The Unattractive Truth About The Search Traffic For Your Blog

Last week I had not checked Twitter to my Google Reader in a month. Well, turns out I am not alone.

Within minutes, I started getting back tweets from others saying they rarely check their feed more. Instead, people find content from other sources, including:

Twitter
Facebook
Paper.li
e-mail subscriptions
applications (some drawn in RSS feeds, but others were recommendation engines)

The decrease in RSS?

I was struck by how things have changed a lot in the last two or three years.

It was not long ago that bloggers are promoting your RSS feeds over all other methods of subscribing to their blogs. Email was dead and RSS would be the number one way people connect with you.

RSS is to continue to drive traffic (at least my Feedburner statistics seem to indicate that), but when I look at my own stats to see that people are coming to my sites, the percentage of those coming from RSS / Feedburner seems to be in the fall. The decline is slight, but compared to steady increases I saw a few years ago, has been reduced (as a percentage of total traffic) for me at least.

Fluctuations in traffic from social networks

What I noticed is that some of the traffic sources vary greatly from year to year.

For example, different social media sites have been quite inconsistent. Some months, Twitter can be good, but other months may be down. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and other social media sites have given the influx of large amount of traffic at times, other months are very low.

Some of the traffic levels on the types of content you're writing, but in other cases, it is more to do with the increase or decrease from the same sites (eg, Digg seems to have suffered a lot lately).

In general, I have seen traffic levels increase Twitter and Facebook, but this has varied from month to month, and despite some effort in building my network, the percentage of my total traffic coming from the media media has been relatively small (less than 10%).

Steady growth in ...

RSS This seems to be in decline (for me) and social media traffic has fluctuated, but ... total traffic has continued to grow.

So what are you doing? Is there any way sexy new traffic I've been focusing on?

I'm afraid not. In any event, the sources of traffic I'm seeing constant growth have been a little, well, retro. There are two:

E-mail. I keep seeing people talk about how they are giving up on email, which is a technology that is dying, but I see no. Perhaps those who are in the forefront are giving, but "normal" certainly are not. Is to increase traffic to my sites through newsletters, and still doing conversions with respect to sales.
Search engines. Regularly informed is that search engines are under the threat of social media, more and more people use social networking sites to search and find content to read. I have no doubt that there is some truth in that, but search engines are not dead. Again, "normal" people still head to Google to find content. I have not put a lot of time on SEO or traffic especially designed for searches, but a side effect of adding daily content on a blog is that naturally accumulate pages indexed by search engines , so the search traffic naturally grow.

Conclusions

In no way am I suggesting that social media is not worth your time and effort, or you must kill their RSS feeds and focus exclusively on e-mail or SEO. These observations are mine, my four blogs, and may not be typical.

I think the key takeaways for me are:

To analyze its own traffic and where it comes from. I now make this analysis has challenged me to think about how much time and energy they put on social media, and if you really pay as much as if he had made other choices for my focus!

Do not throw all their efforts on the new single, "sexy" marketing forms (such as social media). They have incredible potential, but do not throw the baby with the bath water.

Note that the average Internet user does not always know and use new technologies such as expert bloggers in social media that you and me. Will vary from place to place, but good email and search engines may be good places to focus your efforts!

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization