SEO: Figuring Out Where Your Visitors Come From
In the first article on understanding and implementing a plan for SEO, we discussed the terminology of Measuring Website Effectiveness. Let’s discover what these terms mean in relation to your website and how visitors use it.
The answers to the questions below help you make changes to your website so the content and structure is more effective for the user. They may also suggest that you should evaluate your marketing strategy and message especially if your sales and other marketing results are not strong.
When people find your website, it is important to know:
- How many people visit your website and Is there a trend up or down?
- How did they find your site?
- What information do they look at?
- Did the visitor’s usage pattern indicate that the website helped you achieve some business goal?
- What actions do they take after they visit my website?
The statistics that help you understand the first two questions are discussed below. The other questions will be addressed in the next blog.
How many people visit your site?
- Visitor count: A higher visitor count indicates more people are finding your website. If you started an SEO campaign, this is one measure to indicate if your efforts are helping. If you have a new promotional offer online or a new service listed and your visitor count is higher, check the landing pages to see which page viewers visit first. If they visit a page with promotional content, this indicates if your promotion is generating traffic.
- Unique visitors: If your website does not have features that draw people back to it, you would expect that the unique visitors would be relatively high as a percentage of total visitors. This may indicate that your site does not offer enough value to draw people back again. Some features that draw people back again include a subscription service for premium content, regularly updating content, special offers or coupons online, and rss feeds (automatic content updates from other related websites). Other effective means of developing repeat visitors for some business include message boards and polls.
However a high unique visitor count as a percentage of the total visitor count may also indicate a new website or really effective promotion of the website. It takes a couple of visit for a user to believe a site merits returning on a regular basis so it takes some time for repeat traffic to develop. So look at the trend and the individual period to better interpret your unique visitors.
- New visitors: This statistic is the best overall indicator of how fast your traffic is growing. New visitors represent the untapped potential of the marketplace and following what new visitors do on your website gives you great marketing information. If your Analytics tool allows you to segment the data, look at landing sites, time spent on the site, and exit pages for new visitors. This will give you a sense of how valuable they consider your services and the content you provide.
How did people find your site?
- Referring site: If you have increased your directory listings or started a reciprocal blog posting relationship, you would expect links from those sources to increase.
- Traffic source: If you have enhanced your internal, you would expect that your traffic from organic referral sites to increase e.g. Google search by one of your key words. If you can segment this statistic with you analytics program, look at new visitors for support of this conclusion.
Take a look at your analytics and see what these statistics show you before you look at our blog about interpreting visitor’s traffic pattern. A good analytics package is the key to effectively managing your SEO strategy, so if you haven’t installed one yet, make sure you do so you can follow the changing traffic trends.
Great insight into how we should analyse the analytic stats!
Finally I can take all these numbers (that are too low I might add) and actually do something with them instead of wondering what it all meant.
its funny you know, we all know the importance of understanding where your traffic is coming from and tracking this, but how many of us actaully do? I know I dont. Its not that I dont think its important, I just have so much stuff to action and learn and it seems so frugal at this early stage – but as you pointed out, its not