Is too much of your traffic coming from Google?
Problem
- Many sites get most of their visitors from one search engine, and nobody controls how it ranks them.
- One ranking change can cut that source in half overnight, with no warning and no appeal.
Solution
- Read your traffic by source off your WebCounter counter and work out the share that is Google.
- Grow the sources you own - email, returning readers, people who type your name.
Key points
- At 90% from Google, halving Google cuts the whole site by 45% in our example.
- At 60% from Google the same hit costs 30% - and at 40% it costs 20%.
- Over a year the 40% site keeps about 17,500 more visits than the 90% site.
- The figures are illustrative, not a forecast of any Google update.
- Email is the source you control most, because you choose when it is sent.
In how risky is your top 5 pages' traffic we looked at too much traffic landing on too few pages. In how long to recover from a Google update we looked at the way back. This post looks at the same risk from the other side: how much of your traffic depends on one source, and what that costs when the source drops.
Why one source is a risk
Search traffic is the best kind of traffic right up until it is not.
- Google changes how it ranks pages several times a year, and announces the larger updates on its Search Status Dashboard.
- A drop hits every page at once, so a site that is mostly search has nothing to fall back on.
- You cannot speed up a recovery - it waits for the next time the pages are judged again.
- Visitors who know your name survive any update, because they never needed a search to find you.
Work out what a visitor from each source is worth
Before you spend time building another source, check what a visitor from it is worth to you. Type your own numbers into the calculator below and it compares a social visitor with one from search.
Prefer a full page? Open the social vs search calculator on CalcSA. To check how much traffic sits on your top pages, the traffic concentration calculator goes deeper.
Worked example: three sites, one Google drop
Three sites each get 10,000 visits a month. One gets 90% of them from Google, one 60% and one 40%; the rest come from email, social, links and people typing the address. From month 6, Google sends each of them half as many visitors and stays there for the rest of the year:
- 90% from Google: down to 5,500 visits a month - a 45% drop. 88,500 visits over the year.
- 60% from Google: down to 7,000 a month - a 30% drop. 99,000 visits over the year.
- 40% from Google: down to 8,000 a month - a 20% drop. 106,000 visits over the year.
- The site with its own sources keeps 17,500 more visits than the one that relied on search.
Illustrative. The 10,000 visits, the 90%, 60% and 40% shares and a 50% drop lasting from month 6 are assumptions chosen to show the shape - not a forecast of any real update. Your WebCounter counter shows your own split by source.
A year with a Google drop at month 6
Visits a month for three sites of 10,000 visits, with Google halving from month 6:
- 90% from Google
- 60% from Google
- 40% from Google
Show the numbers as a table
| Month | 90% from Google | 60% from Google | 40% from Google |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 to 5 | 10,000 | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| 6 to 12 | 5,500 | 7,000 | 8,000 |
| Year total (months 1 to 12) | 88,500 | 99,000 | 106,000 |
- Start a newsletter while search is going well - it is too late to build one after the drop.
- Make the site's name memorable, so people come back by typing it rather than searching.
- Do not chase every source - one you own and work at beats five you post to now and then.
Reading your counter for this
Your WebCounter counter shows visits by source, so you can see exactly how much of your traffic is search. No counter yet? Get your free WebCounter counter - it takes a minute and costs nothing.
- Search share: visits from search engines divided by all visits, for the last three months.
- Direct and returning: people who type the address or come back are the visitors an update cannot take.
- Email visits: tag the links in your newsletter so they show up as email, not "direct".
- Count bots out - they inflate "direct" traffic and make you look less dependent than you are.
Sources
- Google, Google Search Status Dashboard - where Google lists its ranking updates - from general knowledge, not re-checked for this post.
- The 10,000 visits, the 90%, 60% and 40% shares from Google and the 50% drop are our illustrative assumptions - no published benchmark was used.
- Calculator: CalcSA, Social vs search visitor value.
Estimates only. How much an update costs depends on your pages and your sources; your own counter is the test.
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