Would You Rather Have 10,000 Visitors or 100 New Customers?

If I told you your website traffic could drop by 30% next year, would you panic?

Most business owners would.

But what if I told you that at the same time, your enquiries could actually go up?

Thanks to Google’s AI search and the rise of zero-click results, traffic is becoming a terrible way to measure whether your SEO is actually working.

So here is one question I want you to sit with for the next few minutes: would you rather have 10,000 new visitors to your website, or 100 new customers?

I’m Josh, founder of Improve My Search Ranking, a specialist SEO and AI search agency based in London and a three-time winner of the UK Search Awards. Over the past ten years we have worked with well over a thousand businesses, helping them generate in excess of 200 million pounds in sales. In this article I want to challenge the single metric that most business owners still judge their SEO on, and show you why it is quietly leading them in the wrong direction.

Let’s get into it.

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Rather watch than read? Here you go:

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The Great Traffic Illusion

Let me make that opening question a little harder. If I could guarantee you 10 million visitors to your website next year, or a thousand new customers, which one are you taking?

As a local business owner the answer sounds obvious. And yet many owners still measure the success of their SEO campaign based entirely on website traffic levels. Think about the reports most people get from their SEO agency. They are full of visitors, sessions and clicks, but they rarely mention the things that actually matter: inquiries, phone calls, sales and revenue. Those are the numbers you genuinely care about as a business owner. You should not care about getting more visitors if it is not leading to more sales.

Picture two businesses side by side. Business A gets 50,000 visitors a year and 15 inquiries. Business B gets just 2,000 visitors a year, but generates 90 inquiries. Which one has the better SEO campaign? In my opinion it is not even close. It is Business B.

Put simply, traffic is a vanity metric. Revenue is the metric that pays the bills. You cannot pay your bills with website traffic.

Google is sending fewer clicks than ever before

This next part is genuinely interesting. Research from Similarweb and SparkToro, the company founded by Rand Fishkin, the former founder of Moz, looked at what actually happens when someone performs a Google search.

As of 2026 here in the UK, only 30.5% of Google searches now result in someone clicking through to a website. That means nearly 70% of searches end without the user clicking anywhere at all. They simply stay on Google. Of all the countries analysed in the study, the UK had the highest zero-click rate.

So if those clicks are not happening, what is going on? The answer is fairly obvious: Google is answering the question on behalf of the user rather than sending them elsewhere. Think about weather searches, AI Overviews on informational queries, featured snippets, map results, business profiles, knowledge panels and shopping results. People can now get their answer directly from Google without ever leaving the platform.

So should you be worried about this as a local business owner, or is it simply changing how people buy through search and AI search? As I just touched on, Google is no longer only a search engine. It is becoming the destination for many queries, and users no longer need to go anywhere else.

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AI is changing the customer journey

One finding in particular stood out to me. When Google AI Overviews appear, studies have shown that clicks on the traditional search results can fall by around 30%, because people get their answer immediately and have no need to visit another website.

But here is the part most people miss. Look at how the customer journey itself has changed.

The old flow looked like this: go to Google, run a search, visit five or six websites, read the information, compare, then make a decision.

The new flow looks very different. With AI Overviews and search on other large language models like ChatGPT and Claude, the AI shortlists the best businesses from an initial query that already carries more context and detail. The customer might then only check out one website, because people are increasingly trusting the recommendations the AI provides. They may look at two or three, but they are no longer working through five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten different businesses. Fewer people are checking fewer businesses.

On the other hand, when someone does click through to your website, they are probably closer to the end of the buying cycle. They are more informed, they have asked a few questions and received a few answers, and they are potentially far more qualified. This brings us back to the point I made in the introduction: it may not be such a bad thing to get less traffic if the traffic you do get is higher quality and more likely to convert.

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Informational Searches Versus Buying Searches

This is where a lot of business owners get it wrong. They treat every search query as the same, and as having the same value. They clearly do not.

If someone searches for “what is SEO”, “how long does my gas boiler last” or “how often should I service my car”, there is a very good chance Google can answer that directly in an AI Overview, as can other large language models. No click is needed.

But a transactional search is a completely different thing. Take “emergency plumber near me”, “window cleaner near me” or “mortgage broker in area XYZ”. The person searching is not looking for information, they are looking to hire someone, probably pretty immediately. Those searches still need to send people to businesses. They need to generate clicks, or at the very least inquiries, because the person has to get in touch with someone. ChatGPT and Google cannot fix your boiler or clean your windows.

Research shows that transactional searches are far more likely to turn into a click than informational ones, which makes complete sense. So the clicks and the traffic you may be losing are mostly the ones that were never going to buy in the first place. They sit at the very top of the funnel and are not in a position to buy yet.

It is still good to attract that traffic, because you can nurture it and move people through your marketing funnel over time. But the priority is clear. We can still target transactional, end-of-buying-cycle keywords, and that is where people are ready to spend money. For a local service business, that is where you generate real revenue.

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New SEO KPIs Worth Measuring

With all of that in mind, it is worth rethinking your KPIs. The big one we have probably been measuring in the wrong way is traffic itself.

Instead of asking “how much traffic did we get”, we should be asking:

• How many inquiries are we getting?
• How many phone calls?
• How many bookings and appointments?
• How many quote requests?
• And ultimately, how much revenue has search generated for the business?

Here is a quick comparison. One campaign brings in 1,000 visitors converting at 10%, which is 100 inquiries. Another campaign brings in 10,000 visitors converting at half a percent, which is just 50 inquiries. That is ten times the traffic for half the result.

Google may well send you fewer visitors going forward, but the ones it does send should be better quality, provided you optimise your site in the right way. Less traffic does not have to mean less business.

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What You Can Actually Do About It

Here is how to adapt your website and your business so you convert more of the visitors you do get.

Step one: stop chasing the click and become the obvious choice when someone is ready to buy. Improve your Google Business Profile and your Bing Places profile, and make sure you are listed on Apple Maps, Foursquare and the other major directories as a starting point.

Step two: actively seek out reviews across all platforms. Google Business Profile is an obvious priority, along with Trustpilot. If you are a plumber, that might mean Checkatrade or TrustATrader. Whatever the go-to review platform is in your industry, build strong foundations there.

Step three: raise the quality of your service pages. Improve them from a content standpoint, a conversion standpoint and an SEO standpoint. Make sure you have location-specific pages and location-plus-service pages. Include plenty of case studies, examples and before-and-afters to showcase your expertise. Demonstrate your authority with accreditations, trust signals and awards, and anything else that builds your credibility and a recognisable brand.

Step four: track conversions, not just traffic. In your Google Analytics 4 account you can set up key events and track conversions, such as how often someone clicks your email link, completes a form or taps your phone number. Track whatever conversions matter most to your particular business.

Do these things and it stops mattering that Google sends fewer people to your website, because you will still be generating inquiries and sales, which is what counts.

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In Conclusion

The businesses that win will not be the ones that get the most visitors. They will be the ones that get the most customers.

We have been measuring SEO through the wrong lens. If you only ever look at traffic, then yes, Google will keep sending fewer clicks than ever to your website. But the real question is whether you can take advantage of the people who do land on your site and turn them into sales. You will get less traffic, but more qualified traffic, and that has always been the true goal of SEO anyway: high quality visitors leading to high volumes of conversions.

So stop obsessing over traffic and start obsessing over conversions.

If you found this useful, let me know what you would like me to cover next.

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