Hits on your website are not everything.

I worked for a company where the goal I was given was a measurement of unique visitors per day but I disagreed with the goal.

I understand the reasoning – more hits means more potential customers right? Not necessarily. Targeted traffic is much better as those visitors are more likely to be interested in your product.

If you are a new business starting out, my advice is to concentrate on the longer tail keywords as you need to use your website to either provide sales or leads. Concentrating your time on targeting generic keywords may mean a lot of time is spent on promoting your website to an audience who are not likely to buy anything from you.

Let’s take an example of a ficticious used car dealer in Essex. Would the phrase “used cars” be worth chasing? Granted it will be a massive search term, but if someone in Cornwall was looking for a used car, are they going to drive all the way to Essex just because it tops the search engine? It would be very unlikely.
So, optimise for the longer tail phrases such as “used cars in Essex”, “used cars in Colchester”, “used cars in Chelmsford”, “used ford essex”.
Think about your customers and how they will search, and based on that information you should choose your keyphrases.

A used car dealer that get’s hits to their website from all over the UK loses a massive chunk of their visitors because they are not close enough to the car dealer in Essex. Therefore the number of website hits is misleading because they will not be able to convert a lot of those visitors to customers, and by ignoring the longtail phrases that are more likely to convert to customers, the used car dealer can be losing out on potential customers.

So, in summary, it is important to understand where your website hits are coming from and whether that traffic can be proffitable to you. If it isn’t, it’s time to consider if you are targeting the right keyphrases.