When asked how they initially found out about us, many of our clients will recall searching for something online and finding our site among a search engine’s results. Great, SEO win! But that’s not really the full story. They usually go on to say that landing on our site began a long relationship with our content, sometimes lasting years, that preceded becoming a client. These people’s extended use of our site speaks to the high value of our content to them. But what this ultimately shows is that, no matter how long their “vetting” process, a site’s visitors offer very little value to you until you have converted them to prospects. So, think about this in terms of your site: How much site traffic is actually converted and where does it come from?
More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic.
Take a moment to let that sink in. More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic. Knowing that our site received the vast majority of its traffic from search engine referrals, and that we performed quite well for phrases directly related to what we do, like “defining a web content strategy,” “how to do SEO,” or “website development pricing,” I would have assumed that most of the people subscribing to our newsletter, registering for our webinars, or requesting meetings with us are referred by search engines. But after reviewing the data, I have concluded that this is not the case at all.
The image above depicts the 9 top referrers of traffic to our website, showing how many unique visits and eventual conversions came from each over the past 6 months. As expected, the top referrer to our site, exceeding direct visits by almost 5 times, was search engine traffic (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). However, out of the 71, 233 visitors who came to our site from a search engine, only 333 of them ended up converting to an actual lead. That’s a paltry fraction of a percent (.47%). Our miscellaneous referrals, on the other hand, which include any other website on the web that has chosen to link to us, deliver far fewer visitors by comparison to search but far more conversions. Out of the 10,350 visitors that came from direct links to our site on other websites, 475 ended up converting to actual leads. That’s 4.5%- almost 10 times the percentage by proportion of conversions originating with search!
While I can’t say for certain that my conclusions about our site traffic would apply to every other company like ours, I’d bet it’s pretty likely. When you stop to consider why search traffic delivers fewer conversions than other referrals, the data makes perfect sense. Think about it: When you search for something online, you scrutinize the results for relevance before you choose one to click, and even then, you often realize that the site you’ve visited isn’t quite what you’re looking for. No hard feelings; you don’t expect search engine bots to organize the web based upon just what you want. That would be like going to your local library and finding a card catalog with your name on it. But when a site you trust links to another site, you do expect that recommendation to be much more closely aligned with your interests and intent than a search engine’s results to your query. You assume that the people behind that website are like you, and when they link to another site, it’s for a really good reason. They’ve read its content and found it valuable enough to recommend to you. Put simply, people trust people and people act upon trust.
I think the chart above makes this principle very clear, but if you need any further evidence of how direct human referrals lead to more conversions, read what happened when Smashing Magazine referred to our site among its list of useful email web design newsletters.
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