What is "SEO Trash Traffic"?

One of the most common concepts that we hear repeated in SEO (in all DMKT practices as well) is "Relevant Traffic." What does it mean?

From my perspective, we can define “Relevant Traffic” like this:

"web visitors that are interested in what you are offering, and able to get it."

This definition automatically disregards people interested in your product, but living outside your delivery area, without a budget or any other circumstance makes them useless for your business.

Also, this means that people that live in your area and have money available but aren't interested in your product are also "not relevant traffic."

In both cases, we are talking about web users that somehow ended up on your website and are part of one of those two categories.

Serving pages is damn cheap. If you are getting "trash traffic" from real humans (I am discounting all bot traffic), but you can quickly pivot your business model, you will have a chance to get money from them.

It's like having a hardware store. Every day, someone enters your store and asks for a coffee. You can say, "this is not a coffee Shop, sorry." That's ok. But if you have that situation every day, perhaps selling coffee in your hardware store isn't a bad idea, or at least point them out to the closest alternative (ideally, your coffee shop).

Is there any way to get some money from your trash traffic? Even getting them subscribed can represent an opportunity to sell something later.

Most big companies are too slow to take such an approach. But a smaller one could do it quickly. These are some examples/ideas:

Based on geolocalization, let's say that you know that some visitors are "trash traffic". You can:

Use a pop up to get the email ("we will notify you when we are available in your area")
Show an alternate design of your website, with ads activated.
Guide the user to go to buy to another website (previously agreed to do it mutually).
Create a different version of the product (smaller, bigger) for different a types of customers.

IMO, you can create a business based solely on the traffic you can get. Based on my experience, many SEOs tend to disregard this traffic because it isn't related directly to "the keywords they are trying to rank" or "we do not sell that." My suggestion is to leverage the power of SEO to create new business opportunities instead of only promoting the actual ones.

It is necessary to understand the business, the current trends in the industry, and scale economics to use this type of insight to promote new business lines. But every professional SEO should have this close connection to the commercial side (instead of looking at the keyword difficulty of a keyword or any other low-value SEO task), right?

I get traffic, then I exist.

A small note about "trash SEO traffic"

Sometimes, traffic can be, if not trash, useless for creating new business opportunities. A specific example comes to my mind: the past year's keywords.

IE. "Best SEO Tools 2019", "Best SEO software 2020" or "Learn SEO 2020" can bring some traffic, but most of the time, they will not represent a new commercial angle since they will eventually disappear.

I see many SEOs using this type of "obsolete keywords" because several SEO tools show these keywords and some search volume. It is better to focus on not-dying trends.