Search Driving More Traffic To Your Site
When evaluating the general health of your site, one of the first areas to review is your acquisition strategy ... to understand how people are arriving at your front-door?
I use the term "people" rather than "user", "customer" or "visitor", because it's important to remember these are more than referral stats -- they're warm, breathing humans that choose to visit your site. And they generally fall into three groups:
- People who know you -- (direct traffic)
- People who were recommended to you or your content -- (referral traffic)
- People who searched for you or your content -- (search traffic)
You could add other categories for people driven by ad campaigns or e-mail marketing -- but the above three are the biggies, especially for media sites.
Now, according to a KissMetrics post, which is based on Google Analytics data, of those three acquisition sources, search continues to grow. As the choices and access points for content evolve and expand -- search remains the quickest, simplest way to navigate most information inquiries on the web and is your best means to introduce yourself to new "people".
The 2011 Web Analytics Review infographic also notes an overall drop in Pages per Visit, Time on Site and Referrals from other sites. As people's attention continues to splinter and referrals from other sources drop, search becomes an even more attractive option to reach folks short on time, but hungry for information.
