We all know that the old adage, “build it and they will come,” really is a load of waffle when it comes to getting traffic to your website. Perhaps it would be more suitable to suggest build it, market it a lot, build a presence in the search engines, get yourself engaged in social media, keep your content fresh, say something different and give people a reason to share it with their friends and then they will come – if you do it particularly well.
But they might not come directly.
Even after someone finds your website, visits it and decides they will return, they might not return “directly.” Even if they know of you, there’s a decent chance they’ll return via a search for your brand term, rather than by typing your web address into their browser’s address bar.
Here’s some traffic source data from our site(taking data from 1st April 2010 – 31st March 2011) where:-
- Referral traffic is traffic to the site as the result of clicking a link to our site on another website.
- Direct traffic is those typing our web address into their browser (or using a bookmark stored in their browser) and coming directly to the site.
- Brand organic relates to people searching anything specifically related to “Tecmark,” into Google and visiting the site that way.
- Non-brand organic is traffic that came as the result of someone searching a keyword in a search engine that does not contain our brand name, for example, “SEO Manchester,” “ipad developer london,” or “app developers.”
- Over the 12 month period we took data from, 22% of the Tecmark traffic came direct – i.e. people typing our web address into their browser’s address bar.
- 23% came as the result of “brand organic.” That is to say they found us in a search engine by typing one of our brand terms in, e.g. “Tecmark,” or “Tecmark.co.uk.”
We invariably see a similar pattern across client sites as well.
Essentially, more of the people who were looking for us online went to a search engine to find us than came straight to us.
There are likely to be all manner of reasons for this. Some people may not remember or know the domain name off the top of their head. Others might be looking for some specific information about us and want the search engines to present the relevant page or another website that might have that information. But let’s not also forget that we’ve become very accustomed to letting Google and the other search engines do the legwork for us. I’m guilty of searching a brand in Google even when I know the domain, just to save me the “hassle,” of typing the web address in!
Which Brand Terms do People Search?
There were all manner of Tecmark related brand terms that referred search traffic over the 12 month period analysed. Some of the more common ones include:-
- Tecmark
- Tecmark Manchester
- Tecmark.co.uk
- Tecmark Systems Ltd
- Tecmark Apps
- Tecmark UK
- Tecmark SEO
There are also commonly searches for various names alongside “Tecmark.” Again, we see similar patterns across all the websites we deal with.
Ranking for Your Brand Terms
If someone types anything to do with your brand into Google, you want the first website they see to be yours. What you don’t want is for other sites, whatever they are, to be outranking you.
If you manufacture goods that are then sold by other retailers, you may find people competing with you on brand searches. You may find other companies across the world with the same or a similar name outranking you on some searches too. You could find other companies with a similar name “competing” with your search terms or you might find yourself up against forums, directories or blogs.
If you have a comprehensive SEO campaign in place, you will generally find your obtain rankings for your brand terms efficiently. But it’s worth keeping an eye on traffic to your site from your brand terms and keeping an eye on rankings, particularly for your secondary brand terms.
By not ensuring your presence for your company name and similar searches, you could be losing potential clients who are already looking for you, to your competitors.
