search engine optimisation

Search Traffic Refers More Visitors Than Social Media in 2017

February 26, 2018 By Dan Thornton

Reports of the demise of search engine optimisation, and the dominance of social media, will need to be updated as search traffic sent more visitors to websites than social in 2017.

The figures come from a variety of sources. Shareaholic put Search at 34.8% of site visits compared to social at 25.6% in 2017, which puts Search as the biggest source of traffic for the first time since 2014. Meanwhile Chartbeat has consistently had Search ahead, but referrals grew since August 2017. Parse.ly also confirmed the rise for search and drop for social media.

Search Traffic Refers More Visitors Than Social Media in 2017

What is changing to search and social traffic?

Social Media platforms have come under criticism for their handling of fake news, spam content and clickbait. And as the largest of the networks, Facebook has come under particular scrutiny. So as a result, the most recent changes to the Facebook newsfeed have attempted to boost trusted sources and demote the rest.

At the same time, the efforts by Google to improve mobile search access, particularly around Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), have been driving a growth in search volume and traffic, while desktop activity remains largely the same.

What to do for your business?

The ‘battle’ between Search and Social for biggest source of website traffic is largely a pointless one. Regardless of which is marginally bigger, you really want to be using both to the best of your ability.

Search remains not only a large source of traffic, but one which converts to action well. Because if you’re optimising for the right searches and content, you’ll attract people actively in the market for your products and services. And it will deliver you a good source of new customers who don’t already know about your company.

Meanwhile Social remains a great way to increase engagement and repeat purchases. You can use it to reach targetted new customers, and to promote sales to existing fans. And to also improve your customer service and engagement. But it’s not really at its best as a pure sales channel generally. There are exceptions, and some small companies do a lot of social media-based sales through Facebook, Instagram etc. But although all companies can change how they rank, promote and share content via their platform, having a business based on social media sales through 1-2 channels will always seem a little riskier than also having search, email and other sales mechanisms in place.

If you’d like to know how we’ve increased sales through search, social media, content marketing and other methods, get in touch…

Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Lessons from a Google Hangout – State of Digital’s Future of Search

January 16, 2014 By Dan Thornton

The Future of Search was discussed in a live Google Hangout organised by State of Digital today, and I was honored to be one of the people involved in the debate.

It was great to be chatting with Dixon Jones, Gianluca Fiorelli, Krystian Szastok, Russel McAthy and Tim Stewart. And Bas van den Beld did a great job of organising, hosting and moderating it all, including feeding in some good questions from people watching the hangout live. The ‘behind the scenes’ chat also helped everyone to cover all the topics raised, as well as distracting the less confident among us from worrying about our appearance or occasional fluffed sentence over the course of 90 minutes.

So overall it was great, I learned a lot just from chatting with everyone else involved, and I’d love to do more.

But having written a quick guide to Creating and Sharing Videos Online, there were some obvious mistakes I made in preparing…

Google Hangout Guide:

The organisation was handled by State of Digital and Bas, who did a good job in herding us all into the right place at the right time, and managing the muting of mics for everyone who wasn’t speaking. It’s important to make sure everyone involved turns up a little bit early to make sure they get access, have functioning video and audio (e.g. Tim’s blurrycam), and they also know how to access any backchannel, such as Google Hangout’s chat functionality.

What could I have done better?

Appearance:

Overall, I didn’t do too badly. I’m no Tom Cruise, sadly, but I’ve found it’s vital when speaking live or on video to feel confident in how you look and what you’re wearing. In this case, an Open Rights Group T-shirt which remained out of shot…

The other thing to remember is to check for all potential embarrassments such as unwanted nose or ear hair, errant bogeys, bits of lunch etc, etc. Five minutes before shooting can save a lifetime of internet mockery.

Lighting:

Fail here. Despite the fact I know how important lighting is for video, and I actually rent my house from a professional video editor, the lighting in my home office is crap for filming. It’s easily solved with a couple of decent and cost effective lights. And now I have the impetus to invest, as I did look slightly pale and blue. Fine for an extra in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but not ideal…

You can spot the people who put a little more thought into their lighting arrangments (Bas, Gianluca, Krystian).

