What is a good number of website visitors?

Forget the total number of website visitors!  Here’s why you need to filter that into relevant website visitors.

When it comes to website performance, one of the most common questions businesses ask is:

“What’s a good number of website visitors?”

On the surface, it sounds like a sensible question – more visitors should mean more opportunities to convert to enquiries/sales.

But here’s the problem: obsessing over total visitor numbers often leads businesses down the wrong path.

The volume of visitors to your website only tells a small part of the story.

What really matters is:

  1. Who those visitors are.
  2. Where they’re coming from (geographically and from where online).
  3. What they do within your website.
  4. And ultimately, how many of them become enquiries or customers.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know but you can also click on these links to skip to what interests you the most:

By the end of this article, I hope you’ll have a clearer view of what “good” looks like for your business – not based on averages or vanity metrics, but on useful visitors who are most likely to convert.

The question everyone asks - and why it’s the wrong focus

It’s completely natural to ask:

“How many website visitors should we be getting?”

But that question can often lead to the wrong mindset.  Many businesses treat traffic volume as the primary measure of online success, assuming that more visitors equals more enquiries and more sales.

That’s rarely the case.

Picture two different websites:

Website A gets 1,200 visitors a month but only converts 1.5% into enquiries – that’s 18 enquiries.

Website B gets a lower 400 visitors a month, but with a 4.5% conversion rate, it also generates 18 enquiries.

Website A gets 3x the visitors of Website B.

So, which one is doing better?

The answer is Website B – despite having a third of the visitors, it likely has better quality visitors and resonates more with the right audience, resulting in a higher percentage of people making contact.

Over the years, I’ve seen countless businesses with modest traffic outperform those with larger volumes – simply because they attract the right kind of visitors, ignore the irrelevant visitors, and offer a better user experience once those people get to the website.

Here’s what often goes wrong when the focus is purely on numbers:

  • Management set an expectation of increased website traffic, without considering the quality of the visitor numbers they are getting.
  • Staff (internal or external) report on traffic growth without considering conversion rates from only the relevant website visitors.
  • Businesses run paid ads to increase traffic, but don’t improve the website experience for those visitors.

Ultimately, traffic is only useful if it leads to results.

If your website isn’t converting well now, driving more people to it is unlikely to change that.

That’s why I encourage businesses to change the question from:

“What’s a good number of website visitors?”

to …

“How many of those visitors were potentially useful, and of those, what percentage became enquiries or sales?”

It’s a mindset shift that makes all the difference.

What you think is ‘good’ might not be useful at all

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a high number of website visitors can give a false sense of success.

You could be seeing 2,000+ visits a month, but if most of those are irrelevant or never likely to become customers, then what’s the point?

 

Types of traffic that aren’t useful

Let’s look at the kinds of visits that inflate your stats but bring no real value, ordered by the most important, descending:

  1. Visitors from outside your geographical target area – if you only serve clients in the UK but 30% of your visitors are from India, the US, or elsewhere, those visits aren’t helpful.
  2. ‘Noise’ from blog or images traffic – sometimes blogs or images rank in search results but bring in people who will never become your customers (including those from outside your geographical target area).
  3. Bots and spiders – automated scripts that crawl your site can appear in analytics, but they’re not people.
  4. Internal staff – people from within your own business accessing the website from home or the office.
  5. Suppliers or competitors – these visits may be interesting, but they’re not sales opportunities.
  6. Existing customers – someone logging in, finding contact info, or checking something they already know about.

When you strip all that away, your truly useful visitors might be a lot lower than what your overall visitor numbers are showing.

Here’s an example:

Total visitors per month: 1,000.

After filtering out bots, overseas traffic, internal staff, competitors, and noise, you’re left with: 450.

Number of those 450 who reached a particular product/service page: 150.

Enquiries generated (about that product/service): 6.

Conversion rate from useful visitors to that product/service page (150): 4%

See how much more valuable this breakdown is?

When you only look at top-level traffic numbers, you miss the bigger picture: how many of your visitors are truly relevant and likely to convert.

That’s why I encourage every business to dig deeper – and discover how software helps you do exactly that.

In this video, you can see how I use software to reduce total visitors to website service pages down to only those from the geographical market that the company targets:

Typical website visitor numbers – by industry (with important context)

You’re probably reading this hoping to find a benchmark – a number that tells you what’s “normal” or “good” for your sector.

The truth?  There is no universal benchmark.

However, I know that you probably need to get a feel for where you stand compared to others in your industry, so here are broad ranges I’ve seen across businesses where I’ve had access to their website visitors data (from 6,200+ websites over the years).  These businesses are mostly small to medium-sized and operate across the UK, with turnovers ranging from £60K to £21M, mostly below £5M.

