Is Your Website Traffic Coming From the Right Places?
Author: Jamie | Filed under: AnalyticsHow to Avoid Becoming a Dead End
There are many different ways to attract traffic to your website such as blogging, links on other sites and taking part in online business forums.
How do you know that your efforts are worthwhile though? Read on to discover three key areas you need to analyse in order to check where your traffic is coming from.
Using a site such as Google Analytics, you can quickly and easily look at the following and see what’s working for you.
The last thing you want is lots of traffic that comes on to your site, has no interest and turns around again at your dead end.
- Countries
If your business operates solely in the UK for example, it’s a good idea to check where the majority of your traffic is coming from.
You may be getting a lot of visitors, but very few online sales or enquiries. This could be due to you getting the majority of your traffic from outside the UK.
This can happen if you submit articles to article directories and blogs that have a worldwide focus as well as if you’ve carried out a link building campaign from non-UK sites.
- Websites
You should also check what websites are driving traffic to your site. In cases where you’ve done a lot of reciprocal link building, you may get a lot of untargeted traffic.
For example, if you’re running a car valet business and you’ve exchanged links with a local chiropodist, you’re unlikely to get people staying on your site for long because they’re not necessarily looking to have their car cleaned at that time.
- Keywords and phrases
Another useful way to assess incoming traffic to your website is to use Google Analytics to see which keywords and phrases people have typed in to find your site.
This can also help you identify that some of your traffic is not really looking for what you do. Using the car valet example again, someone may have entered carpet cleaning Birmingham into Google and then clicked on to your car cleaning website via the search results.
Having these types of irrelevant traffic will not do your site any harm, but it will have no benefit either.
In order to convert more visitors into customers, your site needs relevant and targeted traffic.
If you want to know more please read my top 10 tips for Google Analytics
Targeted traffic is definitely the key. While other traffic may look good on your stats it’s not really going to make you an income. It will however increase your bounce rate and that’s not really a good thing.
Sire recently posted..To Tweet Or Not To Tweet- That Is The Question
Hi Sire, thanks for visiting! You’re so right – too many people get caught up in boasting about visitor numbers but they are meaningless unless they turn into customers.
Jamie Fairbairn recently posted..Online Marketing Nonsense
Very true….Not every traffic source is same and converts in the same way, specially social media provide the lowest conversion.
Shaan @GeekyStuffs recently posted..Blogger Limits & Restrictions – A Complete List
And I made a post view days back which talks about the top methods to get traffic to your blog.
http://www.shaanhaider.com/2011/04/top-20-traffic-methods-for-your-blog.html
Hope that it will help your readers too
Shaan @GeekyStuffs recently posted..Can You Make a Living Through Professional Blogging
Thanks Shaan, that’s a very useful video on your site.
Jamie recently posted..A Beginner’s Guide to Guest Blogging
Is it worthwhile blocking the Chinese and Indian traffic (for example) thus allowing more of the ones you want (say from the US/UK/Oz) onto the site?
You could try to block them but personally I wouldn’t bother. Having traffic from these countries isn’t going to affect how many people can access your site from the countries you do want to target.
When you’re link building and posting content on the web, just make sure you use sites in the countries you really want to target. Many people outsource their link building and end up with links coming from countries all over the world that are not their target audience.