Don’t put all your search traffic eggs in one Google basket

This is what says Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Bing in a post titled Bing Penguins & Pandas Poetry

Whether you like Microsoft or not, what he rightfully says is don’t just depend on Google for all your traffic – invest in other sources (websites, blogs, other search engines and social networking websites).

In the afternoon while having lunch with my wife I was explaining to her what it means to solely depend on Google for your business: it’s like farmers depending solely on the monsoons (or other rainy climates) for their crops. When you just depend on rains then your crops fail when the rainfall is below normal or if one year there is no rain. You have to create other sources of water. You need to learn to preserve water. You need to learn about crops that can be grown even if there is less water. I mean, don’t just depend on the rainy season for your harvest.

In the same manner, if you solely depend on Google, what happens if all of a sudden, like just happened with the Penguin update, your links vanish from search results and your traffic drops drastically? Most of your business will be gone.

Here are a few things you can do to create other qualified traffic sources:

• Publish your content on other websites and blogs: This not only improves your search engine rankings it also gets you targeted traffic from niche sources.
• Publish a regular newsletter: This is something I haven’t been doing I must confess. I have set up a newsletter at MailChimp, people have been signing up gradually, but I haven’t been regular. I must. In the coming weeks, I will. By publishing a regular newsletter you can keep in touch with your older, existing clients and you can also bring back those visitors to your website who might have visited once, dropped their e-mail ID and then forgotten about your website even when they could have used your service.
• Submit your blog and the RSS feeds link to related directories: Again, this will get you more traffic from more sources.
• Make ample use of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter: Right now I’m not sure how a B2B business (which mine is) can engage people on social media for the purpose of getting you work, but many content based companies have significantly improved their traffic  bypassing Google altogether.
• Create a strong brand for yourself: People should know what you do and they should seek you whenever they need what you can provide. For example, people should know that I’m a professional, experienced content writer and when they need credible, reliable and well written content, they should approach me.
• Submit content to social media websites: Create small videos related to your business and put them on YouTube. You can create slides and put them at SlideShare.
• Create a community: Creating a community doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be getting customers and clients out of it (you do, in fact) but they will be your advocates whenever they come across people who may require your services.

Duane further says:

Algorithms change.  Rankings change.  Competition happens.  The fact is, you need to be prepared.  So, when your single biggest source of traffic sudden loses steam, what do you do?  If your plan was to make sure your content ranked well across all the major engines, then your plan of action would already be in effect, protecting you from the loss in one area.  True, its not an offset that matches what could potentially be lost at the same level, but the option is losing everything and having nothing suddenly.

This is actually very true. So use your content to create multiple traffic sources.