I Tried a Tool That Promises Organic Traffic to Your Site. Here’s What Happened Next

My Substack newsletter was the guinea pig

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

As an SEO specialist, I test various marketing methods and explain their pros and cons to my clients.

If you’ve been working with SEO for a long time, you know that CTR is a very important metric.

Unfortunately, in the world of marketing, nothing is guaranteed — especially in search marketing. Considering that some still resort to outdated methods such as link farms, bot traffic, and other deceptive tactics, caution should be exercised when dealing with unknown SEO agencies.

SERP Empire is the tool I tested. They claim to offer a powerful organic traffic booster — but how does it perform in real-world conditions? will your site be penalized by Google?

However, SERP Empire users have reported tangible improvements in site traffic after implementing the traffic booster.

Here’s my result after using the tool.

Screenshot by the author

My Substack dashboard. Screenshot by the author

That’s no small number.

It is known that being number 1 in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7% and that a page ranked first is 10 times more likely to be clicked on than a page ranked 10th.

If you’re at the top of the right search terms, this will guarantee you more visitors and more sales. It also helps you beat your competitors.

To give you context, direct traffic performs best at 76%, and second best is email marketing at 6%.

SERP tools (such as SERP Empire) align with modern SEO strategies, emulating the signals — such as click-through rates (CTR) and dwell time — that search engines use to gauge user interest and engagement.

It improves the perceived popularity of your site, which is a crucial metric for Google.

Not all bot traffic is equal

For the most part, daily bot activity is completely normal. This common bot traffic falls into a few main categories: search engine crawlers, SEO tool crawlers, copywriting bots, and more.

Example: page views of a website by Googlebot

There are also clearly malicious bots, such as scrapers, spambots, DDoS bots, and others. Although they are not the focus of this article, you should always be aware of the possibility of being targeted by them, even if the probability is small.

Paid bots and paid traffic exist in a gray area. The risks are not particularly high, but they are real, and, in most cases, you won’t benefit from them. Bots don’t convert or buy anything.

This traffic is not illegal unless it has been obtained through illegal means, (which is rare). Below, I’ll explain why and how you should still be aware of this — even more so if you’re paying a marketing agency to bring in real traffic.

Users and costs

I haven’t delved too deeply into the underground networks of bot owners and buyers, so I can’t tell you exactly where this traffic comes from.

However, I can explain who uses it and how it’s usually very cheap.

The main suspects:

• Supposedly reputable SEO agencies that really want to claim increased traffic or other successes, but can’t or won’t do the necessary work.

• Agencies that want to show higher click-through rates have to use manipulative methods to achieve this.

• Website operators monetize their sites with ads. By acquiring traffic, you can significantly increase your impressions, while the traffic costs comparatively little.

I’m sure there are other candidates that I’m not analyzing at the moment or that are so rare that I wouldn’t be able to guess. But these three are certainly more common than you might think.

By analyzing traffic and comparing it with competitors’ traffic, you can quickly recognize the unusual differences. SEMrush traffic analysis is based on clickstream data. Unlike other analytics systems, you can’t fool them with bot traffic.

More ways to recognize a dubious SEO agency

Here are some questions you can ask yourself when choosing an SEO agency or considering renewing an existing contract:

• Does the agency promise guaranteed or quick results in three months?

• Does the agency offer “complete SEO packages” with little flexibility or responsiveness to your needs?

• Does the agency maintain a public presence, reviews, employee CVs, or other public information?

• Are the steps the agency takes for you clearly and precisely defined or do you pay a monthly fee for general “SEO tasks”?

• Does the agency offer “link building” that consists of paid links, uses aggressive anchor text, consists of comments or forum spam, or is characterized by poor link neighborhoods?

• Does the agency deliver content that is well thought out and addresses the topic with sufficient breadth and depth, or is it more superficial text of 500 to 700 words?