Traffic Sources Explained In Detail

It is commonly thought that search engine traffic is very high quality and easy to monetize. This is because the searchers are looking for something specific, as I outlined in this article about types of blog content. But does that mean it means your blog is more valuable if most of your visitors come from search engines or is a more diverse mix of traffic better? Search engine traffic generally is one of the most stable types of traffic and so at first glance a single stable source is surely better than multiple sources of varying quality, because more money will be made from the site with a higher percentage of quality traffic. Unfortunately it is not that simple.

From A Buyers Point Of View

Lets say you are looking to invest and buy a blog that receives 1000 unique visitors per month, which is a pretty small amount.

Option 1
90% of those 1000 visitors find their way to the site via the search engines and are not repeat visitors.

Option 2
30% of the traffic is from search engines, 50% are from referring sites and 20% are repeat visitors.

These traffic differences tell you a massive amount about the quality of the site and how much time it will take to maintain. Humans are the best judge of content quality (quality meaning useful/informative/entertaining) which means it is likely the second site which has a community of repeat visitors is of higher quality. A site with a community also has potential for faster growth, be it virally from the visitors spreading the word or from the them providing links to it. However, a community takes resources to manage and with humans being the best judge, if you mess up and fail to keep providing content that 20% may shrink rapidly to 0% and that’s not because the other traffic sources increased!

With option 1 what comes to mind is a more “passive income site”, which in some cases is an MFA (made-for-adsense) site. The site sits in the search engines and the owner occasionally adds content to it at too slower rate for a community to build up, but saves resources by adding content less regularly.

Which Set Of Traffic Sources Is Worth The Most?

Positives For High Search Traffic:
Some of these are direct advantages, others are indirect.

• Traffic is highly targeted and as a result highly monetizable
• Needs less fresh content than a site with a community
• Search engines take longer to react than people, even if when they do act it can be very sudden. If the traffic has been stable for 3 months there is little reason to believe it is about to be lowered.

The big disadvantage for a site with lots of high quality search engine traffic and little other traffic is that if the site is penalized by the search engines the traffic is massively reduced. There is no diversity.

Positives For Mixed Traffic Sources

• Overall traffic is more stable. The traffic is more likely to decrease a small amount but less likely to be completely reduced.
• Is a sign of a site that is kept up-to-date. Often on a dead Website or blog all the traffic sources dry up apart from some of the search traffic.
• Quicker to grow traffic. Search engine traffic takes time to accumulate, if a site is receiving a sizable percentage of traffic from referring sites that percentage is more likely to be able to increase more quickly.
• Community could create content themselves with the right model

The big disadvantage for having a mix of traffic sources which vary in quality is that the traffic is not as well targeted and so not as profitable. This isn’t because of the mix of traffic, but because there are few other traffic sources that match up to the profitability of search traffic.

Size Matters

To take it to the next level, the budget and overall plan of a buyer makes a big difference. If I were buying a site with just 1000 visitors per month, its purpose in the owners web business would be to be part of a passive income network, where the low cost of maintenance would be a big factor which puts the high search trafficked site in the lead. Having a large number of small sites in a passive income network negates the riskiness of having most of the traffic coming from just one source.

However, for a larger site with perhaps 10,000 monthly unique visitors per month (at the very least) I would be looking for a very high quality site with a community. Not only for the money but if I was going to spend large amounts of my time working on that site it would need to be enjoyable and community sites are much more fun! Also on a larger site it is much easier to take advantage of the viral aspect, because there may already be enough evangelistic repeat visitors to spread the sites popularity across the net with little paid promotion.

Conclusion

This is somewhat theoretical, but for a small site where the plan is to have lots of them then sites with high search engine traffic are a good choice. For a larger site repeat visitors and referring sites is a positive attribute.

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