% of traffic from search engines

[drang3d]

I was just wondering what would be the percentage of internet traffic from search engines?

[RESteve]

Wow. Quite a bit. This forum is alllll about SEO.

[drang3d]

I know its quite a lot but I'm trying to convince a maketing director to put more of their budget on search engine optimisation and the organic serps than spending on other web advertising, i.e. banner ads, adwords, advertising on other sites. They are even considering spending quite a bit ($3000) on advertising on a new site, which has no backlinks, 0 pr, no optimisation on their site at all, whos trying to pitch their services based on hits rather than uniques. And after reviewing their site I can see that 90% of their traffic is coming from adwords but hey I'm just the guy who does the I.T. not marketing!

[RESteve]

Put them in touch with Webmaster. At least have them look into alternatives than blowing 3k on marketing - IMO, 3k in SEO consultations and implementations would be MUCH more advantageous.

Put it this way; what do they have to lose? Worst case scenario is that they will be more informed about the options they have with driving traffic to their site.

[drang3d]

Yeah I agree Steve but get this, the company I work for hate consultants but are happy to waste money on things they have done no research on! I would recommend Morgan but I know he'll probably tell him the same things I've been telling them anyway(things I've picked up from Morgan, REW, seobook, etc.)

WOW, 100 posts, that was quick!

[Ryan Ward]

Drang,

85% of my traffic comes from Google organic searches

5% From REW blog

You do the math

This includes the fact that I am on the 1st page at MSN and Google for atlanta real estate

MSN plays almost no factor in my organic hits to my website

and who knows what yahoo is thinking...

If you spent $3,000 on SEO for Google optimization, you will achieve a much better ROI than anywhere else on the web.

In my opinion...

[Lydia]

To get a new site traffic immediately PPC is the only way to go. Google's sandbox effect means you could be dead in the water for quite a long time. How convenient that they offer Adwords, and now in the last week spent another $3 billion to buy Double-Click. Coincidence? I think not.

Putting that money in SEO [perhaps] has a larger long-term payback, but can you afford to wait months, possibly years, to see the return?

If you have to invest all that money in one pot, go PPC.

However, if your marketing director realizes he must look short-term AND long-term, invest in a small PPC program, while embarking in a larger effort to rank in the search engines.

[RESteve]

possibly years

I'll have to disagree with you on that. Good SEO will start making it's mark in a matter of months.

I just don't think a full head on PPC campaign is their answer. Sure, invest a bit just to get some basic traffic going, but invest the bulk of it in SEO and google optimization by a qualified professional.

[Morristown]

other then links from REW where are you guys finding are the best places to link to and get links from as far as boosting your organic search possitions?

[webmaster]

It does really depend on the goal, in fact for short term as Lydia suggests, I DO recommend PPC advertising vs SEO - however if the budget were there (And I think you are already telling them this) then of course SEO is the long term solution in terms of ROI.

Now into your question: (Let me get out Google Analytics and get you a nice sample)

I just did a query on referring source of 743,652 unique visitors to REW over a period and here is how those visitors break down (Top stats only)

1: Google 468,801
2: Direct (No referral) 130,430
3: MSN 14,948
4: Yahoo 14,590
5: Search (Not sure what GA means by this) 8,539
6 AOL 7,257
7 Google.ca 2,222

I could keep going, but you get the point: In terms of quality of this traffic, I am not sure how they would want to measure that, but out of those unique visitors generated 3,216,088 pageviews which is an average of 4.32 per unique visitor.

Any other stats you need?