Range of monthly visitor numbers to websites by industry sector

I’ve included many sectors here as broad categories that many businesses fit within.

There is a low and a high number for each (e.g. construction websites had as low as 103 visitors and as high as 4,568 per month).

Chemicals: 231 – 4,087

Construction: 103 – 4,568

Consulting: 98 – 2,472

Energy: 239 – 22,365

Financial Services: 86 – 1,287

Hospitality: 479 – 4,436

Insurance: 134 – 3,725

IT: 246 – 2,397

Legal: 466 – 7,008

Manufacturing: 219 – 10,552

Marketing and Advertising: 113 – 9,741

Property: 225 – 6,562

Recruitment: 82 – 4,631

Retail: 46 – 11,253

Software: 141 – 16,892

Telecoms: 217 – 3,428

Training Courses: 237 – 8,812

Transport: 234 – 3,022

These numbers span from tiny niche businesses with a highly specific audience, all the way up to those operating nationally or internationally with stronger marketing spend and broader appeal.

 

Why these ranges don’t define your success

Let’s take and example from the software sector:

A company selling payroll software only to UK-based recruitment agencies may only ever appeal to a small group of prospects, whereas a SaaS platform targeting global users across industries could see tens of thousands of monthly visitors.

Same sector.  Totally different market.  Also very different visitor numbers.

This applies to every other industry too.

Here’s another couple of examples …

  • Consultants working within a local radius might naturally expect fewer visits than nationally-focused companies running Google Ads.
  • Manufacturers selling high-ticket items to B2B buyers will always get less traffic than B2C e-commerce brands – but those visitors are often more valuable per enquiry.

What really matters is fit.

It’s fine to be curious about the numbers for your own business sector, but please don’t use them as a stick to beat yourself with.

Instead, ask yourself:

  • Are we attracting the right types of visitors (this is itself a minefield when using paid advertising)?
  • Are they in our geographical target area?
  • Are they engaging with the parts of the site that lead to enquiries?
  • Do we know what percentage of them are converting?

If you use Google Analytics then it can help to a certain extent but only really gives you basic information.   I’ll focus more on intelligent visitors analysis software further down.

So yes – feel free to use the industry data as a rough frame of reference – but your best comparison is always against your own past performance, focusing on useful visitors and their actions.

 

Why geography matters more than you think

You could be getting thousands of website visitors a month, but if they’re not within your target geographical area, those numbers mean very little.

Let’s say you’re a London-based service provider working exclusively with UK businesses.  If 35% of your visitors are from the US, India, or Europe, then that chunk of traffic is unlikely to turn into enquiries.

Or perhaps you’re a local trades business serving only a 15-mile radius – and yet your blog is drawing visitors from all over the country.  That’s OK for exposure, but those distant  visitors will never convert.

This is why geography matters when assessing your website performance.

It’s essential to exclude visitors from all geographical areas that you can’t help – the remainder are your ‘useful’ website visitors.

So, when asking, “What’s a good number of visitors?”, remember to always qualify that with:

“… from the right geographical areas.”

Otherwise, the numbers are totally misleading because you’ll think your website is underperforming compared to the total number of visitors, when you should only be focusing on those in your geographical target area.

 

How to know if your traffic is ‘too low’

It’s common for businesses to feel anxious if their website traffic is under a certain threshold, but how low is too low?

A general rule I’ve seen across thousands of websites is this:

If your website gets fewer than 300 visitors a month, you may have a visibility problem.

That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong – but it’s worth investigating.

Why sub-300 visitor levels can be a red flag

In most cases, it suggests at least one of the following:

  • You’re not being found online (limited or weak SEO/paid ads).
  • Your offline marketing doesn’t convert into web visits.
  • Your social media presence is weak.

I’ve worked with plenty of businesses that had great products or services, but their website was essentially invisible to the market.  That’s a missed opportunity that’s usually fixable without spending a fortune.

But … context still matters because there are exceptions …

If you’re a niche consultancy or a business that only needs a few high-value clients per year, then even 100 visitors per month might be fine – if you’re successful in converting them to enquiries and sales.

The key is to analyse what those visitors are doing, focusing on these questions …

  • Are they from your geographical target area (both by country and localised within the country)?
  • Are they landing on or getting to your service or product pages?
  • Are they spending time on your site, or bouncing away quickly?
  • Are they converting – or at least showing signs of interest?

Unless you’re a very niche business, if you have fewer than 300 visitors per month and poor engagement or conversion, I recommend that you focus more attention on what your competitors are doing right with their websites and marketing.

