what % of total traffic is from SEs

[oilman]

I was just curious what kind of traffic number people use when determing if they are getting good traffic from SEs. I've heard that if you can get anywhere from 5% to 25% of your total traffic from SEs you are doing pretty well.

My goal has never been a specific number. It's more like 'just get more SE referals than las month'.

Any input?

[rcjordan]

Oil, I have one large site that was launched last November that depended on SE's for 99 percent of its traffic. It inherited a base of 300 impressions per day at launch (the site had existed prior in a very rough, much narrower format) and it is now cracking 8,000 per day regularly. As the site has gained favor with users and other significant sites have deep-linked to it, SE's now generate something like 70%. This site was built with the intent to garner all or most of its traffic from the SE's.

In general (on the above site and its older sister sites as well), I expect 60 percent of my traffic to come from SE's.

[squeezeplay]

Tough question if you have repeat visitors who first found your site thru a SE but then bookmarked it. The subsequent visits will never show up as a SE referral but that's how they found you to begin with. So, is your 60% raw referrals or a factored %? Or do you have a site that does not see many repeat visitors?

[rcjordan]

>Tough question
All good points. Actually, it's even tougher. In some of the aforementioned sister sites, I own killer domain names that are essentially "keyword.com" -the number of visitors that just sit down at the keyboard and type in the url on a guess is significant. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it might even be 10% or more.

>is your 60% raw referrals
60% would be my target for raw referrals. Like Oilman, I don't really end up fixated on a percentage, you read the numbers, you read the referrals, you make a few live sacrifices and then start fixing what's not working out as well as you first thought it would. In some ways, my percentage calculation belong under "business plans" because it's when I'm in the earliest phases of developing a site that I'm thinking most about this. As in the site mentioned in the above post, I sat down with the goal of launching a site using the search engines as the vehicle.

[rcjordan]

>Or do you have a site that does not see many repeat visitors?
I didn't see this question at first.

The new site mentioned above doesn't yet have too many repeat visitors. It is a "utility" site that is meant to be found, used, and -hopefully- bookmarked. Because it is just now working its way onto the web, it hasn't had time to establish a repeat user base, though signs on that are encouraging.

My older sites, dating to 1995, have a good repeat trade, and that's one of the reasons I "factored" their SE referral rate down to 60%. I should mention that all of my sites deal with travel, and given the competition in that sector, I can't expect too much from repeats. I figure that I have to battle for them in the SE's for nearly every visit.