per day
• Yahoo    60 million per day
• MSN    28 million per day
• AOL    16 million per day
• Ask    13 million per day
• Others    6 million per day
• Total    213 million per day

Thus your total potential exposure is 213 million per day. That is if all of the above searches are for your keyword combinations. How many searches are there for your keyword combination? Great question. So far I have found no answers. Google is extremely protective of actual numbers. They will give you graphs depicting trends and hot searches. But they do not give actual numbers on these charts.

For example, if you look up the search trend on "obama birthday" you will find a dramatic increase in August. But there are no numbers shown. Just the percentage increase.

This is an unfortunate gap in our ability to get a handle on what is happening. Deliberate I'm sure. But unfortunate.

So let's just make up some numbers to illustrate the process. Let's assume that out of the 213 million searches per day 1% are on your exact keyword combination. This is an absurdly high number. That would mean 2.13 million people a day could potentially see your page in the search engine results. But what page are you on? And how many pages into the results can you reasonably expect people to dig?

On rare occasions I will dig three pages into the search results. How many pages will you dig? Two? Three? Ten? If you are not on page 1, 2, or 3 you can pretty much drop any expectation of being found in the search results.

This is the situation for most people. Most folks do not show up in the top of the search results. This means that either they receive zero traffic or they promote.


But, wait a minute I thought the holy grail of SEO was going to get me on the front page of google search results. Check out a short discussion on my take concerning what SEO is.

Now that the internet is a vast wasteland filling with trillions of web pages the accidental visitorship of days gone by are long gone.

Today there is little or no accidental visitorship. Count on promotion. Don't even dream you can bait a hook, drop it in the water and hope for a bite. It could happen, but it's not very likely.