A large part of a content marketer’s efforts are put into generating custom content that can optimize a site to be found in SERPs. Brands need to be revealed in organic search through SEO initiatives, but also through referrals from other websites. New research from Conductor shows that referral traffic is a big player in how web users get to websites, but that individual domains see differing results.
Conductor analyzed the referral traffic of fifty B2C and B2B websites, finding that top 10 percent of referral domains (excluding search) drive 91 percent of the referring traffic. The figure jumps to 98 percent when organic search is included as a traffic referrer. According to Conductor, 70 percent of traffic comes through organic search, while 25 percent comes through direct referrals. Just one percent comes from social media sites. Additionally, it seems B2B brands have slightly more diverse referral sources, as the top 10 percent of referral sites (excluding search) in this sector drive about 5 percent less traffic than those for B2C sites.
Although referral traffic is responsible for a large proportion of incoming site hits, Conductor found that individual sites saw referrals from different sources, indicating that content marketers must create and develop quality, relevant, custom content that keeps a brand’s most important referrers in the loop.
“While some might have hypothesized that there would be a group of ‘super referral sites’—sites that we’d see as among the top referrers across a large percentage of industries–there was little to no overlap amongst the top referring domains between the domains analyzed.” – Conductor
Not only that, content marketers should focus on SEO marketing as they strive to reveal brands, as the majority of sites are found using search engines like Google and Bing.
Brafton recently reported that Google’s recent Panda 23 update has caused some marketers to rethink their SEO strategies for 2013. The Google team is constantly working to find ways to comb the web for the best SERPS for users, which is why content marketers should ramp up SEO efforts so their brands are revealed in organic search. Quality, custom content will help bring in referral traffic, as well as higher placement in SERPs.
