SEO vs. Social Media: The Traffic Throw Down

Click-throughs and stickiness are two paramount issues for web businesses. Click-throughs are the number of people who click on a link, and stickiness is the amount of time someone stays on your site.  There is always contradictory information about the issues of sticky click-throughs and social media.  Some people say that social media is not as good as traditional SEO.  Some people say that it is better.  I am here to tell you that they are both right.

Xbiz just posted a story reporting that social media generates less traffic than search. When you dig deeper, the breakdown is not as simple as that. There was a huge variance according to industry.  For instance, the study showed that 42% of new visitors to news sites came from social media, but for sports sites it was only 5%. Overall search traffic still dominated the majority of unique visitor traffic, however social media unique visitor traffic, while only 11%, was on the rise.

What Xbiz did not highlight was that the study was not specifically related to Adult, and it does not have any figures that highlight the trends in Adult Industry. It was a look at all web traffic to all kinds of sites.

The study was conducted by Outbrain, a company which provides widgets to publishers, designed to keep readers on their sites longer. What the study also published was the chart of the top traffic sources for websites:

What they also did not tell you is there is no mention at all of the Adult Industry. In fact, when you look at the findings it actually looks unlikely that they considered Adult entertainment at all.

Does this make the study irrelevant to Adult? No. It is still relevant to some extent – what it does tell you is that SEO is still an important aspect for creating a strong web presence.  In fact, SEO is relevant for social media as well.  Social media is about relationships; SEO is about clicks.