When monitoring your website traffic, it’s easy to look at your sources and see that Google has sent you the most traffic, leading you to think you should double down on it. Maybe you should, but maybe not.
There are certainly people that Google sends to your site that you should be thankful for. If someone searches for “plumbers near me” to find your plumbing company, that’s fantastic! However, there are many cases where it may look like Google is sending you traffic but it’s not really coming from Google.
In a recent post on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin dug into this pretty deep, and this image largely summarized what he had to say:
If your reputation is strong enough that people search for you by name, that is awesome! Really, that should be your main goal. It’s great when people find you for unbranded searches like “plumbers near me”, but if they know to search for you directly, you win.
Google may still find themselves in the middle, but you didn’t get that customer via “SEO (Search Engine Optimization)” even though they technically came via a Google search. You need to find out how people really discovered you and why they searched for you by name and double down on that instead.
As I shared last year, tracking down precise attribution can be nearly impossible, but that doesn’t mean you should default to attributing it to Google. Work hard to figure out where your best customers are really coming from, and focus as much effort there as you can.
If you want more detail and data behind this, I encourage you to check out the full post on SparkToro.
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