Analyize my traffic

TheWaterboy

Havent done any SEO or Internet Marketing on the site over the past 18 months. Have a new site design nearly ready to go live within the next month so just looking for some advice on Internet Marketing.

Currently getting about 4000 unique visitors a month - broken down as follows:

88% from Search Engines (33% CPC / 55% Organic)
7% Direct
5% Referrers

I want to increase my Referrers and Direct traffic quite a lot if possible. Any general advice on whats the best way to go about this. Ive recently started a blog and also started using twitter for updates etc.

notnem

TheWaterboy wrote: »

I want to increase my Referrers and Direct traffic quite a lot if possible. Any general advice on whats the best way to go about this. Ive recently started a blog and also started using twitter for updates etc.

The best way to increase referres is to go out there and get links to your site from other related sites / industry portals. There is no easy way around this and while Twitter and the Blog will send you some traffic, it won't be in any great quantities.

As regards direct (type in) traffic, this should increase with time as people find your site and return to it by typing in the domain directly. Search Engines, Referrals etc will help build this number indirectly, but leaflets etc could be useful.

Hope this helps.

Trojan

Direct traffic is type-ins and bookmarks (some RSS feeds may show as direct, some may not). To increase type-ins you'll need brand recognition or offline networking - handing out cards/leaflets/giving talks etc. To increase bookmarks you'll need a compelling reason why people should 1) bookmark your site and 2) revisit that bookmark.

Referrals are people clicking links on other sites (as mentioned above sometimes RSS feed clicks show as referrals depending on RSS reader). So to increase clickthrough, you should have links on pages that are getting lots of traffic. There are many ways to do this - leaving a well thought out comment on a popular blog post is one.

But to go back to primary question, what's your real goal? To get potential customers to your site? If that's the case then I'd work heavily on writing relevant blog posts and articles, and networking on Twitter. I wouldn't worry too much about Directs/Referrers for the moment!

D.W

Have you given any thought to starting an affiliate programme?

TheWaterboy

did think about affiliates - might look more into it. I think the high signup costs with TradeDoubler etc. put me off. I have a good knowledge on how to write my own system but just dont have the time.

Will look into it more.

link8r

Traffic can only really come from 3 sources - Direct, Referral, Search Engine.

If you you were getting 20% of your traffic from Google say, then that's not necessarily bad if you have a brand-orientated site and get a lot of referral/direct traffic. Or if you had a site with a lot of return visits.

Its really about number of unique visits per day excluding the bounced visits. So if you had 100 uniques a day but 40% bounce rate, then you had 60 unique visits worth counting on.

So the % from each source isn't an indicator of performance. Rather, if you had say an unusually high % of MSN traffic -v- Google, lets say 50% ofyour search traffic came from MSN and 25% each from Google/Yahoo, then I'd say you have a definite Google-related SERP issue. If you had the same respectie SERP's in the 3 engines, you should get about 75-85% of your traffic from Google.

So really you need to care about your SERP's and % share by SE if you're looking for a KPI.

Secondly, if you're getting a lot of referral traffic, then you need to make sure you can protect that source - and make sure that Analytics isn't say incorrectly reading a URL or page on your own domain. Very uncommon.

High proportion of Direct Traffic can be a bad sign if you're constantly looking for new visits. If you have low SERP visibility and aren't very popular but have a high direct % then you need to do something. Make sure you and your colleagues IP's are discounted from Analytics...

Best of luck too!