Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Keys To Natural, or Organic Search Traffic

Depending on what your business model is, search engine traffic can be the life-blood of your business. If you are buying traffic, such as Pay-Per-Click, then you know pretty much exactly how much traffic you will get; the more you pay, the more you receive.

Natural, or organic traffic is a whole different situation. For those businesses that live off of search engine traffic, there are two factors that determine how many visitors you will get.

The first is the particular keyword phrase you are targeting, specifically how often it is searched. Obviously, you're never going to get 100 visitors per day for a keyword that only gets searched 10 times per day. On the other hand, you won't get 100 visitors even if it is searched that many times per day. Which brings us to the second factor determining your traffic volume.

Where you rank for your targeted phrase will determine what percentage of "available traffic" you get. Let's talk a minute about "available volume".

A given keyword phrase gets searched "x" times per day. How do you know what "x" is? You use one of the many available keyword research tools. Some of these tools require one-time or subscription payments, while some others are free. Two good free tools are Wordtracker (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/), and Google's own keyword research tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

It's worth noting that you will often get different results for the same query with these tools. That is because they use different methods and different databases to determine search volume. Either way, you are seeing a rough estimate, but that's what we have to work with.

Suppose your target phrase gets searched 100 times each day. This is where your rank or position comes in. Depending on where you are in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), you are only going to see a percentage of that volume. The closer to the top, or Position #1 that your web page appears, the larger the fraction of total search volume you will get.

Generally speaking, the top spot, Position #1, gets approximately 50% of the volume. This means that when a search is done, about half of the people searching will click on the first result. Positions #2 and #3 split about another 25%, giving the first three entries approximately 75% of the available volume.

The remaining 7 entries on the first page will split nearly all the remaining 50%, with each position seeing a lesser percentage than the one above it. In all, if you aren't on the first page, you don't see very much of the trafic, and in fact if you aren't near the top, the fraction you receive will be very low.

The keys to natural search engine traffic then are targeting keyword phrases that have decent daily search volume, and to get your web page to rank at or near the top of the SERPs for that keyword phrase.

It goes without saying that the higher the daily search volume, the stiffer the competition is likely to be. And so, your goals should be to target phrases that have good search volume, but not so much that reaching the top spots will be nearly impossible.

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