Is traffic useful without links?
-
We have many articles on our sites that bring in a large volume of traffic but bring no links.
As an example we wrote an article about the hottest cities in the world. The article brings in over 1000 hits a month on Google and people spend an average of 4 minutes on the page and never return and never link to it.
The article also doesn't bring in business because the company sell Air Conditioning.
From an SEO point of view should we focus any time at all on writing articles that are useful for the internet community that bring in traffic but don't bring in many (any) links?
-
I had a big laugh with your May 2011 entry. These are definately shareable/viral, especially in the hvac community (hvac-talk.com and other forums). You really do need to add share buttons all over the page.
Being a local air conditioner service business, I can sympathize with how dull our content can be. I too get traffic from all over but few links or shares. You should be miles ahead because of your humor (my posts tend to be pedantic). I wouldn't mind sending a link your way in a future blog post.
-
Really appreciate your comments.
-
I would make a temperature chart of the year for lots of big cities, showing on them the "air conditioning season". Post these on your website but more important give them to other air conditioning businesses to post on their website (with their branding and a linkback to you). These would be locked .pdf documents that you produce.
-
Like the EGOL humour plus agree with EGOL 100% here. 100 hits and getting Facebook like is pretty good reward. I assume that you are linking within your site as well to keep people on the site.
And to answer your question you should always try and write articles that are useful to the Internet community but also to you. Socialize the pages as suggested but if you can write this quality on cities I am sure that you can also write it on Air Conditioners.
-
My reactions to this are.....
You are successful.
Slap adsense on those pages to make a little money.
Examine the quality of those pages to determine if they are likable linkable tweetable. How could you change them to make them more sharable?
Maybe your best talents are not in air conditioning? Would your time be better spent writing a website about fun topics?
-
Turn up the heat with the social buttons maybe have set at top and set at bottom, play around with it, have some text pointing to the share buttons 'share with your friends', you get the point.
-
It's funny you mention that, I just noticed that it has brought in 20+ facebook likes / tweet, so maybe not so useless.
-
Put some social tools around the content and try to get visitors to share the article, this will generate social signals which in turn effect SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Need More Traffic
hi,guys,our company have one online vape store,and now only 2000 visitors per day,anyone can help me checking where i need to improve to get more traffic from google.it seems i need more high DA backlinks,right? the website link is : www.smokstore.us any suggestion.thanks
Link Building | | smokstore0 -
Niche Market without impartial authority for links
We've had trouble with one of our brand websites for years now in SERP rankings. When I first started working here 3 years ago I stated that the site lacks a content foundation to build on. A large number of our pages do not have proper text content or had duplicate content, there was no consideration of keyword usage in any title or body copy, and there was absolutely no reason for anyone to want to link to the site. I'm not a copy writer so I've pushed to get one hired, if even just on a freelance basis, to at least get some kind of content on the pages that I could work our keywords into. I'm hoping that soon they will finally start listening to me and we'll get that content in place. However, even with the content we have the problem of our market not having an impartial authority site that we could be linked from to help us build our own authority. The current authorities for our keywords are competitors. They've been doing a better job with their SEO and for a lot longer than us. The nature of our business restricts us from displaying pricing on our site which I feel is another major strike against us when it comes to organic link backs. We do not sell direct, all of our sells are made through authorized dealers and each dealer has their own territory that does not compete with each other. Additionally we do not have a MSRP and even if we did our dealers would explode if we advertised it on the site since there is such a wide range of dealer pricing. The only good thing we have going for our site currently is a new redesigned layout that makes it easier for users to navigate and get the information they need. I feel it is still to cluttered but I have to make the brand manager happy and that person insists on adding clutter that is not necessary. Additionally we added a new tool to the website, a custom tool that uses javascript and canvas to allow visitors to build their own product and request a price from their local dealer. The links we have to our site right now are from PR sites and sites that do not have any authority in regard to our target keywords. A while back we asked our dealers to help out by adding a link to our site from theirs. This was initiated by a third party company who had delusions of understanding SEO and so the links our dealers have work great for ranking us for our brand name but not so much in regard to the keywords we want to place for. Plus not every dealer is doing it. Our top competitors have over 3x the links to their sites than we do so we have a lot of catching up to do in that respect. And when I look at the sites that are linking to them it's, again, news and PR sites mostly. My line of thinking currently is to get our content issues under control and get all of our dealers linking to our site with properly constructed anchor text. I'm also trying to push to have more and more frequent press releases sent out to a wider range of sites than we currently target. I want to submit the customizer tool we developed (6 months of work and improvements/additions to be done in the future, so we're kinda proud of it) to sites that like to link to such things but so far I've not been able to find any. I'm just not searching for the right thing to find them is my guess. A few other ideas I've had is to reduce the page depth of many of our pages, mainly our product pages since they're 4 levels deep right now. I'm not sure if that's worthwhile though. How important is the url structure and keyword usage in them and how many levels should I try to keep from exceeding? We have an infographic on our site that generated a few links, are things like that really worth the time and effort though? Would it be better to focus our attention on something else instead? What I want to know is if my thinking is right and if there is anything else we should be doing that I haven't thought of yet. Or if I'm off base with all of this and we need to be focusing on something else entirely. Thanks in advance for any help/insight!
