Long Tail Search Engine Optimization and Social Media results in Increased Traffic Over Time

As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, we are leveraging our experience at the smbZen BizJournal to investigate the effect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media marketing on web traffic.  Two months of data derived from consistent execution of this strategy at the BizJournal indicates that Search Engine Optimization of long-tail search engine keywords coupled with Social Media marketing can produce a substantial increase in web traffic (visits and pageviews) over time.  The following week-by-week snapshot of BizJournal website traffic, measured in unique visits, clearly illustrates this conclusion:

What follows is a discussion of the strategy we employed to drive this growth and the conclusions we can draw from this two month data set.

Hard data: SEO Drives a Growth in Web Traffic over Time

There’s a lot of good advice out there about how to grow a website, but relatively little accessible data.  As Arpan and I are data driven decision makers, we decided we would track our site’s analytics and share our progress to give other a better sense of how our particular strategy works.  Our previous updates regarding our analytics suffered from insufficient data.   But with two months of growth now behind us, enough time has elapsed to clarify the result of our efforts.

As we’ve outlined previously, we decided to engage in a search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing strategy that consists of the following elements:

• the steady addition of content that targets long tail search engine terms (define long tail with link)
• the gradual increase in incoming links that results from regular publishing (the site’s PageRank act as a crude metric)
• use of social media to reinforce distribution of content, primarily twitter (read why here)

So, just how has this strategy fared thus far?

Preliminary Results From Blogging and Search Engine Optimization

The two most important factors to search engine traffic growth, according to Problogger Darren Rowse are:

• the steady addition of content
• the gradual increase in incoming links that results from regular publishing

Preliminary data suggests this does work.  Here is a Google Analytics chart that shows daily search engine traffic to this site since November 1st, 2008, approximately fifteen days since Tom and I started posting regularly.

Before jumping to conclusions, please keep in mind that this site and corresponding domain are new and have a Google PageRank of 0.  Despite the handicap in Search Engine Placement Rankings (SERP), the site’s daily search engine traffic since November 15th, has on average doubled.  I attribute the dip seen at November end to the holiday season.

Our Marketing Experiment With Social Media

When Tom and I started delving into Social Media (blogging, RSS, social bookmarking, social networking, microblogging a la Twitter), we asked whether leveraging these tools would result in sales of our referralZen product.  More generally, we wondered if small businesses, regardless of industry focus, could use Social Media to generate business opportunities.  Although we have found examples of success, we simply don’t know.  Our current attempts are therefore, a real-time experiment with Social Media.  In this and in subsequently posts, we will discuss our approach, link to related stories, and share our findings.

Why Social Media (SM) & Our Approach

The key to smbZen hinges upon, as it does with many other businesses, managing the average customer acquisition costs.  Our hypothesis is that Social Media tactics (a) will be the most sustainable form of communicating with and hence marketing to our target audience, (b) will, as a consequence of “a”, yield customer acquisition costs lower than those obtained through both Pay-Per-Click (PPC/Google Adwords) and Direct Mail.  The hypothesis is supported by articles on Social Marketing such as, The Importance of Social Media Marketing, written by Maki at DoshDosh.

Our approach to Social Media is threefold.

smbZen is a service by SMBZEN, LLC
Copyright © SMBZEN, LLC All Rights Reserved | info (at) smbzen (dot) com