5 Ways of Rethinking Your Referral Traffic

So you have a site, now what? Well, one of the first things you need to do is drive traffic to it, but how? What if you have a site with traffic, what can you do to better drive users to your pages?

In the past we could rely on Google organic and paid to generate most of our site traffic, but not anymore. While organic is still your highest-quality traffic, what if it goes away overnight? And while paid is helpful in generating specific conversions around keyword searches, in the end you are often just renting those visitors. So if you want to stay relevant today, we need to rethink our concepts of referral traffic as it looks much different today than it did even one or two years ago.

Here are five tips on creating a more perfect referral traffic profile and avoiding mistakes that could cause you pain.

1. Reliance on Social Media

Often we see sites that get a lot of their traffic from social media. If your site is one of those sites, congratulations - that is not the easiest code to crack. You have done good things.

Social traffic is a positive signal. It means your site is being shared and talked about. It means your site has relevancy to your user base. However, it is imperfect traffic and a strategy that is unsustainable on its own. Why is this?

First, if you are relying too heavily on your social media presence for traffic and the site you are getting that traffic from decides to change a factor that takes away that traffic, you have little recourse. There is really nothing you can do. Well, you can pay, but that requires more money and time, which following a loss of large amounts of traffic, you might now have to invest.

Second, unlike organic visitors, social media users are typically "one and done." They see something they like, they head in, they read, they head out.

While this can be an excellent method for long-term brand building, it is not your best traffic source for in-depth or lengthy visitor engagement. Some will like what they see and come back, but not as many when they find you by other efforts.

So while there is nothing wrong with this as a part of your comprehensive plan, you want to be careful of relying on social media at the expense of more relevant and engaged traffic such as organic search. In addition, if these sources suffer declines, you can more readily address the issues on other channels than you can with social.

Mostly, just make sure you are not ignoring other avenues for bringing users in to the site.

2. Reliance on Google Organic

Just as you can be overly reliant on social media, you can also be too reliant on Google organic. While organic search is your best traffic referrer in terms of engagement, site stickiness, and returning visits, if you accidentally trigger an algorithm negatively and it takes a slap at your site, well you might wake up with a cliff dive on your analytics and a sunken feeling in your stomach.

While it is very important to spend a lot of your time cultivating your organic visits, it is not a safe bet to rely on Google for that traffic alone. The most important thing you can do is diversify your traffic and find multiple generative and reliable sources.

3. Reliance on Google and Facebook

Many sites rely on these two sources are their primary traffic-drivers. Be careful if these are the only two. Don’t rely so much on Facebook or organic SEO that you forget to continue to diversify your traffic profile. Your traffic referrals are a delicate balance of visits from paid, organic, social, syndication, etc.

The most important thing you can do in this day of Google is to make sure you have built up as many positive traffic sources as make sense for your business. This way if you lose in Google or Facebook today, you can start cranking up the traffic in other areas tomorrow.

4. Organic Is Still King

Organic traffic is not just Google, though we typically think of that first. It can also be Bing, Duck Duck Go, and Yahoo, or even a contest or event. Whatever your organic source, the users are likely to be more engaged and user intent is typically going to be more aligned with your site content. While Google organic should and will be the largest organic referrer, building up your alternative referral sources will help protect you from getting hit in one area or another.

5. Watch Out for the Bots

Semalt, Buttons-For-Websites, and other bots visit your site and show up in your analytics. These referrals are not real humans, but bots meant to send traffic back to its owner by you clicking on the referrals in your analytics. There is no reason to support this traffic and there is no reason to not get rid of it. There are several methods for doing this, however Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools has the most comprehensive post explaining the issue and how to get rid of it.

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3 Signs Your SEO Campaign Is Dying – and How to Fix It

SEO is a long-term strategy to gain more visibility and more traffic for your online brand, but accurately measuring the effectiveness of that strategy can be challenging. Many of the benefits of SEO, such as increased brand visibility, are qualitative and therefore hard to measure, and even objective metrics like inbound traffic can be subject to random variation and become difficult to interpret.

After you’ve maintained an SEO strategy for more than a few months, however, you should have enough information to form meaningful conclusions from your data. Most importantly, you’ll be able to check in regularly to see if there are any red flags that signal something is wrong with your campaign. These red flags can be hard to spot initially, but if you know what to look for, you should have no problem detecting them and taking corrective action immediately.

