When you look at your website statistics, are you concerned that you are reliant on one particular traffic source? There is a hangover from the increasing awareness of SEO that Google has already taken care of with it’s crushing Panda update. Simply put, you could be limiting your search potential by being too dependent on one traffic source – and that could even be your search engine marketing. By penalising the widespread farming of traffic from its search results pages, Google continues to reward the big brands. However I view this positively. Firstly, by widening your traffic sources you reduce risk if you were to have a Google nightmare by unintentionally triggering a penalty. Secondly, think about the links your SEO team / agency are seeking. If you were reliant on these links to produce quality traffic, would you place those links all over again? I raise this because not everyone can find a successful direct response model with marketing activity such as pay-per-click advertising or display, certainly small businesses sometimes lack the spending power to get the right CPCs or CPM.
I was taught a few years ago to aim for the ideal traffic mix of 33% brand (direct entry), 33% paid and 33% organic. However if you are a small business that don’t have the pockets for brand building or paid search then my experience is that white hat SEO is the way forward, especially for niche products or services. You should see some external sites that link to you in your top 20 visitor referrers. For this type of model, I would say worry less about the proportions between the referrers as Google also analyses traffic quality. If you are a small business in an online niche space, then you will be predominantly interested in the high converting keywords as opposed to the big ‘hollywood’ keyword search terms. Also see how you’re doing on Bing.com and watch out for any nuances between this Bing and Google.
Having a healthy digital marketing mix is an important discipline and now pretty much mandatory, so start researching and widen your voice online. Take a look at your competitor’s traffic sources by using Alexa or SEM Rush – you might find a trick that you could also be cashing in on.