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How do you know if you've hit a saturation point (or is there even such a thing) in the search engines for SERPs for a particular web site?
If you have many specific on target keywords directly replated to your site, what's a reasonable threshold for a measure of SERP success and or saturation? 50% in top 10? 75% in top 10? 100% in top 10 (has ANYONE ever)?
I know I could work on a couple of keywords that seem to have issues moving higher, but at what point does it become meaningless that the amount of work exceeds the ROI?
Basically, when do you know that you're getting about as much traffic as you'll ever get and stop worrying about jockeying for yet more position?
Sigh.
Assuming there isn't a flurry of media attention on your topic, there may only ever be a certain proportion of interest in it. So you need to find the percentage of surfers who are into small blue widgets, or whatever, and multiply that by the total surfing population. Then figure out how many times the average surfer visits sites, and adjust that up or down for your target audience.
So some of those figures can be discovered if you know where to ask (or can pay), but there's also a bit of guesswork involved. For popular search terms something like Overture's search suggestion can help, as can the Lycos 50 and Google's Zeitgeist. Neilsen's Netratings may be useful for finding surfer statistics such as average pageviews and broadband coverage.
With no prior signifant SEO work on the site it was getting about 5,000 visitors a day all on it's own and ranked tops against it's competition. Then I did a massive SEO optimization about 6 months ago which quickly escalated the site to 11,000 visitors a day and the traffic seems very stable at that level. None of my additional optimization attempts have caused any significant fluctuation up or down, it's just holding steady.
I'm also tracking about 200 keywords for this site, about 50% are in top 10, about 25% more are in top 20, the remaining 25% float in the top 50. No matter what I do, certain keywords seem to hit a threshold that they won't move beyond.
Which is why, after a couple of months of making further adjustments and everything seeming to stay status quo, I came to the conclusion I hit my traffic plateau. That the search engines are locked up by other sites on a couple of critical keywords short of ever breaking that lock, it's as good as it gets. I was hoping to push the site to 20K+ visitors a day but at this point it's starting to look like it's not possible short of paying for the traffic.
Comments?
I have seen this.
There appears to now be a default level of traffic when you have fully optimised your site.
This varies by industry and site type, but it does seem to level off after a time.
There are a couple of main reasons for this, I think.
1. The main search engines are very static, Google, Yahoo,MSN + some others = 100%
2. Linking is very out of fashion - increases/decreases from linking just don't happen anymore.
3. The free has gone - whether its Adwords, Adsense, Aff marketing, etc - everything is paid for.
What can you do
1. Paid for services - I am getting rid of most of my free services, people seem to prefer to pay for a service (weird?)
2. Content - In 1999 the mantra was content will win out, they were wrong, but in 2005 unique content does look like the future.
This probably hasn't answered your question, but its my contribution. :)
dregs33
after a couple of months of making further adjustments and everything seeming to stay status quo
The word adjustments leads me to believe that when you say SEO, you mean on-page optimization. If this is the case, then there's deffinitely a plateau to on-page changes and you can hit it relatively quickly.
But there's always plenty of room to grow in terms of new content, link campaigns and other off-page techniques.
That being said, there is/are, if not a plateau, significantly diminishing returns for off page as well.
