Expected percentage of traffic from SEO?

[Robert Charlton]

What percentage of traffic should a site expect to be from SEO?

I realize that it's almost impossible to generalize... with all sorts of reasons for variation. Wondering what the range of experience has been.

[Brett_Tabke]

If it runs more than 20% of your visitors, that's into warning sign area. Some sites I've seen live, and most often die by 20%+ from SE's. I've seen wild fluctuations depending entirely on the type of site and the depth of content. The more content - the less dependence on referrals. As you said, it is very hard to generalize. Some sites you have to scrap tooth and nail to get a drip of 100 referrals a day and other sites you do the same amount of work and gush a steady stream 100 fold that.

[Ove]

<If it runs more than 20% of your visitors, that's into warning sign area>

I have a site that is 60+ from SE`s is that a warning?

I try to have atleast 40-50% of visitors from SES is that wrong thinking?

But i also see the total visitors growing just not from SE`S

I also think visitors from SE`S are more important and the othrt ones ( they have search for the unic information) maybe iam wrong

/Ove

[Robert Charlton]

>>If it runs more than 20% of your visitors, that's into warning sign area.<<

Brett - An interesting take on this. Actually, I was wondering about the opposite direction. The site that prompted me to ask the question reports 7% of their traffic from SEO. They're very well linked and very badly optimized; but, between the links and some very lucky directory listings, they rank very well for some main target terms. One of the things I'd be trying to do is to broaden their range of targets to increase search traffic.

So, maybe the question should be, is 7% low enough to be into the warning area in the other direction?

Their content, incidentally, is excellent.

[Robert Charlton]

As I've been thinking about it, the 20% figure concerns me for several reasons....

I've been citing figures in various studies... I'm sure you've seen them... that, next to email, searching is the most popular activity on the web, that 71% of frequent web users most frequently find sites by searching, etc etc. These would suggest that a site might get the majority of its traffic by search... and that site owners might therefore want to spend a substantial chunk of their marketing budgets for SEO.

If we use the 20% max figure, that would suggest that only 20% or so of the marketing budget go to SEO. I realize that this is a lot more than what large corporations might spend... but, with medium sized companies and smaller, given this figure, it might be very hard to justify an expenditure of, say $5K, $10K, or more, for optimizing.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ove, it depends on your definition of "trafic". "uniques" or "page views" makes a difference. I was speaking in terms of pages views. Page views from search engine related vistors will historically be less than someone who visits your site from a bookmark or a TII (<i>Typed It In</I>).

>7% low enough to be into the warning area in the other direction

I don't think so. How were you calculating that? By Total Uniques? eg, if you have 1000 uniques a day and 50 of those were search engine referrals, that would be 5%? Or where you meaning that you have 1000page views a day and 50 search engine referrals?

[Ove]

And i speaking of unics from SE
Ok Thanks

/Ove

[Robert Charlton]

I'm speaking about unique visitors from search engines (and directories) as well.

[Cricket]

One way of looking at it may be this.

If you start a site with Zero traffic and no word of mouth and the first campaign you run to increase awareness of your new site is soley based on SE and DIR traffic, then you could feasibly state that 100% of your traffic is SE based. With your first repeat visitor via a bookmark, this 100% is reduced in proportion to one part of the total visitors sofar - given a period of time.

Unless you class your repeat visitor as SEO based, your overall percentage from the SE's will always (well - hopefully decline), as more and more folk come back via their bookmarks. This of course though!!! (there is always that!!) is also dependent on the way the engines shift their partnerships around, and also - and harder to measure perhaps, your own increase in effort at site promotion on the engines, which may reduce the SE volume if you mess up, or increase it if you do ok.

I run some small affiliate pages which get traffic 100% from engines. And they make a packet sometimes, then in other periods I have to re-adjust (like when I lost excite in DEC). Either way - 100% is always coming from engines. A one stop visit - buy - and gone.

I guess looking at my larger sites, I hope to see not a fixed figure of X%, but a declining curve towards but never reaching 0%. I suspect the curve isnt going to be smooth either!!

Cricket.

[ritualcoffee]

It is difficult to generalize. percentage for SEs really depends on the online behavior of your market. My market - 10-12% from search engines.

This number has risen from 6% when I started SEO.

I would suggest investigating your market's behavior.