

Ask YC: Is long-tail Google search traffic a good thing? - shafqat

If your site has a lot of pages indexed by Google, its likely that a lot of your traffic is from organic SEO traffic. It's great because its free and usually grows as your site's pages grow. The negative is that the bounce rates are higher.<p>What do you guys think? Is a lot of SEO traffic a good thing or something to be concerned about?
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KLAW
It's really important and not at all negative, it just means people are
searching for something specific, and will most likely move on once they've
found it.

For retailers, these are the 'gold' searches. The more detailed the search
phrase, the more likely the purchase.

Think about it: 'Digital camera' is far too broad to determine the mindset of
the searcher, but 'sony cybershot offer black' shows a far greater purchase
intent. Add on a specific product name / number and a sale will be imminent.

For NewsCred this stuff is equally important. You can minimise bounce rates by
doing more to keep these users onsite, be it related content, UGC, improved
usability / navigation, etc.

Besides, traffic is traffic...

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shafqat
Good points all around. We definately have to focus on keeping these SEO users
on the site longer. More importantly, to have a good acquisition funnel to
convert them to registered/regular users.

I'm not so sure all traffic is created equal, but the marginal benefit of all
traffic is certainly positive.

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KLAW
To encourage users to sign up you just need to encourage more interaction /
personalisation. Easier said than done, I know.

The news aggregation game is a bit in-and-out... traffic we receive (as a
publisher) from aggregators comes in and mainly bounces. These readers often
browse multiple sources to get a view on an individual story (to get a wider
spectrum of views, more detail, better pics, more user insight etc).

The way NewsCred is designed doesn't lend itself so well to this... you have
promote one story at a time; I'd consider adding more links to more sources on
that story, Techmeme/Google News-style, to take advantage of this sort of
behaviour.

Maybe users can ultimately choose their own sources, or NewsCred can choose
for them, based on where other people are going. The key is in achieving a
good depth of coverage, rather than just pointing people at the big media
sites.

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shafqat
Agree completely that its all about depth of content. What's your startup?
Don't see it mentioned in your profile!

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KLAW
Ah thanks, schoolboy error. We talked by email a couple of weeks ago... now
updated ; )

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ScottWhigham
To me, that's like asking, "My customers that pay with $100 bills tend to
spend more than the ones who pay with $20 bills. What do you guys think? Is a
lot of $20-bill-paying customers a good thing or something to be concerned
about?" It just doesn't make sense to me.

Traffic is money for you I would assume. You don't appear to sell directly to
subscribers so you need traffic if you are going monetize your site.

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shafqat
Our monetization strategy is not dependent on traffic, although ad revenue
from the consumer site is definately a bonus. As for our biz model, I'll post
about it separately once we can disclose more.

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mechanical_fish
It must be a pretty odd monetization strategy if people checking out the
product is a _bad_ thing. Even a visitor who will never be a customer might
have friends or blog readers that will.

Do you work for the NSA? Have you considered deploying a login barrier and a
splash screen to drive people away? ;)

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shafqat
Haha... I never said having traffic is a bad thing! I'm just comparing what
the merits of long tail SEO traffic is vs direct or SEM traffic.

