New research from Silicon Valley agency Milestone Internet reveals how local and organic search generate more traffic, produce higher engagement rates and it converts at higher revenue rates per transaction than other channels.
The Milestone Internet research paper analyzed 500 location based businesses, their sessions and page views in order to understand which channels produced more earnings at the best ROI.
According to Milestone Internet:
“Milestone Research reviewed over 500 location-based websites, 63 million sessions, and 176 million page views over 18 months from Jan 2020 to June 2021 to generate these findings.”
Organic search was the top performing channel, followed by local search.
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What was especially interesting was that referral traffic came in third. Referral traffic can be traffic from sites like Angi (formerly Angies List), Yelp, Home Advisor and so on.
I once heard Brett Tabke (@btabke), founder of Pubcon (@Pubcon) search marketing conference, speak about promoting a website where he said that there is no better source of traffic than a referral from a source that is trusted. He said that those referrals convert at a higher rate and result in higher enthusiasm by customers.
My professional experience following that advice validated his observation.
There is something special about a website telling their audience about how great another site is as part of a strategy for obtaining more traffic because the visitors are ready to embrace the site before they even visit it.
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Local search today has many options for obtaining quality recommendations from trusted third party websites.
An interesting finding was that traffic from referrals resulted in higher engagement rates.
Milestone Internet’s research showed that referral traffic was responsible for nearly 10% of traffic. According to the research, optimizing for third party referrals is an important channel to optimize for.
According to the research paper:
“Referral traffic is the 3rd largest contributor to website traffic with 9.4% of overall traffic. Referral traffic is the visits to your website from the links on different sites. It is a recommendation from one website to another.
The data indicates that generating quality backlinks and external sources is a good source to generate web traffic.”
This is how the different channels ranked for traffic:
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A big takeaway is that local search deserves to be fully optimized, from taking full advantage of Google My Business (GMB), building third party referrals, improving SEO and utilizing every opportunity to increase visibility in search.
Milestone Internet’s researchers observed:
“Organic and Local Search together is the best combination for driving website traffic with 69% session share and 73% page view share. But given the data, they turn out to be the most reliable, resilient, and high-performing channels.Local gives the best ROI with the highest page views per session compared to other channels.”
Milestone Internet offered these ten tips for optimizing the local search visibility:
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Read the full article and download the research paper:
Organic Search and Local Drive 69% of Digital Traffic for Location-Based Businesses
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