Posture and Seating:

Not too bad. I was basically using my laptop on my desk and sat in my office chair. So it was serviceable, but not necessarily comfortable or relaxing – I think it was Gianluca who moved to a sofa part way through the hangout.

In the future I’d aim to have a more comfortable and relaxed place to sit, and somewhere where I’m not looking down at the camera (I wasn’t the only person to pick up on the inherent risk of a double chin looking down). It also meant I was only seen from the neck up, which was fine for this particular chat, but might be rather boring if I was hosting something on my own for a few minutes – all you’d see is my head, without any body language or movement.

Audio/Visual:

Not too bad. My Creative ChatMax HS-720 Headset worked well considering it’s under £30. And if I’d picked a better angle and lighting, the actual quality of the video feed is reasonable.

For shooting more videos, I think it will be worth investing in a good quality external webcam, so I can be more flexible with where I place it, and potentially a good quality external mic as well – the ChatMax works well for chats like this where I need to hear the other people, but if I’m recording a screencast etc, I’d like to have a little more audio quality.

Plus I keep meaning to record myself playing guitar etc to see if I’m improving, so that’s another reason for an investment…

Google Hangouts: Worth doing?

I’ve talked to a couple of clients about organising Google Hangouts with experts in their respective fields and I definitely think it’s worthwhile. One of my earliest jobs online was to organise celebrity web chats in a text only chatroom – the ability to have a panel of speakers, and easily sharable recorded video, makes this much easier and more effective.

As long as the content is interesting, the production quality is secondary, and by having multiple people involved it seems to average out the best and worst.

In the tech world, Hangouts have become a staple part of internet content. And the blogging community has also picked up on them as a great way to connect, discuss and share conversations and content.

The difference between SEO and Spam…

October 25, 2011 By Dan Thornton

There’s occasionally some confusion and complaints about SEO as being the cause of spam on the internet with irrelevant content being returned in search results because of unethical techniques. The problem is that within any industry you’ll get good, ethical people who work hard at what they do, and bad, unethical people who use tricks to get quick results and run with the cash.

But if you’re still concerned about spammy SEO and you should be optimising what you do, a new video by Google’s Head of Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts should help:

Good SEO takes time, effort and skill to ensure that relevant content and products are correctly returned for relevant search terms. Bad SEO promises to get you to #1 on Google by using every trick in the book.

And I’ll always practise and recommend good, ethical ‘white hat’ SEO practices for one simple reason – they give better, more cost effective and longterm results. By following the best practice recommendations of search engines, you don’t have to worry about getting found out, or getting your spam technique negated by an update, and having everything wiped out or penalised overnight. You’ll also have a solid foundation to build your business on, and as part of the work you’ll be improving the content and results in related areas, such as conversion rates and social media engagement.

And if you ever need advice, feel free to get in touch!

Content, Marketing and SEO

October 19, 2011 By Dan Thornton

I generally stay away from posting infographics, but this one on the value of content and SEO is useful and relevant enough to share, and it reinforces a lot of the messages I’ve given to clients about the increasing need to integrate all elements of digital marketing, beginning with great content which is optimised for conversions/actions, and then building on that with social elements, search engine optimisation, and federated distribution.

It’s also why I’m doing an increasing amount of work to identify the brand story and narrative with a client before doing any other marketing work. If you get the brand story and a handful of pieces of content working well, then you can boost the people who are visiting it in a number of ways. If you do it the other way around, you get lots of traffic costing you in terms of bandwith, and nothing in terms of the desired outcome, whether that’s revenue, interaction, sign-ups etc.

It’ll be interesting to see what effects a rise in content marketing has on the market for content creation. After years of watching rates fall for both freelance and full-time writers, journalists and bloggers, perhaps for those who are able to display quality in terms of optimising for businesses in addition to tone, style and substance, this will see a marked rise.