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          Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses drive visits to their website through organic search traffic. Given that the top organic search results receive a third of the clicks, a decline in ranking could be detrimental for your business. Implementing SEO best practices on your website will help to ensure that your web content is seen by as many potential customers as possible. The more visitors you have, the better your chances are of converting those visits into sales!

          Local search engine optimization (SEO) helps local businesses gain visibility by optimizing their local business listings for local search. A business that leverages local SEO will include its address, phone number, local opening times, and exact location in the form of a local citation. The goal is to rank for local searches which are usually performed by people in a specific geographical region looking for a business near them.

          We typically see results within the first 30 to 60 days, but when it comes to SEO, there are many factors at play. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results may not come as fast at you wish.


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          Digital advertising uses the internet to send advertisements to customers who are online through different websites and social media platforms like Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

          The price for Google Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.

          The price for Social Media Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.


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          This depends on the complexity and size of a redesign and if eCommerce is needed. On average, it takes around 14-18 weeks from the web design intensive stage to launch.

          If your website experiences the following issues: it’s not responsive on all devices, has a slow loading speed, the design appears old and tired, users don’t spend long on the site, sales are stagnant, or your business is going through a rebranding - your website needs a redesign to boost your brand awareness and sales.

          Sometimes there’s no need to rebuild a website. Minor edits, refreshing page content and images, or restructuring page layout for SEO best practices can boost traffic and sales.


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          Semantic search launched in 2013 with the release of Google's Hummingbird update. Since then, Google's search engine has become more complex. The integration of machine learning, with RankBrain, and NLP, with BERT, has enabled the search engine to better understand the context of a query and deliver more personalized and targeted results. Semantic SEO is the process of creating machine-readable content using structured data and linked open data to help search engines better understand your content.

          On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. From meta tags to page content, website structure, and HTML, on-page optimization services are focused on making your website more visible to search engines.

          Structured data refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways. Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.


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          An SEO agency has experts in different areas of search engine optimization that may be out of the realm of your marketing team's abilities. SEO can be very complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, as search engine algorithms change it can be difficult to stay current on the latest ranking factors and strategies for improving online visibility. You will likely see a greater return on investment and better results from using a professional SEO agency than you would from tackling this on your own.

          As a digital marketing agency, SMA Marketing provides products and services in four areas: SEO, Local SEO, Digital Advertising, and Web Design

          We focus on building authentic, long-lasting relationships with our clients. We’re goal oriented and results driven and believe in doing good and making a difference in the world.

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What is Referral Traffic?

Knowing the difference between your traffic mediums can have a big impact on your marketing strategy. In this video, we take a look at referral traffic. We share what it is, how it’s tracked, and a few ways you can leverage referral traffic for better reporting. Ok, let’s go!

Resource Links:

Video Transcript:

As I said in the intro, we’re going to be talking about referral traffic. This is the second installment in our guide to understanding Google analytics. The first one was on direct traffic and if you’re interested in that, you can find that either in the card right here or check out our channel, but today we’re going to be talking about referral traffic, specifically.

A Visit Directed From Another Site

Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting a visit to your site that came from either another website or another web page. This could be a blog, this could be a directory, it could be an industry-related forum. Any of those types of sites or another page on the internet that links back to you and sends traffic to your site is going to be known as a refer. This is what Google is going to count as a referral traffic hit in your source and medium reports within Google analytics.

Tracking Referral Traffic

How is referral traffic tracked? Well, it’s passed via HTTP refer. When somebody clicks a link on your site, the browser sends a request to your server and this information is included in most cases. Now, not all cases, people can obviously hide things and use VPNs, but in most cases, the request includes a field of data about the last place that the person had visited. Google analytics captures that field, saves this information, and reports it to you as a referral inside of your source reports.

Social Media as Referral Traffic

One of the main issues with referral traffic is that Google often puts a number of social media sites into your referral report. This happens because by default Google sees people coming from another website like social as referral traffic. As you can see here, Facebook’s got a number of different domains and all of these have been tracked via this site as a referral hit, not a social media hit.

Why does this happen? One of the main reasons is that social platforms are available in a number of different subdomains and devices across numbers of different networks. You can do Facebook in the app, you can do it in your browser, you can do your browser on mobile, a tablet or a computer or even other connected devices now, and this can obviously cause issues in tracking because Google will look for that information, it will pick up that information if it sees it coming from an outside site and it doesn’t necessarily see all the social signals or the UTM hasn’t been built with a social tracking in it, it’s going to go into referral. The other reason this happens is that social networks will use redirects to help protect user ID and identity, so this causes some issues when it comes to tracking social.

Control What You Can

If you want to clean this up, there’s a really good blog post from lovesdata.com and it’s specifically talking about Facebook referrals in Google analytics, but the same logic and the same filtering that they walk through in that piece of content will help you clean up other social channels or maybe other issues with referral traffic not ending up in the right buckets. One of the important things to do is to control tracking on what you can when it comes to your referral traffic. Now, when building links or doing guest content contributions on other websites, it’s nice to know if those site links are actually generating traffic.

In SEO, we’ve talked about it a lot on this channel. We want to build links, but we don’t want just links for the sake of having links. We want links that are going to send qualified traffic. And the one way we can do that is by adding UTMs onto those links in either our backlinking or with our guest content. You can use your UTMs to force a referral link and then create some custom dimensions that you want to track. You could create your own source medium if you want to. But to make it easy, I would start with doing it based on referral.

Use the Google tool that’s linked right here to help you create those UTM codes and this will help you track your referral traffic from the sites that you control at least, at a much deeper level to make sure that your links and your guest content or the other pieces of content you’re creating on other different channels is driving the right traffic to your site.

Wrap Up On Referral Traffic

So to wrap this video up, let’s go over a couple of the main points. Referral traffic is visits that came to your site from another site. How does Google know this? They know this based on the HTTP refer. The issues that we see with referral traffic is that some social traffic can get mixed in here. So you might want to create filters to fix this issue, to make sure that you have really clean reporting. And lastly, you want to leverage UTMs to track visits from links and content from other sites to make sure that you know whether those outbound activities you’re doing are working for your business.

If you have any questions about what we talked about in this video or any of the other videos, if you have any questions about what we talked about here today, please comment below. We’d love to continue the conversation with you. And until next time, Happy Marketing.

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