COMMENTS
It's great to see more research going into traffic sourcing in the small business sector.
Just curious though, are those first two graphs over 7 days like the third graph?
Looks like SEO is not dead. Organic search is an investment- same as buying your building vs. leasing- in securing the marketing of your business.
@Matt: great question, Matt. Yes, the first two graphs are also over 7 days to keep the time span of data consistent.
Great article! I am interested to know what is the recommended way to identify the top referral websites for a given market, industry or region. I am thinking about non US domestic markets principally. Are these referral sites generally fee based?
Regards,
Sean.
The Google maps referral is interesting. That tells me that people are looking for a local business or that the website has a directions or find me button on it. I assume the ow.ly referral is because that's the default URL shortener in Hootsuite.
@Sean: you raised a good question that encourages further analysis of the HubSpot data. After dividing referral sites by industries, I discovered that there seems to be no industry-specific popular referral sites. Instead, generally popular sites such as google.com, yahoo.com. yelp.com, and the like top the list across many industries. Keep in mind, however, that most HubSpot customers are U.S.-based companies, so I cannot draw a similar conclusion for non-U.S. domestic markets.
Hope this helps,
Lily Zhu at HubSpot
So the question this analysis begs is can you show the same data for conversion rates? Is the expensive PPC traffic worth it by converting at much higher rates?
Great info. One of the biggest challenges I'm finding is that the search engines are continually changing, therefore, your strategy/tactics need to adapt as well. Ironically, I just posted an article on local search this morning and I would be interested in some feedback - http://bit.ly/8oHL0l.
Thanks,
- John
Yes, for local businesses I've seen firsthand what Google Maps can do for you. For those that haven't tried, I was able to easily claim my business and that of a friend (for my friend). Once you have control of your listing be sure to update/add content for everything Google allows -- coupon/pictures/videos (host on YouTube)/text/tags/etc. Google likes content and as soon as I did this our two sites went to #2 & #3 in their respective categories. While our websites weren't on the first page of organic search our customers told us they found us using Google and wanted someone that ranked on the first page as they viewed this as important. Since our sites weren't listed on the first page I know they were referring to our map entries. We were in a brokerage business at the time.
What you don't address is whether all the sites in each group have ppc campaigns. Organic may be delivering the largest share because only X% of the sites in a group are actually driving ppc traffic.
Nice info. I'm negotiating with Thomasnet right now. I hope they don't read this...
Do you think that the google CPC is just turning into a bidding war? It seems that the suggest bid for my keywords in adwords campaigns is continuously going up. This is obviously a benefit to google now but won't this potentially squeeze small businesses out using the CPC? I can't picture the future of adwords with trends like these.
Adam W,
The Google Adwords bidding war has been going on for some time now and small businesses have to focus on long-tail keywords. In your case, "web design in st louis, mo" is more relevant and affordable.
- John
Spot On. We are a tour operator based in India and maps.google.com is our #1 referral point. Surprised that bit.ly is not in the list
Quick question that I didn't see addressed here. What about traffic from backlinks from other sites? Is it such a small part that you didn't include with your study?
Great article and good data nevertheless. Emphasizes the benefits of SEO!
@Nathan: thanks for raising the question. It's not that traffic from backlinks is too small for us to include--we simply do not have the data at this point.