Healthy percentage of sales from Google referrals?

[Artful]

My friend's webhosting company gets about 43% of all its sales originating from Google. 53% come from URL type-ins or untraceable sources. 43% seems a little high for comfort to me. They have been around for about 10 years however and they have done very little SEO in the past. What is usual in this area? Are they at risk of a big fallout or does Google reward un-SEOd, old sites well?

[edited by: Artful at 12:09 pm (utc) on April 9, 2008]

[tedster]

Any time you concentrate anything in one spot, you're at risk. Given Google's dominance as a source of traffic, it sounds like your friend's business is rather well diversified.

[Oliver Henniges]

> it sounds like your friend's business is rather well diversified.

Yepp, I'd second that. Here in central Europe google seems to have a market share of 80-90% of all search-engine-based traffic, for some sites even more than 90%. After our breakthrough in exommerce our sales resembled this figure.

For quite some time now I see stagnation in our visitor-statistics, or only minimal growth. But the percentage of customers ordering for a second (third, fourth..) time and coming in via bookmarks or search for URL is constantly rising. I'd be very happy if one day I'll have such a stable socket of 50% independent of google.

[Artful]

Thanks for your replies. That's interesting. Actually that 53% is of new sales and does not include recurring sales so it is even safer than that. Still, I am surprised people seem to think this is a healthy percentage of new sales outside of Google. I didn't realise online businesses were this dependent on Google these days. That's a little alarming.

Any other statistics or anecdotal evidence on what's typical as a percentage of non-SE sales?

[conor]

It all depends on the mix - based on Google domainace of seach ( 67% @ last count ) 53% is beating the mix = all good!