What Do You Do For An Encore?

SEO has trained businesses to obsess over traffic over and above any other metric. The goal seems to be to get people to the site as cheaply and quickly as possible, before doing whatever it takes to convert them before they leave. Not only does this kind of behavior not work (yes, you’re wasting your marketing budget), but the very premise severely misunderstands how human beings make buying decisions.

For most businesses, a first-time visitor is worth pretty much nothing. Yes, that’s right: NOTHING. They’re probably not a Marketing Qualified Lead, and I’d bet the farm they’re definitely not a Sales Qualified Lead. Why is this? Well, it’s (probably) not because incoming traffic is of poor quality. It’s more likely that, simply, people don’t trust strangers, and they don’t make significant purchases from businesses they discovered 37 microseconds ago.

Look at your own experience. When did any of us last stumble upon a new business and immediately hand over our credit card details? Yet the majority of marketers using digital channels operate as if instant conversion is not only possible, but expected.

Nobody is ready to buy on the first visit

As marketers, we’ve become pathologically impatient. We track bounce rates obsessively. We shave milliseconds off load times. We deploy increasingly desperate tactics to capture contact information before visitors can escape. We think this fear and paranoia is rational, because if someone leaves our site without converting, we might never see them again.

But it’s precisely these aggressive tactics we’re using to keep someone on our site long enough to buy, that in reality has the exact opposite effect. That newsletter sign-up popup that appears five seconds after I’ve arrived on the site is interpreted as desperation. The chat widget that activates before I’ve even finished the introduction paragraph feels intrusive. All of these gimmicks signal to the buyer that we’re desperate, and don’t care about them.

During that first visit to a site, most buyers are actually doing something very important, and highly specific. They’re assessing whether this particular source deserves their further (and future) attention. When we interrupt that assessment by demanding an email address, we’ve answered the question for them – and not in a good way. Asking first-time visitors for contact details isn’t like proposing marriage on a first date. It’s far worse. It’s like asking someone to co-sign a loan before you’ve finished introducing yourself. The request reveals something about judgment that no subsequent interaction can repair.

The terrible economics of only attracting strangers

A business model built entirely on first-time visitors has awful economics. Acquisition costs climb continuously while competition for attention intensifies, making the need for constant novelty exhausting. But supposing we consider a different approach, where the first visit to our site is treated as relationship initiation rather than a conversion opportunity? Someone who returns five or six times before making contact has already voted for us, with their attention. They decided the content was valuable enough to remember and chose to come back despite having countless other options.

We should value and savor such return visits, since they represent a kind of unpaid marketing. Each interaction compounds our credibility in the eyes of the buyer in ways paid advertising can’t touch. The visitor moves from awareness to consideration through voluntary engagement, which makes them exponentially more valuable – and probably loyal.

Familiarity reduces friction better than excitement does

Repeated exposure makes processing easier. The layout starts making sense and navigation becomes intuitive. Research shows that “processing fluency”, how easily information can be processed, significantly influences both judgments and decisions. Think about websites you visit regularly. You know where everything lives and you’ve absorbed how they organize information while recognizing their communication style. That accumulated knowledge creates an investment, which generates switching costs that favor continued engagement.

Businesses often assume that sufficiently valuable content will overcome poor usability. If you really think that people are going to join the dots for you and excuse your lack of knowledge, value articulation, and understanding, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. In pretty much every competitive marketplace, cognitive ease wins every time. We can have the best product in the world, that does everything the competition does (as well as much more) as well as it being cheaper. But if we’ve made a dogs dinner out of how we’ve positioned, framed, and communicated our value proposition, we may as well go home early.

Someone on their fifth visit to our site, on the other hand, has already paid the learning costs. They understand how the site works and what to expect, so each subsequent visit demands less mental effort and increases the likelihood of another visit. The relationship reinforces itself.

AI search is expanding the choice options

Artificial Intelligence is growing in popularity in how people find information, albeit very slowly at the moment. When potential customers ask AI systems for recommendations or use them to research products, a basic question emerges: does your business even register in that context?

AI visibility operates slightly differently than traditional SEO. Large language models form associations from training data, retrieval patterns, and the connections between information across the web. Having a website alone no longer suffices because the business needs discussion happening elsewhere, references from other sources, and integration into broader professional conversations. AI can only recommend what it actually knows about. A business with minimal digital footprint and sparse external mentions effectively doesn’t exist from an AI perspective. Building that presence demands exactly the patient relationship-building we’re discussing.

What actually brings visitors back? That’s easy: it’s having something worth returning for. The specific format matters less than whether it delivers ongoing value. Most businesses approach content as compliance. We publish blog posts because SEO requires it, we share updates because social platforms exist. But this kind of mechanical approach produces mechanical results where people arrive seeking immediate utility and leave when they don’t find it. Not exactly the best way to build a buyer relationship, is it?

Effective content operates differently. Each piece connects to earlier work, while ideas develop across multiple articles, chapters, videos, or episodes, allowing a coherent perspective to emerge gradually. People come back not for an individual post, as much as to track the evolution of thinking over time.

This demands patience, since such benefits accumulate over the medium to long term. But the economics improve steadily as the body of work grows. Each new piece adds value for both new visitors and returning ones while the body of work creates authority that isolated articles cannot establish.

Trust formation takes time, period

Research on trust development demonstrates that building credibility demands multiple positive interactions over time. Initial skepticism gives way to careful evaluation. Positive experiences build confidence over time until there’s enough evidence to justify taking action. This process takes as long as it takes, and no marketing tactic can speed it up.

Businesses that get this design their digital presence accordingly. First visits aim for memorability and value rather than transactions, while site architecture facilitates exploration instead of funneling toward conversion points. To take this kind of position requires genuine confidence in the product offering (not to mention confidence from superiors). But when products actually solve problems, then enabling the buyer to make more informed decisions is a win for all of us. Rushing the process signals either desperation or implicit acknowledgment that extended consideration might not favor the seller.

Short-term metrics distort everything

Modern marketing weighs heavily in favor of immediate measurability over long-term value creation. First-visit conversions can be tracked with precision while sales resulting from someone’s seventh visit across three months cannot. This measurement bias pushes strategy relentlessly toward the immediate and away from what actually builds sustainable businesses. But just because we can easily measure something, doesn’t mean that metric is worth measuring in the first place.

Businesses built on relationships developed over the longer term consistently outperform those built on impulsive first-visit conversions, because the former generates advocates while the latter generates buyers who immediately forget the transaction occurred.

As AI systems increasingly mediate how people discover and evaluate businesses, this ‘long game’ patience becomes even more critical. Successful companies will be those that invested in becoming genuinely memorable and recommendable, and that investment starts with treating first visits as relationship beginnings rather than opportunities for immediate value extraction.