When creating an SEO strategy it makes sense to jump right to Google and what Google wants to see because Google controls nearly 64.5 percent of the U.S. search market. However, there comes a point where you may have a good system down for Google, and which point it’s a good idea to see where else you may be able to bring in traffic.
YouTube and Bing are two other huge engines that you should definitely be tracking, but what about some of the smaller traffic generators? If you’re not getting traffic from them yet, it’s never too early to start getting involved and seeing how much extra traffic you can bring in from those sources—even if you’ve never heard of them.
6 Top Sources of Online Traffic You’re Still Not Tracking
Below are a few sources of online traffic to start tracking and monitoring as soon as possible:
Quora
Quora is one of my favorite websites on the web because it works as a social network but with real, actionable advice that you can use. The site is moderated and users vote the best answers to questions to the top of the page, but Quora allows links within an answer. This makes it easy for you to direct someone to your website or an article you’ve written if it’s relevant. When people ask technical questions, you’ll almost always see a great number of responses with links in their answers, and this is appreciated.
Aside from only answering questions with links, building up your own Quora profile can be great visibility. If you’re answering questions frequently, people are able to click your profile to learn more (and yes, see a link to your website). It’s a great way to not only bring traffic to your website, but help create relationships with a very targeted audience.
Scribd
This is a document-sharing site that gives users access to 400,000 books from over 900 publishers. It works like a digital library and works on all devices, so this is a great place to be discovered by the avid readers and learners community. According to their most recent numbers they have about 80 million monthly readers around the world, so if you can get involved and make your content discoverable through this source traffic benefits could be huge. This is a particularly great option for anyone creating EBooks.
Slideshare
Slideshare.net is incredibly easy to use—simply upload a PowerPoint presentation and you’re done. According to the latest numbers on their website, Slideshare averaged 60 million unique visitors a month and 215 million page views, making it among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world. In other words, if you can put enough great content onto slideshare and really optimize your page with presentations that your audience will search for and then find relevant, this can be an excellent source of traffic.
Reddit is always focusing on the funniest, buzziest, or most controversial news on the web, but it’s home to more viral posts than just about any other sharing platform as well. If you can really tap into the Reddit audience and create a clever GIF or meaningful article, you could see traffic advantages from Reddit’s more than 113 billion users each month.
AllTop (and other content aggregators)
You have to be careful sometimes with what are called content aggregators because they work very similarly to directories (in fact, if you want to split hairs they technically are a type of directory). However, if you can find a website such as AllTop and get your website listed, you may see a big spike in traffic coming from that website. Simply fill out an application to be included and you’re set. I cannot stress enough, however, the importance of really looking at all of the websites being linked to on the source to make sure you’re getting involved with some quality. AllTop is a great place to start.
LinkedIn is no longer just a social network for professionals. Ever since they introduced the publisher feature in October of last year, users have had the opportunity to publish work and have those articles send people back to a certain webpage. Even before the publisher feature LinkedIn started allowing users to update their status’s with articles and links as well, so LinkedIn has slowly but surely been inching it’s way into a top traffic source for some websites.
The great thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it’s a great place to republish blog posts or articles that are already on your website. It saves on time, and you already have a targeted audience who trusts you viewing everything you publish. This makes people more likely to share and more likely to click; thus helping your traffic numbers. Visit this article to learn more about how to optimize your LinkedIn account for maximum advantages.
Why It Matters to Your SEO Strategy
The biggest reason these sources of traffic matter is because you can be tracking them and optimizing for them if you find a significant enough jump in your metrics. Remember that SEO stands for search engine optimization, so this doesn’t just refer to optimizing for Google. Any source that has a search function and delivers results is considered a search engine, so this includes social media as well as the sources listed above.
Does your website get traffic from any unusual or unpopular sources? What are you doing to optimize for those sources? Let us know in the comment section below.