Diversify Your Website Traffic Sources
This is going to sound strange coming from an SEO professional, but organic SEO alone isn’t enough when it comes to developing an online marketing campaign. While SEO is important for online success, it’s only one piece of the online marketing pie that a website needs to invest in if it wants to build a strong brand and grow as a business. It is important that a website diversify its traffic sources in order to ensure long term success online; relying 100% on the search engines leaves your site in a vulnerable position.
An effective SEO program should make up about 40-50% of your online campaign. The rest should come from other traffic sources. Here are a few reasons why this is true:
What if the search volume goes down?
You could be doing everything right when it comes to SEO. You continually post excellent content, you onsite SEO is solid, and your traffic has been continually increasing over time. What happens if your search engine suddenly goes down?
The hard fact is, if people aren’t searching for what your company offers, there isn’t a lot more that you can do to drive more unique visitors to your site. When search volume for the entire industry drops, every website in that industry takes a hit.
Think about a company that sells a technology that is new to the market. Search volume will be highest in the early days when people first start learning about this technology. Once a lot of people buy it, the search volume will naturally decrease. When this happens, the company will either need to rely on other forms of traffic if they don’t want to lose revenue.
What if your site incurs a penalty?
Even if you were unknowingly engaging in black hat SEO tactics, your site can still be penalized for your actions. If your website were to incur a penalty tomorrow and your site was penalized, would your business be able to withstand the lost traffic? If 80% of traffic comes from the search engines how long could your website survive?
If you hinged more than 50% of your hopes on search engine traffic, your company will take a serious hit when experiencing such a big drop in traffic. By diversifying your traffic sources you make sure that the loss of one doesn’t cripple your online business. Could your website survive without traffic from the search engines for a few weeks/months while you worked to resolve the penalty? If you rely solely on the search engines for traffic then probably not. This is yet another reason why you shouldn’t depend on just one traffic source.
Good SEO involves every other form of marketing.
If you aren’t supposed to focus solely on SEO to drive traffic to your company’s website, what should you be doing instead? First and foremost, you absolutely should continue to work your complete white hat SEO strategy. However, if that’s where it ends, then you’re missing the bigger picture.
Social media marketing and content marketing, both inextricably tied to SEO, can help you diversify your traffic sources, build your link portfolio, enhance your online brand presence and much more. An SEO campaign that does no involve some amount of social media marketing and content marketing will never be as successful as it could be. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social sites can drive traffic to your site just like the search results pages. A company blog, guest blog post, white paper and other forms of content not only help with your link building, they can also drive traffic.
As long as your strategy contains a diverse mix of traffic sources, your business won’t take a hit. This is the strategy we recommend for all of our full service B2B SEO clients. If your entire online business depends on the search engines for traffic you are at the mercy of the search engines. Think about it this way – If Google and Bing were to close up shop tomorrow and that traffic source dried up, would your website vanish with it?
Categorized in: SEO
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