I ran a poll that started a few weeks ago asking my blog readers what their site's leading source of traffic was. Check out the results: Poll Results: 36% Say Most Of Their Traffic Come From Search Engines
I don't understand the point of the poll, especially with the small sample size. If your goal is to inform people that referrals are better than search engine traffic, why not just make a post on it?
I'm glad most of my traffic does not come from SEs ... I could be just one algo change away from having no visitors.
So, if they only get a few hundred hits a day to begin with, if that.... No offense, cousin, but so what?
For those that heavily rely on SE's for traffic, you better find a new way to get some visitors! You never know, Google might penalize you from their index for no stupid reason. Anyways, there are many other ways that actually bring more traffic than Google (and other SE's). By the way, don't forget to leave a comment on the post!
As long as you are doing nothing wrong, you do not have to worry about SE. Instead worry about new competitors entering the market. Unfortunately Blogging has a low barrier to entry.
I would agree that depending too much on search engine traffic will not be a good choice for the reasons pointed out by Sly. However, it is the best source of passive traffic once you get a good ranking for good keywords.
Hi, I have registered my domain approx 10 month back. In starting age, I was not getting traffic at all up to 3 months but later I am getting decent traffic. I am getting more traffic (approx. 55-60%) from search engine and approx 10-15% are from community website since I participate in those regularly. I blogs regularly. All these above was specific to my only domain. but as I have seen some reports which says almost 40 to 60% traffics comes from search engine. Some times it may be approx 80%. You need to keep Search engine in prority list while targeting for your visitors. It takes time to getting traffic from search engine but search engine traffic is worth since you need not to pay any charges to getting traffic once your site is well optimized.
Yes, that's true. But imagine if Google never even existed. Or for no reason at all, they have removed your site from their index. What are you going to do now? Unless you have another reliable source of traffic, your online business will not succeed.
Yes, I have to agree with you. I have a website that gets about 30,000 visitors a month from search engines, one in particular and I was very dependent on that income. Then one day I lost about half of my rankings. The lesson I learnt was not to be too dependent on one source of traffic. You need at least 5 sources of high quality traffic to build a solid business. If something happens to one you do not care.