Diversify Your Website Traffic Sources

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in Inbound Marketing

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 incredibly important for online success, it is 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. Here are a few reasons why:

What if the search volume goes down?
If people aren’t searching for your products, there isn’t a lot you can do to drive more unique visitors to your site. When search volume for the entire industry drops, maybe because of seasonality, every website takes a hit. Think about a company that sells snow blowers; how many people are actively looking to purchase a snow blower in May or June? The search volume might not even be half of what it normally is come November, or after the first big storm of the winter season. During those summer months, the snow blower company has to rely on other marketing sources to drive traffic to their website, simply because the searchers aren’t there to reach. If you don’t have those other traffic sources in place when the search volume drops your company is essentially invisible.

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? 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.

Good SEO involves every other form of marketing.
If your SEO campaign is only focusing on driving more traffic from the search engines then you are 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.

If your entire online business depends on the search engines for traffic you are at the mercy of the search engines. If Google and Bing were to close up shop tomorrow and that traffic source dried up, would your website vanish with it?