Link Building | | EscaladeSports0 -
Unnatural Linking Using Webdsite Themes
I am working on a website that last year received an email from Google via webmaster tools talking about the linking profile. The email suggested that the website had unnatural activity (links) and that the webmaster needed to investigate before filing for a reconsideration. After having looked at the link profile using OSE, it was easy to see the problem. Thousands of inbound links with the exact anchor text. Here is the BIG problem. The tactics used by the unamed SEO agency prior to me were to embed links in to the footer of web themes? At this stage it is unclear as to where you can downlaod or purchase the web themes but it's obvious that the problem is simply going to escalate. The domain in question is www.teamtactics.co.uk Any thoughts on the above would be much appreciated - at this point I am trying to find the place were the themes are available for download. Any ideas much appreciated. shivun
Link Building | | seohive-2227200 -
Link Building for a Newbie!
Hi Guys & Girls. Following my previous question, I seem to really be getting to grips with SEOmoz and all its features which seem fantastic. As mentioned before, I am quite new to this SEO game and learning all the time!! Through all my reading and learning over the last week I have learnt that Link Building is one of the most powerful ways of increasing your SEO game. I'm really trying to get my head around it all. I have come across things like "Link Farming" which seems to be a big no no in terms of Google. Submitting to Link directories etc etc. Now for somebody new, this all comes across quite confusing. Can anybody out there provide me with a really simple but informative way to effectively Link Build? Best practices etc etc! I really want to learn and "up" my game! The website that I am working with is http://www.advanced-incar.co.uk Many thanks, Tim
Link Building | | timborrill0 -
Page links vs. domain links
Hello all, I am trying to find out how Google weighs page inbound links vs. domain inbound links. I have a domain with about 100,000 inbound links and am adding a new page to my domain which at this time has 0 links. I will be trying to outrank a competitors page that has 6,000 inbound links to the competitors page, but only has 26,000 inbound links to my competitors domain . Is there a formula or a way to know how Google values a page link vs. a domain link?
Link Building | | digitalops0 -
Where to link?
Hi I need to gert this page up in the rankings http://www.kerryblu.co.uk/wedding-headbands-70-c.asp but am getting no where fast. When applying for links should I direct them to this page or to the homepage, and let them filter through. Thanks
Link Building | | Yorkie0 -
Link value
Hi I have some links from blogs to our ecom website. My question is if anyone knows what happens if you have several different blogs on .blogspot linking in to you. Does that make them loose value because they are on the same domain? I can probably quite easily have 5-10 blogs on blogspot all with PA of 35-40 link in to us. Is it worth striving for or should i strive to get blogs that have their own domain to link into us instead ? Or equally important ? Dan Lærum
Link Building | | danlae1 -
How many links per week is too fast in link building?
For a new website/blog how many links per week looks suspicious or hurt the rankings?
Link Building | | aaran1