Is Search Engine Optimisation Alone Enough to Get Traffic?

A while ago I wrote about positioning in the search engines and demonstrated what effect different positions had on traffic to a web site. Just this week I came across an anomaly in my results for one of the sites I run. For two very competitive phrases we had been working hard to gain position in the search engines. The idea was based on generating volume rather than targeted traffic.

Now normally you should focus on niche phrases, which makes your job easier when it comes to position and the result more accurate and targeted for customers when they click through to visit the site. But sometimes you do just need to increase traffic to your web site.

You could just buy ads through Google Adwords but this can be expensive as well as resource intensive to maintain. A much more cost effective route to gaining large traffic volumes is to attain position for some highly searched key terms, usually!

After spending many months trying to achieve just this for these particular phrases we are now second only to Wikipedia in the search results on both phrases. With competition in the region of 63 million results on one and 30 million on the other and over 500k searches being performed per month on these phrases.

When I tracked the figures with Googles Webmaster Tools I could clearly see that the web site was getting a large number of impressions from the search results on these phrases. But to my surprise it was not getting any traffic from them!

Looking closer at the results it was easy to see why, the resulting page and title that Google was displaying in the search results was not very attractive. It did not entice people to click on the link and therefore we were seeing no benefit of that position.

So more work to be done on that front and I take back what I said previously, for now. There’s a bit more to it than just being number 1!