1. A Sharp Drop in Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is a metric referring to the number of people who found your site through search engines, and it’s one of the best metrics we have to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign. To measure your organic traffic, log into Google Analytics and click on "Acquisitions." Here, you’ll see a breakdown of how many visits your site received from organic sources, referrals, social media, and direct visits.

You can click into the organic visits to gain some extra details on the sources of your organic traffic, but the main number is the one we’re most concerned with. Keep an eye on it on a monthly — if not weekly — basis. While you should be seeing some long-term growth patterns, what you really want to look for is any sharp drop. For example, if you’re used to seeing 1,000 hits a week and that inexplicably drops to 200, you might have a major problem on your hands.

2. Stagnant Growth or Decline for More Than Two Months

Like I mentioned, the goal here is to see long-term growth. If you check back on a consistent basis, month after month, you should see an overall pattern toward increased traffic. That being said, organic search behavior is anything but predictable, and random factors beyond your or Google’s control could artificially leave you with a tough month or a brief stagnation. If you notice one month in particular doesn’t result in growth, don’t panic.

However, if your campaign remains stagnant for two months or more, you might have a serious problem. What you want to see is steady, measurable growth in organic visits — if you’re hovering around the same figures or if you start to see a decline, consider it a red flag. There are instances where multiple months of consistent traffic don’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is failing, but you don’t want to take the gamble by keeping things the same for another month.

3. A Sharp Drop in Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings aren’t nearly as important as they used to be. There was a time when keywords meant everything to SEO, and getting one to rank highly meant you had found success. Today,keywords are less pivotal; since Google deciphers user queries based on intent, rather than keyword phrases, your ranks are much more fluid. It’s far more important to have relevant, quality content than it is to have content based around certain keywords.

However, your rankings are still a valuable metric to measure because they can indicate the health of your campaign. Keep a handful of keywords as your targets to measure, and check your ranking on them every once in a while (once a month for most campaigns, or once a week for more aggressive campaigns). If you notice your rankings falling on a majority of those keywords, this is a red flag for your campaign.

Tracking Down the Culprit

Let’s imagine that you’ve found one of these red flags. What does that mean for your campaign? It means something is off in your strategy, and it’s interfering with your ability to increase your search visibility. It can be difficult to track down the exact cause of this downturn, especially since it could be multiple factors working together, but it’s important to identify the source.

Over-Optimized Content

Are you writing your content with one or a handful of keywords at the forefront? Are you recycling content or using old topics just so you can push more content on your site? If so, you could be over-optimizing, which could be leading to lower ranks. Write fresh, original content on new topics on a regular basis instead.

Poor Link-Building Strategy

Bad link-building tactics are the most common culprit of poor SEO campaign performance. Google’s Penguin algorithm update was launched to penalize such schemes as buying links, building too many links, and building links on irrelevant or low-authority websites. Instead of participating in schemes to manipulate your way up the rankings, try to earn your links through publishing high-quality content and relationship building.

Bad or Missing Reviews

Today’s local search incorporates information from your business all over the Web. If your information is missing from important local directory sites (like Yelp or TripAdvisor), or if you seem to be getting lots of bad reviews, your ranks and search visibility could tank.

Missing Peripheral Elements

Neglecting another important tactic or platform in your SEO campaign can also lead to poor performance. For example, if you don’t use social media or if you aren’t incorporating guest blogging, your results could suffer.

Once you’ve discovered a red flag that your SEO campaign is in trouble, it’s important to take corrective action as soon as possible. Identifying the source is only the first step of the process; you’ll have to work for days or weeks to repair the damage left in the wake of your flawed strategy or one-time mistake. The best course of action is to maintain a solid, high-quality SEO strategy to begin with; as long as you’re adhering to Google’s best practices and working with user experience as your main priority, you shouldn’t ever expect to see one of these red flags.

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More Than 80% of HTTPS URLs Display as HTTP in Google

According to a recent small-scale analysis, more than 80 percent of HTTPS URLs are not showing up in Google's search results, said Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analysts at Google, in a post on Google+ this morning.

Despite being eligible for indexing - many of the HTTPS URLs don't have any crawl issues and don't have a noindex - these links are being displayed as HTTP URLs because of webmaster configuration.

"[The URLs] can't become canonical because website owners don't tell us about them. They use the HTTP variant in their sitemap files, in the rel-canonical and rel-alternate-hreflang elements, even though the HTTPs version works mighty fine," Illyes wrote.

If a site supports HTTPS - to which Google gave a ranking benefit back in August - Illyes recommends using them.

Have you told Google about your HTTPS URLs?

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