Going from 5% to 10% conversion beats doubling your traffic
Two directions to more clients. One is cheaper to control
Cristian Lascu
August 20, 2026
For most of us the law of large numbers is a known concept. In practice, even in our business context, it shapes a lot of how our results actually turn out.
When it comes to having more clients that come from the traffic generated by your website, there are two obvious directions. First, you can get more customers by generating more people who see your work.
The second direction is, from the traffic and the people who are already visiting you, to try and convert more of that attention into a paying customer.
Both of the approaches mentioned above can move the needle, but one is easier to control and cheaper to implement.
Both directions became harder at the same time
It is worth saying why this matters more now than it did two or three years ago.
Search results increasingly open with an AI answer, which means fewer people scroll to the links underneath. Your competitors are publishing at a volume that was not possible before, because the tools became cheap and fast. Inboxes have filters in front of them. Social feeds have algorithms deciding who sees what.
The practical effect is that the cost of buying or earning attention keeps rising, and there is no sign of that reversing.
So the question becomes which of the two directions is worth your limited time.
The first direction works great, but is not in your control
Getting more visible works. Ranking better, being cited more often, publishing consistently, running paid campaigns. I have spent most of this year on exactly that work and I would not tell anyone to stop as it clearly works.
The difficulty is that the outcome sits largely with someone else, and working against that current can be expensive. You can influence how a search engine ranks you, whether an AI cites you, and how widely a platform spreads your work, but you cannot control any of them.
There is also a timing problem. Visibility work tends to pay off in months rather than weeks, and paid traffic stops creating awareness for your work the day you stop paying for it.
The second direction is arithmetic you already own
Suppose your site converts visitors into customers at 5 percent, and you improve that to 10 percent.
The effect on your revenue is identical to doubling your traffic.
The difference is what each one costs you. Doubling traffic in a competitive field usually means months of content work, or an ongoing advertising budget. Improving your conversion rate normally means describing the problem more clearly, making a single strong offer instead of several weak ones, and removing the friction between interest and action.
There is a second reason this direction is worth prioritising, and it is the one most people miss. Conversion rates multiply through the funnel, while traffic simply adds to the front of it. If you improve three consecutive stages by a third each, the combined effect roughly doubles the output of the whole funnel, without a single additional visitor arriving.
That compounding is the part that makes the work worth doing properly.
What this looks like in my own numbers
I will use my own funnel as the example.
Fewer than 1 in 100 of the people who see my site in search results actually click through to it. My ten highest volume search queries have between them produced no clicks at all, which is a useful reminder that appearing in results and being chosen are two different things.
Of the people who do arrive and join my list, roughly 6 in 10 came through a specific free resource rather than a general invitation to subscribe. That ratio has held steady for months and it is the clearest signal I have about what actually converts attention into a relationship.
After that, about 4 in 10 of my subscribers open a given issue, and roughly 1 in 11 of those who open will click something.
Every stage reduces the number that carries forward. This is perfectly normal and consistent with how any funnel behaves., and yours behaves the same way at whatever scale you operate.
What I find useful is looking at where I can act. Improving the first stage means persuading a search engine to treat my pages differently. Improving every stage after it means writing more clearly, making the offer more specific, and asking for one thing rather than several. The second set of changes is far more within our control as owners of our own sites.
Where conversion rates actually move
In my experience, four things account for most of the improvement, and I would work through them in this order.
The first is describing the problem in the language your customer already uses. A lot of business copy explains what the company does. The pages that convert well tend to describe the situation the reader is already in, closely enough that they recognise themselves in it (the pain point of the customer).
The second is reducing the number of choices you present. Every additional option divides attention and costs conversion. I have seen this clearly in my own newsletter data this year, where issues with one clear action consistently outperform issues that offer a menu of them.
The third is delivering value before asking for anything. The 6 in 10 figure above is this principle and nothing more. A specific, genuinely useful resource converts considerably better than an invitation to imagine future value, because it removes the need for the reader to take anything on trust.
The fourth is removing friction you have stopped noticing. Additional form fields, an unclear button, an answer buried halfway down the page. These are difficult to see on your own site because you built it, and usually obvious to somebody looking at it for the first time.
None of these require more traffic. All of them work on the traffic you already have.
Which direction to prioritise
If almost nobody is finding you, work on visibility first. No conversion rate compensates for an empty top of funnel.
Beyond that point, and I would guess most people reading this are beyond it, the second direction is faster, cheaper and considerably more within your control. It also increases the value of your visibility work later, because when that work eventually pays off, the additional traffic arrives into a funnel that converts properly rather than one that leaks.
Improving conversion first means every visitor you earn afterwards is worth more to you.
This is the part of the work I am moving toward more seriously, and it is what I will be helping people with. I will share more on that shortly.
Worth doing this week
Write down the conversion rate at each of your three main stages. Visitors who take the next step, leads who open, and those who act. Most businesses have never written these in one place, and in my experience the weakest stage is rarely the one people expect.
If you would like a working example of the value-first approach described above, everything I publish is free and ungated, and how those pages are constructed is as much the point as what they contain.
Or reply with your three percentages and I will tell you which stage I would address first. I read every reply.
The One Thing
Traffic gains add to your funnel while conversion gains multiply through it. Moving from 5 percent to 10 percent has the same effect on revenue as doubling your traffic, and it usually costs an afternoon of clear thinking rather than six months of work. One of those directions depends on a search engine. The other one depends entirely on you.
Start with the one you control.
What I'm Building This Week
How much of our collective effort goes into the direction we control least. Nearly everyone I speak with is working on visibility, and very few can tell me their conversion rate at any stage of their funnel. We are optimising the part a platform can take away tomorrow, and largely ignoring the part nobody can touch.
Reply to this email with one of:
What is your conversion rate from visitor to lead? If you do not know it, that is itself the interesting answer.
Which stage of your funnel do you suspect leaks the most, and have you actually measured it?
What was the last change you made that improved a rate rather than a raw number?
What resonated? What did I get wrong? Hit reply: I read everything and I'm building this with you and with your input.
P.S. The toolkit, in the order I would use it: Visibility Audit → GEO/AEO Audit Checklist → How to Get Cited by AI → SEO Strategy Playbook → Title & Meta Audit → Sovereign Idea Workflow. All free.
P.P.S. Know someone putting all their effort into more traffic while their funnel leaks? Forward this. Improving what they already have is cheaper than doubling what they do not. They can subscribe at thesovereigntechnologist.com.
That’s all for this week.
See you next Thursday.
