SEO vs Social Media: Blog Traffic Increase

There are many ways to get traffic to a new website and blog, and in this article, I want to talk about some of the results from Small Business Ideas Blog for 2013 and the plan for 2014.

I created this blog to test various marketing tactics and in 2013, I experimented with SEO and social media, as well as a few other things. Sadly, I only wrote 3 blog posts in 2013 (busy with other projects), but despite that, blog traffic increased over 700% in 6 months, which goes to show that a little content promotion can go a long way.

Posts before 2013 = 27

Posts from June 2013 to December 2013 = 3

2013 Posts and Traffic strategy

Here are the three posts I did in 2013 and the traffic strategy used to promote each post:

101+ Sources for Blog Content Ideas – Used SEO to get relevant backlinks to the post

How I Quickly Got a 300% increase in Traffic to a New Blog – Twitter outreach

How I Accidentally Increased Social Sharing on a Blog Post by 96% – Emailed my email list and used social media outreach

And here are the results in summary. Despite only writing a few posts, I got over 700% increase in traffic due to actively promoting those posts.

Over 700% Increase in Traffic in 2013

Got tweeted by some influencers, like…

Ann Smarty – A well known SEO and Founder of My Blog Guest and Viral Content Buzz:

Brian Dean – SEO Expert and founder of Backlinko

Neil Patel – A well known SEO and founder of Quicksprout, and co-founder of Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg.

And also Kristi Hines (popular internet marketing writer for a lot of high profile blogs), Danny Brown (social media author), and a few other people.

Google Traffic – Up by over 800%

Here’s some Google Analytics data showing the increase in Google traffic for the second half of 2013.

Google Traffic Increase 2013

Building backlinks to a page not only boosted search traffic to that page, but also to other pages as well. So if you think that SEO is a lot of tedious work, it is still worth doing for the long term benefits.

SEO vs Social Media

I started using SEO in 2005 for e-commerce and Adsense sites. By focusing on SEO aggressively, I was able to quickly get enough traffic and sales within a couple of months to go full time with my e-commerce business. Back then, social media marketing was pretty much non-existent, but a recent study by Shareaholic shows that social media referral traffic is growing fast.

I intended to use social media and old fashioned publicity building techniques to grow this blog, but it’s hard to ignore the amount of traffic that Google sends. SEO is still very much alive – you just have to do it the right way.

Getting retweeted by other Twitter users was a great experience also. When influencers retweet your content, it is a good sign that your content is top quality. Twitter traffic was also responsible for the sharp spike in traffic in August.

The big surprise for 2013 was the amount of Pinterest shares on some posts, especially since Pinterest wasn’t even a focal point of my efforts early on, especially since business and marketing blogs are more content than image driven.

Although SEO traffic from Google was the clear winner as far as generating traffic to the site, social media marketing has allowed me to start forming relationships with other bloggers and is still important to incorporate into the marketing mix.

The Plan Going Forward

Here are a few things that I am planning on doing going forward.

Write more blog posts – I plan on writing more blog posts in 2014. If writing and promoting a few posts can increase traffic this much, then writing even more should be even better.

The response has been pretty positive so far, so I hope to share even more tips and ideas going forward. Being retweeted by influencers and other people is a great confidence builder.

SEO – I plan on focusing more on SEO over social media. Every time I try to promote a site through other methods, Google seems to notice the increase in real traffic and send me even more traffic. The big difference from the old methods of SEO is that I now focus on sites that can send me real traffic or that are real resources that people will actually read.

In other words, focus on people first before search engines. Remember that the ultimate goal of the search engine is to be able to think like a real person and the search engines will only continue to get better at it.

I also did just a few guest posts, but will do more of that. Some people are afraid that guest posting will be devalued by Google in the future due to people creating low quality guest posts just to get links, but I don’t think it will be an issue as long as you target high quality sites that moderate their content for quality.

Social Media – I’ll probably shift more attention towards Pinterest than Twitter, especially since Pinterest usage has now exceeded Twitter. Pinterest has a ton of potential and early adapters have done well with it, even for content related niches. Twitter traffic exceeded Pinterest referral traffic, but considering that most of my social media efforts were focused on Twitter, Pinterest did really well and I’ll be interested to see if I can do better by shifting more of my focus there.

There are also some other things that I will be trying, including some offline strategies and other tactics to grow the email list, but I will probably write about them as I go along. 2013 was a good year for the blog, but looking forward to an even better 2014.