Last week, CIO published an article featuring a fairly staggering statistic. The latest analyses of web traffic find that nearly half of all “visitors” to sites across the web are actually bots. The article goes on to point out that this is something that costs companies money, as well as potentially misleading them about the success of their web marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, this is probably information that some of the less reputable Beverly Hills web marketing companies would rather you didn’t know about. If clients are ignorant about the perils of today’s internet, unscrupulous local SEO companies can convincing you that you’re getting more traffic than you actually are.

There is a substantive difference between the raw numbers involved in your site’s analytics and the actual conclusions drawn from those numbers. If your local SEO company doesn’t acknowledge this fact, consider it a red flag. If they’re not benefitting by misrepresenting your traffic, careful analytics can help them to ferret out which of your traffic sources are not genuine.

The need to separate human and non-human traffic is also a good reason why your local SEO company and local web marketing company should work closely with each other – if they are not housed within the same firm. The thorough web analytics that one company provides can help the other to avoid wasting our time and money on a marketing campaign that is actually reaching more bots than human beings.