I was analysing my traffic the other day and began to ponder. Where does the majority of your traffic come from? What's the split between search engines, advertising, referrals etc? In terms of return on investment, which source brings you the most traffic for the least effort? For me, search engines take an awful lot of time in terms of SEO, but the majority of my traffic comes from other sources.
what are these sources? I think at the end of the day, we want sites that can run themselves and to get that kind of traffic i think serps need to be pretty good.
Your site, whichever it is, is different from other sites. Some sites work better with traditional forms of advertisement and word of mouth, others couldn't survive without search engines. I have some sites that I've spent 0 time on SEO because I get ample business without, and some sites that would miserably fail if I didn't devote a lot of time to it.
JoshuaGross is right, it really depends on the market you are in... the more competive ones you will never survive without lots of work on SEO and some of the less competitive fields you have to do very little in terms of SEO. I still think that organic search engine traffic is the key to true success of any business.
But would you also agree that you are constantly having to tweak that SEO in order to stay on top of the SERPs and PR?
It could be said like that, especially if you target more competitive niche. But if you have success with SEO in first place, then you shouldnt feel a pain to work for more success.
So the majority of everyone's traffic comes from search engines? I agree that it does depend on the sort of site you have. Article sites will depend heavily on search traffic, whereas a ringtone site may not.
As rightly put by people it depends on target users. If your target users are less or if you can reach to your target audience through other means like mass emails etc. that is good . Your reach is then confined to database ur having , but if that is what u want , u don't need to have a seo. SEO let me tell you is a long term investment where the target audience is large and can fetch good results over a long period of time
My site is regularly crawled by a number of search engines but the majority of hits come from google Image search. I really don't like the Google image hits much because most people coming to my site that way just snag the image they are after and then leave without looking at the rest of the content.
The majority of my visitors also come from search-engines. I don't spend too much time tweaking my SEO though. I think building content is more effective. I have worked on promoting my website during the past few months, but even before that the majority of my traffic came from search-engines.
It certainly would be well worth the experimentation. Creating two sites on with similar topical content, working the SEO on the one, and creating outstanding content and utilizing other online marketing tools for the other to see which makes more money.
Organic search engine traffic maybe a lot of work for some one not knowing what they are doing and using trial & Error, but after that the traffic is always coming in day after day. What’s wrong with that?