Dude, Where’s my Traffic?
Friday, February 26th, 2010
All website owners and online businesses have quite similar aims. We all want more visitors, we all want more leads and sales – essentially, we want to be making money.
I am no exception – I run a number of online businesses, retailing a physical product that someone else stocks and ships. My overheads are at a minimum, and most of the ‘retail’ side of the operation is taken care of. All I need to do is run a successful website, albeit in an online market that gets more competitive every day.
But what does success entail, and how do we achieve it? In my case, success is strongly linked to traffic. I’m a strong believer that the only way to achieve this is Organic SEO. It’s the ultimate long term solution. Google Adwords does work, but can be really expensive; and other similar websites are hit & miss and hard to evaluate. Offline methods are pointless nowadays.
An evaluation of the search engine rankings for my online store revealed I had achieved top rankings for all desired terms. This is shown in the table below; the data is taken from Google (left column is the page ranking, right column is the traffic received)
Based on our previous thinking, the split between the SERP (search engine ranking position) and the percentage of traffic that particular result gets has always been:
I crunched the numbers a little further, to assess both my organic SEO efforts and the accuracy of Google’s data.
The discrepancies are clear – I had a top ranking and the SEO efforts had achieved their purpose…but I was not really winning my fair share of traffic.
This raises a lot of difficult questions; is ‘winning the Google race’ all that matters? Any SEO professional knows it is a constantly changing market place. Google is constantly tweaking there search algorithms to ensure the most accurate results, and SEO experts must learn to adapt accordingly.
An easy conclusion to draw would be that visitors are searching for my terms, and clicking elsewhere as the other results look more relevant. Few people actually use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button, so attention must be paid to making your result appear relevant – not just fool Google’s searchbots.
So if organic SEO is not the ‘Holy Grail’ now-what do we do? We get creative…
- Google Images
There is ALOT of traffic coming through Google Images, yet this is regularly seen as a ‘low value’ traffic source. If there is traffic, we need to find a better way to use it. - News Articles/Press Releases
A more recent phenomenon in search results is the abundance of ‘up-to-date’ content (e.g. press releases and news articles). Using this method, we can quickly gain traction in competitive search terms using up-to-the-minute relevant content. - Social Networks
Google and Yahoo both display social media (mostly Twitter) directly in their search results. Employing these social networking platforms effectively means we can help our organic search engine traffic. - Google Maps
Without going in to detail, I must stress that Google maps are SO important these days. Read this link, or this, for more information.
SEO is an exciting, rapidly evolving process. As marketers we are constantly learning, and we need to evolve to stay in the game
Tags: google ana, google analytics, google traffic, SERP
Get a quote
Get a Free Quote
To get the most your of your website, you need great design and lots of customers for a FREE, No Obligation Quote and Consultation - Get in Touch Today!
Tweets
You are doing all the right things when it comes to seo but you are not targeting the right keywords for your product. They obviously perceive it as something else. Take a look at the other sites listed around your results for your keywords are those the same type of sites as yours? If so look at what they are displaying in their title and description that is making the difference. Plus how long do those visitors that do come stay? why is google estimating so high? and I’d like to know what your site is:)
Tina
I am a little wary of revealing the site due to fear of penelty from the great Google machine
But I am ranking for generic terms (My Product) as well as all the usual sales/buying signal keywords.
Competitors are all doing things quite similarly. I have a good ‘Avge Time on site’ and a low bounce rate-so everything is going to plan that way.
My main point is why does Google estimate so high too-and how much impact does the Google SERP’s have on where users are clicking these days.
Thanks for the feedback though-might do some more analysis
James
Another factor to consider is the impact of Google’s personalisation of search. Observed SERP position does not always match data from Google’s webmaster tools, and may not reflect what a different user may experience.
It is worth running a test between your main computer, logged into your Google account, logged out, cleared cookies or a different browser and from a different IP address, with cookies cleared. The variance is especially noticeable in longtail queries.
I have noticed this as well-personalized search is without doubt having an impact-and will more going forward. Thanks for you input mate-I will go through and check the data from Google Webmaster Tools-I hadn’t thought of that angle.
James
Are you using exact match numbers for your keyword traffic estimates? Broad match would skew them a lot higher. Also, you don’t specify the time period. I assume you’re using a month’s worth of data?
Using exact match mate-broad match is way to inaccurate
The time period was for January Traffic (Google Keyword Selector time period vs my own Google Analytic s Data for January)
James