Divya Uttam has written a great post about the death of search engine domination in Web 2.0.
In the past, most webmasters and bloggers were so much concerned about what Google is thinking and ways how to manipulate it to get more out of it, but now, social media optimization has been a very highly talked about and discussed venue for traffic. Social media is becoming more mature and developed as well as crowded. New social media websites evolved, either with an original idea or clones of successful models. A wonderful system from where the world of socializing of Internet marketing started. We can say that these websites evolved out of the need of generating more traffic in a much effective way.
I agree with Divya, that as social media matures and develops, it is, and will continue to be a major source of traffic for website owners and bloggers. However, I don’t believe that the search engines will lose their overall dominance.
Sites like Digg.com are a great tool for driving quick bursts of traffic to a website, but even after making recently making the front page of Digg, I must say that the traffic generated by search engines is far more valuable.
Here’s the deal, before the whole Krak.dk thing, the server was serving between 4500 and 5100 pages a day in January.
On the 3rd of January we served 5270 pages with 32.71% of the traffic coming from Google.
On the 21st (23946) and 22nd (17845) making 41791 pages combined. 75.56% of my incoming traffic on those 2 days was from digg.com.
On the 23rd we served 6396 pages with only 29.55% of the traffic coming from Digg. 10.03% of the traffic came from Google. That’s only around a thousand more than usual for my blog and as you can tell, things are quickly returning to normal.
Now forgetting how quickly traffic normalizes after the spike, there is the fact that there was practically no increase in the number of click on the Adsense adverts. So, while the digg traffic was a big spike that chewed through a lot of bandwidth, I’m sure that if I was on a hosting plan where I had to pay after using a certain amount of bandwidth, making the first page of Digg would have cost me a lot of money and we burned through over 2 Gigs on the 21st and 22nd alone.
The major issue with social media sites like digg is that they are of most value when you’ve got a story that is hot! Not only that, but with sites like digg, you only got a limited amount of time to make that story hot before the next “big thing” comes along.
Social media traffic is reactive, and after the last few days it’s easy to see how for a lot of webmasters and bloggers it could be very costly traffic.
Search engine traffic however is much more valuable. It may be a far smaller amount, but it is people who are looking for something. These people want what they are searching for and as such are far more likely to click on advertising on your website if they don’t find what they’re looking for. Also, these users are much more likely to hang around and check out other articles, if you are engaging, instead of going straight back to see what the next story that catches their interest on Digg may be.
In 6 months time nobody will click on a digg article that I post today (if it’s even still there?), however they are likely click on a link to the article when it comes up in the search results on Google or Yahoo.
Social Media sites are great for bringing “here and now” attention to a topic or a viral video etc, but for the webmaster, traffic from social media sites offer little to no directly valuable traffic.
Where social media sites do come into there own is the number of incoming links that can be generated for your site by bloggers who write their own opinions on your article and/or simply link to you.
Of course, those links really serve to increase your standings in the search results and drive more search traffic that way.
So, social media sites and like the flyers of street level advertising, and search engines like Google are the word of mouth.
You submit your article to digg, and just like printing flyers and sticking them on a thousand car windows, you get a rush of traffic from people who are just curious and have no intention buying (or subscribing in this case) or are simply bored and want someone to talk to because the Samaritans are sick of them.
There will be some people who agree with you, and link to you or post about it. They are the word of mouth, and they can only be found via the search engines. Word of mouth advertising is far more effective because it’s essentially a friend recommending something to a friend. And your friend wouldn’t recommend something bad right?
Social Media is big and it will get bigger, but friends recommending to friends or in this case trusted sources on blogs linking to other blogs, will always have a much higher conversion rate in sales that a flyer or some other “one off” “here and now” advert used when the potential customer is random.
Social media site users don’t actually want anything when they come to site, besides maybe seeing what stories are hot or who has messaged their profile. Search engine users want something specific, and that’s the reason the traffic is more valuable.
This all comes back to engagement. There is nothing more engaging than friends talking about something, and search engines are the best at ranking search results and driving traffic, in the long term, based on what “friends” are talking about.
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