SEO Consultant Ireland

When you manage to capture your web site visitors, understanding how you did it is extremely important to base your future efforts on how to grow your web site traffic. Here are the basic questions you need to answer for each of your visitors:

Where did he came from?
What search phrase he used?
Where did he land on your web site?

The free questions above are the key of understanding your traffic. I lots of cases you will have to drill down further and answer questions like:

Where geographically is your web site visitor from?
What was your rank in the SERP for the phrase he was searching for?
How was your site represented in the SERP for the search phrase he was searching for?
Where did he go on your site?
Where did he go next?
How long was he on the site?

We all know that Google Analytics is the most used online web site log analyzer today. It is free, and Google is ingesting a lot in improving it constantly. But anyone who used it knows very well that although it is probably the best overall service it still lacks the capability to answer half of the questions listed above.

The result is that if you really want to understand your visitors you will have to use multiple web log analyzers. Especially if you have an active site where the content is dynamic and ever changing you will require a real time display of the activity on your web site to understand what do people actually read, when and why. The same article published in the different times of the day will not attract the same numbers of visitors. That and number of similar situations is where you are 100% helpless with just Google Analytics since it’s data is really far from real time, and is not even intended for such use (it is best used as an overview of the historical data).

There are number of tools that can help you to work with the real time data. You can analyse your raw log files yourself with software packages like WebTrends, or you can use the online services. There is a long list of them and each has a number of nice features so your choice will depend on what exactly are you looking for. The online web site visitors tracking services are usually free to begin with and then paid for when your traffic grows.

The ones I can recommend are StatCounter and the one with interesting features for bloggers is FEEDJIT.

Just looking at the Google Analytics of one of my sites and found Under the Traffic Sources in the Referring Sites the site called Cuil. That made me thinking, why doesn’t Google display Cuil under the Search Engines in the Traffic Source where it belongs? Is it just that Google doesn’t really like Cuil?

Check your web log analyser and you will see the same!

The definition of the Good Google Web Traffic:

A good web traffic from Google search engine is the traffic of the visitors from from Google and found what they have been looking for on the web site. What this means is that the text in the search engine results page (SERP) that has represented the site (title, two lines of text and the web address) was descriptive and it represented well the page where the visitor was brought. A visitor who found what he was looking for will not click ‘Back’ in the browser to see the search results again and choose a different listing, but will stay on your page. If the web page is related to the topic a visitor is interested in, and the content is well distributed under easy to find headings, the visitor will most likely open a few more pages on your site.

How to recognise a Good Google Web Traffic in your web log files?

A good web traffic is the visitor who comes to your page and does not leave your site from that same page, especially without visiting any other page. Check web site visitors paths through the web site, and where you see a path that contains more than one page on your site – it is an interested visitor. If the referring page to the page the visitor came to (landing page) your site is Google, it is the Good Visitor from Google.

How to recognise a Bad Google Web Traffic in your web log files?

If the visitor paths contain the entries where the landing page is the exit page it is a clear indication that the web site visitor did not find what he was looking for you the site and have left without browsing around at all. If you notice that there are number of visitors from Google (or any other search engine) who just come to your site – and leave straight away, it is a clear indication that the listing of your site the way Google represented it is not what the visitor found on the landing page. Check the way Google represented your page in the search engine results page, and compare that text with what your web page contains. If the visitor cannot quickly find those same words or phrases from the SERP on top of the landing page – in most cases you have just generated a Bad Google Web Traffic.