Many jewelers criticize us that almost everything we teach refers to Google in one way or another. This is simply because in our tracking we see the highest percentage of organic traffic coming from Google.com.
Today we took a random sampling of the sites we work on and looked at an average percentage of all the current traffic in the last 30 days. Here are the results:
Organic Traffic for May 2011 to Jewelry Websites:
Google: 85.39%
Yahoo!: 6.41%
Bing: 5.94%
Search: 0.83%
AOL: 0.95%
Ask: 0.48%
It's amazing that Ask is still holding on as a search engine. It's also pretty surprising to see Search.com and AOL showing up as organic sources for organic jewelry website traffic.
Obviously you see how much traffic comes from Google. More than 85% of organic traffic for jewelry websites comes from one search engine. This means 85% of your online search marketing should be spent with Google properties and on Google recommended organic SEO techniques.
It's easy for us to correlate data for search engine referrals, but not so much for shared website or off-site blogs. Although Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit are great places to post links in your link building campaign, very few jewelers are actually doing this and it makes it difficult for us to track.
It's more likely to see link building from theknot.com, yellowpages.com, and random blog posts, but the social networks are still devoid of serous jeweler activity.
Bing has been playing catch up with Google's technology, spidering the web and their SERP popularity. If Google is doing something, you can believe that Bing is trying to copy it. In mid May 2011, Bing activated a new feature that allows Facebook shares to show up in the Bing SERP.
In a video interview with SEOmoz.org on June 9, 2011, Duane Forrester, the Senior Project Manager of Bing's Webmaster Program, specifically explained that when someone shares your web page on Facebook it will not affect the ranking of your website specifically. However, if one of your friends triggers an appropriate search, your shared page will jump to page 1 of Bing's SERP.
Google does not have an agreement with Facebook that allows this type of information sharing or SERP manipulation. The reason we're pointing out this interview is because Google has a similar technology with sharing from Twitter and within your Google Profile friends.
Both search engines are struggling to use social networks to influence the search results.
The bottom line of today's nugget is that one clear method to increase your organic traffic is to start sharing links to Twitter and Facebook. However since Google will provide 85% of your traffic, you should concentrate on Twitter shares. For those of you that don't understand, or even hate Facebook, this is probably good news.
