How Valuable is the Traffic?
Posted On: 2010-05-17
Well that was a very pleasant weekend. We didn't do much that was all that exciting but we still had a great time. We shopped ... we spent time with friends ... we cooked ... we did some family things too and now we're facing a crazy week feeling a whole lot more refreshed than we usually do.
So how was your weekend and how are you feeling now as you face another week? If you spent the weekend doing nothing but work then I really do feel sorry for you. The more time you spend sitting in front of the computer the more stale you become ... the more tired you become and the more removed from reality you become.
Yes I know I talk a lot about the need to get away from your computer and take time out ... and I know that doing that can be very hard ... but despite all the deadlines for gallery submissions and the need to get your free sites submitted you need time out and if you don't take it you won't last long in this industry.
Sure you may make some serious money but your quality of life will be basically crap and you'll burn out quickly. So learn to take some time out and stick around for the long-haul.
It seems to have been quite a while since we talked about search engines so maybe it's time to share a few of our thoughts and ideas. I'm know for a fact that there are plenty of search engine specialists out there who are much more knowledgeable than either Steve or me so take what I say with some level of skepticism and do your own testing to see if what works for us will also work as just as well for you.
Who sends the most productive traffic?
Now that's a question that adult webmasters should continually be asking themselves because there is a cost in the time and/or money that we spend on trying to rank well in the search engines and it's important to know the answer so that we don't waste our time and our money.
So who does send the most productive traffic? Of course if you rank well in Google then you are going to get a lot of traffic to your websites but how many of those visitors actually convert into money in your pocket?
On the other hand we know that Bing doesn't send as much traffic as Google does but is the traffic you get from Bing more likely to produce more money?
Well that's really only a question that you can answer for yourself because everyone's experience can be quite different but what we're seeing for the traffic that Google and Bing send to the websites of some of our mainstream clients is quite interesting.
It seems that in some verticals the traffic that comes from Bing is much more focused. For one client who has a real estate related site the visitors from Bing spend longer on the site ... they look at a lot more of the site ... and the bounce rate is a whole lot less too.
Traffic from Google to the same site on the other hand is more likely to leave almost as soon as they arrive and those that do stay spend a lot less time on the site and look at fewer pages.
Something else that we have noticed with Bing is how easy it was to change the page that Bing listed in their search results for an important term. When Steve went to look at how Bing was listing a particular site for an important term he found that Bing was listing a less-important internal page for that term.
While Bing clearly considered that the page they were listing was the most important page on the site for that term it was fairly obvious to just about every human who viewed the search results that the page Bing listed wasn't all that important at all. So even though Bing had the site listed on the first page of the search results the number of people who actually clicked through to the site was relatively small.
To try and correct that situation Steve went to the index page of the site and tweaked the text on the page to include a few more instances of the search term that was important to the site. He made no changes at all to the page that Bing was listing in their search results.
Five days later the site was still listed on the first page of Bing's search results for that important term but it was the index page that was listed and not the less important internal page. Traffic to the site from Bing was also up a few percentage points so the results certainly appear positive after just a small amount of work and a few days of waiting to see what might happen.
And while you stop and think about that I'm off to try and get a head-start on this crazy week we're facing.