SEO vs. SMO - Which is Best for Generating Quality Traffic?

If you asked most website owners what kind of traffic they wanted to bring to their sites – media or search engine visitors – the answer would probably be a resounding preference for the latter. Everyone knows the potential your website can have when you are getting search engine driven traffic to it. But are there any benefits in having SMO (search media traffic) to your site?

In recent tests conduced on different blog sites, different metric values and measures were used to determine the success of having SEO traffic driven to the site versus SMO traffic to the site. Although the initial numbers were showing that both methods were close in driving the original traffic to the site, one at 81 percent and one at 80 percent, after applying different metrics to the equation, the differences with SEO traffic started to take the lead.

The four measures that were taken on both sites include the returning visitors, average page views, time on the site and the bounce rate. Each of these variables were taken into account for both blog sites. The returning visitor measure is really an indicator of loyal the readers are. It seems as though SMO is known for attracting initial visitors who stop to read an article, but then move on and do not come back to the site. In this test, the SEO return rate of visitors was at 19 percent while the SMO rate as at 15 percent. It is important to note however, that there are many other factors that go into this kind of measure.

The results did show that SEO won that part of the competition. The average page views for each site tallied at 2.00 for SEO and 1.3 for SMO. Now that makes the score: SEO - 2 and SMO – 0. What about the time spend on the website? Well, it looks like this also put SEO in the winner’s circle with 1.8 minutes average spent by visitors on their site and SMO with 1.3 minutes.

With three test categories down, and one to go it looks like SEO is going to be the winner, can they hold in for round four? Round four consisted of the bounce rate. The bounce rate measures how many visitors left the website after only looking at one page. The higher the bounce rate is, the more the visitors leave the website after only looking at one page. In this case, SEO had a bounce rate of 83 percent while SMO had a bounce rate of 84 percent.

This gives SEO the total victory after SMO in this test. Whether or not the findings are enough to offer conclusive evidence that one is clearly better than the other, it is safe to say that both SEO and SMO have positive and negative characteristics to them. The choice is ultimately up to the website owner, and they may just find that incorporating both is the best way to go.