Just had a near perfect analytics day for one of my SEO clients. With their permission, here is the graph:
Perfect analytics with all three sources of traffic being equal
What's so great about it?
The traffic sources are equally spread.
Although I am big fan of search engine traffic, and I run some client sites with over 90% of organic search traffic, for me that's keeping all eggs in one basket. If tomorrow Google decides to impose a penalty on your site (for what ever reason) you are suddenly left with no traffic at all.
So by distributing the traffic among referral sites (which means you make good content that people link to), and investing in the user experience (again you make good content so they will come back) you have secured your site again virtually all Internet turmoil - which is the way to run in it the long run.
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Posted in: SEO
TAGS:analytics day, google investing user experience, perfect analytics, vladimir brent
Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
6 Comments
Interesting to see the increase of the Direct Traffic in the last few days (on the small chart) as well...
Brent, I think I would incline towards referral (non social media) traffic. Think everyday link in NY times online :)
If you were to be overweighted in any category, what would you rather it be?
I'm thinking direct traffic, for the reasons you state above about search being the most fragile leg in the stool. Your repeat visitors are a good indication of whether your site continues to offer something of value to the users who have already found you.
VLAD: That is great! Your clients diverse traffic is a real positive. I do like search engine traffic, but the best conversions come from referrals most often. They are going to your site for one reason...
Stumble upon brings a lot of traffic, but it isn't always great at converting new traffic.
Vladimir, I think diversifying is the best way to get traffic as you stated in your post. I also believe in organic traffic. However, One point more that could be added is, you should try to diversify across different search engines. Even though Google will always give you the lion's share of your traffic, if you can get or even target pages to rank in Yahoo or MSN for example rather than always Google you have a little bit more security, if for one reason or another your site falls from Google.
wow... I think this is really unusual. But, I've never thought of it that way, it is a good approach.
I think sooner or later search engine traffic beats the rest...