Page Rank or Traffic - Which is more important?

Bear with me while I ramble a little. I took over the job as the marketing guy for a company that provides a service to the transportation industry nationwide. The old site was a .info site, had an Alexa ranking in the 9 million plus range, but was ranked as the number one site if you put in _______ auto service, your city, state. It was the number one site for about 10 cities. If you typed in _______ auto service without putting in your location we generally showed up on the bottom of the first or top of the second page.

I did a new website using .com, used a bunch of ideas that I pulled from this forum and have greatly improved our ranking and traffic. Currently our Alexa ranking is 950,000 or so and we pull up in the 2-4th spot on the first page if you type in ______ auto service without using location tag in your search. However, if you type in ________ auto service, your city, state in the 10 cities where we were in the top spot, we no longer show up or our old link to that city shows up. If you click on the old link, it does not go anywhere, just shows up as a broken link. Most of our traffic comes from one link to a huge auto related membership organization that let us put a link from their site to our site.

Now the owner is concerned that we do not show up as the number one site in _______ auto service, your city, state and thinks we are losing business. I tried to tell him that our old site may have been ranked higher, but we got no business because the website was poorly designed and a little ugly. I did a 301 redirect from the .info site to our new .com site and the owner wants me to stop the redirect and try to see if putting our old .info site back up will let us get our old rankings back in those cities. If I resurrect the .info site will it go out and fix the 3-4 broken links that are still floating around in the top position?

So should I just try to optimize the new site to get those location rankings again, if so how long will it take to get back on the first page? Do most people when looking up an item type in just the item or do they type in the item and their location? If most people only type in _____ auto service, then our website is golden. I did put in a locations tab in our new website with those top ten cities and states listed, but it has only been about 6 weeks. Do I tell the owner to just be patient?

 

One other point, we have three competitors that show up above us on Google, but their Alexa rankings are in the 4-5 million range. We show up in Google in spot 3, 4 or 5 but have an Alexa ranking of 950,000. In theory, who is getting more business and more visits?

 

Sure traffic is much important than Page Rank. Nowadays Page Rank is not as important as before.

 

Well PageRank is important in building traffic because you are listed higher without paying for it. But when it comes down to it, traffic is going to get you the sales you want. I don`t think one is more important than the other; in really you should just listen to what the company is trying to achieve and focus on that because you can get both decent PR and great traffic.

 

Definite traffic is a great deal important .But when it comes down to it, traffic is going to get you the sales you want. I don`t think one is more important than the other;The largest part of our transfer comes from one relation to a huge auto related association group that let us put a link from their site to our place.

 

Definitely traffic, the challenge is always converting into sales...

 

Both page rank and traffic is important for a site. Page rank explains the quality of the site digitally. The economy from a site is based on the traffic

 

Traffic is must in seo.

 

traffic is more important from the page rank

 

Page rank and traffic both are two different things and i think both matters to achieve your traffic

 

Imagine this, you have all the PR that you want for your website but you don't get the traffic that you want? Would that help you? Maybe if you can sell High PR links to make money but would you want you website to have all that links? I don't think so.

And then, imagine if you have a low or at least no PR at all but you're getting a good amount of traffic daily? Again, would that help you? May it be that you have a blog with adsense or a product website but with good traffic, gaining visibility over the internet and getting good conversions on products or clicks will eventually get you on top! and you might get a high PR as well.

 

I think traffic is more important

 

Of course it's the traffic. I have many sites which got lower PR then my others and they get better traffic. So I simply don't care about PR.

 

see actual visitor can not see your PR, if he found its interesting than he will be come again n again, PR is only consider by webmaster.

 

Definitely traffic, PR is nothing.

 

Both are proportional to each other. If you get high traffic, it shows the importance of your site; ie.the page rank.
The page rank helps consumers to get better links.

 

without traffic you wont be generating any income

unless you sell high PR sites for a living

 

traffic without a doubt

 

PR is not importance . For The Traffic is most importance. highest importance. fastestpc dot net.

 

Traffic depends on backlinks, onsite seo, quality juice, quality, page rank, and much more.