Are Your Referral Links Driving Traffic?

One of the most common ways to measure the success (or lack thereof) of an SEO program is to track the growth of organic visitors that came to the site using non-branded keywords. These are the visitors that found your website in the SERPs that weren’t looking to do business with you specifically. For instance, someone might find DailySEOTip.com by searching for something like “SEO tips.” The more visitors that find DailySEOTip.com through non-branded searches like “SEO tips” and its long tail variations the better the site’s SEO program is doing overall. But organic traffic isn’t the only way to tell if your SEO campaign is performing well. You should also take a look at the Referral Traffic data in your Google Analytics account, which can give you an idea of how well your link building activities do at driving targeted visitors through to your website.

In my opinion, the best kind of links to build with your white hat link building campaign are the ones that not only boost the search engine trust and SEO value of your website, but also that ones that send a few targeted visitors your way every month. You might scoff at two or three extra visitors (after all, that’s not about to break any SEO records) but think of all the links you’ve built and earned over the years with your link building and content marketing efforts. It could easily be hundreds, if not thousands of quality links and, provided they come from the right kind of site, if each referral link only sent one targeted visitor each month that’s hundreds or even thousands of extra unique visitors coming to your site. Stretch that out over 6-12 months and suddenly it’s not just 2-3 visitors from one link; it’s 2-3 thousand visitors from hundreds of links. When you add that final number to the total organic visitors coming to your site suddenly your SEO campaign is looking a lot more powerful.

As crazy as it sounds coming from an SEO professional, you want to go about your link building almost as if Google didn’t exist. Still abide by their Webmaster Guidelines of course, but imagine what would happen if Google vanished tomorrow – how would potential customers find your site? Every referral link you build has the potential to deliver targeted traffic right to your doorstep. The next time you are in your Google Analytics account take a look at the Referrals section of the Sources tab. You might be surprised at what sources outside of Google is sending targeted traffic your way!