It may be tempting to invest in services that get you more website traffic, but you need to feel very confident that your website is strong enough to to take such an increase in website visitors and convert them into enquiries for you.   This is covered more in next section …

 

How to improve results without more traffic

One of the biggest myths in online marketing is:

“If we want more enquiries, we need more traffic.”

In reality, many businesses already have enough traffic – they just aren’t converting it effectively.

Even for websites that don’t have a lot of visitors, there are opportunities to convert more of those to enquiries.

Improving conversions from website visitors is essential before considering investing more time/budget in driving more visitors to your website.

 

Start by focusing on one service or product

Pick one area of your business that you want more enquiries about.  Then:

  1. Look at how many people land on or get to that specific page (during a time period – e.g. a month).
  2. Strip out irrelevant visits (wrong geography, internal staff, competitors, etc.).
  3. See the number of relevant visitors you had.
  4. Compare that number to the number of enquiries you had.
  5. Express that as a percentage (e.g. 3 of 60 relevant visitors – 5% – made contact).

Chances are, there’s room to improve.

 

Common conversion blockers

From my analysis of thousands of websites, here are some conversion-killing problems that consistently appear:

  • Weak proof of work done (for the service/product being offered) –  if you give people lots of case studies related to each service/product then you will gain more enquiries.  Lack of work proof is the number one conversion blocker on websites.   You can learn a lot more about case studies focus on my page here.
  • No indication of pricing – there are few business types that have a good excuse for not including references to pricing, even if not showing precise pricing.  I cover pricing in a lot more detail on my page here.
  • No differentiation from competitors – you’re saying what everyone else says.  Why should someone choose you over others?
  • Weak or vague page content – it doesn’t convince visitors that you’re the right choice.
  • Missing or unclear calls to action – visitors aren’t sure what to do next.

 

Small changes, big impact

I’ve seen businesses double and triple their enquiry rates without increasing traffic – simply by:

  • Restructuring landing pages to guide users more effectively
  • Proving the quality of service/product they’ve provided to many others.
  • Making it easy for people to understand why they are better than their competitors.
  • Rewriting page copy with more clarity and focus.
  • Implementing human (not bots) live chat functionality.

You already have visitors to your website, and many of them will be relevant visitors.

Now’s the time to encourage more of them take action.

You don’t always need more website visitors.  Sometimes, you just need to do more with what you’ve got.

 

Get clarity on your website visitors free for 30 days

By now, you’ll know that raw visitor numbers don’t tell the full story.

To really understand what’s happening on your website, you need to go deeper into:

  1. Filtering our irrelevant website visitors.
  2. Focusing on those who get to your product/service pages.
  3. Comparing numbers of visitors to those pages to the level of enquiries/sales you receive.

If your conversion rate is a low percentage, you’re certainly not alone – in fact, just by knowing that true conversion percentage rate puts you further ahead in intelligence than many of your competitors will be.

I offer everyone a free 30 day trial that’s focused on getting more results from website visitors by using a combination of software I provide (free) plus my expertise working on 6,200+ websites over the years.   You can find out more and sign up for that on this page here, but in summary, here’s what you get within those free 30 days:

  1. Page by page views of all your individual website visitors.
  2. A free Zoom call with me, focused on filtering your data to only the relevant visitors, and comparing to enquiry levels for one of your products or services.
  3. Additional useful information about your website visitors overall.  For example:
    • Names of companies that visited (useful if you sell B2B).
    • House addresses of visitors (useful if you sell B2C).
    • Insights into the return on investment (or not!) from your marketing campaigns.
    • Extra nuggets of information about your website visitors that you would have had no idea could be discovered.
  4. No sales pitch.  That’s not my style.

If you want more after the free trial then we can have that conversation, but my primary focus is on giving you value that will make a much bigger positive difference to you than focusing purely on numbers of visitors to your website.

 

Summarising everything on this page

So, what IS a good number of website visitors?

Visitor numbers are just one part of the picture. What matters most is whether those visitors are:

  1. Relevant visitors who could feasibly buy from you.
  2. Making contact with you.

Drilling into your overall website visitors and reducing them down to only the potentially relevant/useful visitors can be quite depressing because that number will only be a smaller part of your overall visitors.

But it’s the right website visitors data to be focusing on.

When you focus on website and marketing changes that increase your conversions from your relevant website visitors, that creates the basis for success from which you can then invest more in bringing even  more people to your website – safe in the knowledge that your conversion rate will be stronger.

If you have any questions about all this, please do feel free to pick my brains by contacting me.