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The Case for Long-term SEO
January 10, 2006
A few weeks ago, Doug posted about long term SEO and the benefits to companies that are committed to it.
Colin Christofferson of Optimize the Enterprise responded:
One thing that we struggle with here is trying to understand if we are staying "ahead of the curve." Essentially, if we did nothing else, search traffic to our site would grow simply because the web and search are growing. We want to know if we are outpacing that, and it is often difficult to report on.
He followed up with his own post that furthered the question:
I want to be able to measure my impact relative to the web as a whole. Search referral growth of 30% year-over-year seems great, unless the growth of search usage has jumped by 70% web-wide! It is important that we actually gain new mind and market share through search.
All very good points, worthy of some follow-up. Honestly addressing Colin's comments forces us to ask a few important questions:
- What is the growth rate of the internet overall, and of search engine use in particular?
- If I optimized a site and did absolutely nothing afterward, wouldn't I achieve natural growth on pace with the growth of the internet and search engine usage?
- How do we tell if our growth is outpacing our industry's?
To answer the questions, we need to look at some statistics. Wherever possible, I used the range of 2000-2005 as the comparison points.
- From 2000-2005, worldwide internet "usage" grew about 170%. (As you can imagine, the numbers vary wildly by continent, but I want to work with averages.)
- In 2000, search engines were responsible for about 7% of site referrals.
- Today, the average percentage of search-based traffic is quite difficult to determine. Our clients run the gamut, from about 15% to over 80%, depending on their vertical market and additional on- and offline marketing efforts. (Note: If 100% of your traffic comes from search engines month after month, you have a problem, and you ought to know why.)
So Colin's thoughts are panning out. Year over year, we have steady increase in the percentage of each country's population that uses the internet. On top of that, a greater and greater percentage of that user base turns to search each year to find what they're looking for.
So even if you stop optimizing, should your search traffic grow at a rate similar to the pace of the Internet, and more accurately, at the rate of search engine use? In a vacuum, perhaps. But there's one more important number we need to look at:
- Based on domain registrations (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and edu), the number of actual web sites from 2000-2005 increased by about 364% (roughly 10M to 46M domains). So while many more users are out there, and many more of them are using search to find sites, the sheer number of sites competing for those eyes has increased greatly too.
(The standard disclaimers apply: Many of those are probably parked. Many are garbage sites. Etc. But you see where I'm going.)
Sites like Apple will never have trouble with traffic growth for queries like [ipod]. But few of us, including what we consider some big, big names, have a computational grip on our markets (and our resellers) like Apple does. So that leaves the "rest of us." How do we know if we're out performing our industry? Here are some possible ways.
- Watch your list of referring keywords. The total number of referring phrases should grow each month. But don't expect this to happen unless you focus on creating new content regularly, and you ensure that it's easily crawled and indexed. If your traffic grows with the "same old" set of keywords each month, that's probably a sign of simply rising with the tide of new users.
- Watch the sites within your industry. Are your competitors showing up on more and more results pages? Are there "new kids on the block" that seem to have come out of nowhere who are taking some of your traffic, yet you still see growth? Chances are you need to work harder.
- I've never been totally convinced that the Alexa toolbar is accurate for monitoring one site's traffic, but I think it can be fairly useful for watching the relative growth of a group of sites. How have you fared against your top five competitors over the last 6 months?
To test this global thesis fairly, we'd need to compare two identical sites - one that stays static, and one that regularly adds content, pursues relevant links, and breaks down crawling obstacles. Anything you do to your site ideally knocks you out of the first group, so Colin is right - it's very difficult to report on.
To all this, I should add that in some markets, you shouldn't even expect industry-average growth to continue of you stop optimizing. We see plenty of sites that were kings and queens of their respective counties after optimizing a few years ago, who have seen raw search numbers steadily decline since. They're not even staying flat. And that's happening in more and more verticals all the time.
So stay on top of your SEO game. People are still coming online and searching in numbers too great to ignore, and it's up to you to make sure your growth outpaces theirs.
And thanks, Colin, for thought-provoking questions.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at January 10, 2006 11:04 PM
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