How can you conquer search traffic plateaus ?

All content providers like to see this beautiful positive gradient in traffic. We wake up in the morning and check our analytics, hoping to see them climb one step higher.

You're providing a great diverse useful content, you're doing your SEO the right way and everything seems working as planned. And suddenly, you will see this ugly plateaus of organic search traffic. What are the tactics you implemented to recover from it? Is there a saturation point in organic search traffic? And how do you know that you reached it?

asked Jan 19 '10 at 23:55

Adel
302●1●13

edited Feb 02 '10 at 12:15

2 Answers:

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Woah... tough one. I'm having to scratch my beard thinking of an answer... especially with little context.

Hitting that plateau is an inevitable reality. I do think there's a saturation of SEO traffic if the content is fairly static... but if you're constantly adding more content regularly.. then you should see some incremental month-on-month traffic (especially with regards to the MENA audience where the number of users is growing so rapidly).

I guess the obvious ways of increasing SEO traffic (which I'm sure you've thought about), is refining your optimization a little further, write and produce more content, tag images and videos correctly (to capitalise on Google's universal search) and do some white-hat link exchanges with complementary sites... all with the aim of bump up your position and PR for some of the long-tail searches.

Do you use Twitter as an Search channel? it's a powerful engine in itself when using #hashtags etc. also, following the integration into Google and Bing it could be useful.. for standard SEO.. albeit limited.

All the best..

answered Jan 20 '10 at 00:13

Hiconomics
506●4

3adoola,

I am not sure if my rambling will appeal to you, so please bear with me a little.

SEO is just one way of promoting your content to bigger audience. As Hiconomics said, there are too many other channels. Like twitter, facebook, digg, redit etc. So you will need to promote your content there and give your users tools to promote your content into these channels. Like tweet button, digg button etc.
Traffic is not the best thing to watch in the early morning. That's what Eric Ries http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/ calls it vanity metric. You will need a better metric that reflects how your business doing for example, if your profit is derived from adwords you need to keep an eye on clickthrous rather than absolute traffic.
Having found the real metric of how your business is doing, you start conducting A/B testing on your web design, forms, content types etc.
You try some traditional marketing tricks. Like contests, voting, etc. trying to engage the readers of your content and entice them to provide you feedback to enhance your content even further.

I know it is a bit long, I hope I had more time to make it shorter ;)

Let me know what do you think?

answered Jan 20 '10 at 04:37

Nader Soliman
174●4

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technical ×5
seo ×4
organic ×1
plateaus ×1

question asked: Jan 19 '10 at 23:55

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last updated: Feb 02 '10 at 12:15

How can you conquer search traffic plateaus ?

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