Is All Your Traffic From Google?
It’s important to know where the traffic to your site or blog comes from. If you don’t know you can’t evaluate what is happening now nor can you plan for future growth.
Blog Traffic Patterns
This pie chart is from SEO Diva’s Google Analytics dashboard, and it tells me where visitors are coming from. I’m very happy with these metrics, because they tell me this blog is not reliant upon search engines alone for traffic.
Direct traffic is just that. The numbers (not shown) are large enough that I know it’s not just me looking at my blog several times a day.
Search engines are broken down when you delve deeper into analytics, but the Diva’s search engine metrics show that almost all the search engine traffic comes from Google.
Referring sites are from sites that have linked to the Diva, blog comments I have made on other blogs, StumbleUpon visitors, blog forums, directories and lists, and so on.
Becoming active in the community can bring a lot of visitors to a site, and I’m very pleased to see that over 1/3 of traffic to this blog is from other sites. It means I’m not reliant on Google (or search engines in general) for the majority of traffic to the blog.
My goal now is to maintain these percentages and grow the numbers. Reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, writing articles that others like well enough to link to, joining communities, and other social networking activities will increase the number of visitors to my site.
By performing updated keyword research, I know which keywords I want to target for search engine growth, and have made changes accordingly. I don’t worry about that too much, though, except for making my titles more relevant to searches. As long as I write good articles about relevant topics, Google will continue to index the blog quickly and inbound links will grow.
Get an Analytics Program
Google Analytics is free and quite comprehensive. It’s a simple matter to add the code, and if you’re using WordPress, you can add it using the Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin.
Don’t be intimidated by all the metrics. You can take from analytics what you want – just a quick overview of the dashboard will tell you a lot. For any time period you specify, you can find out:
- Number of unique visits to your site
- How many pages were viewed
- Average number of pages visitors looked at
- Percentage of visitors that moved off your site quickly
- Average time spent on your site
- Percentage of visitors that were new
- Where your visitors came from
- Top pages visited
- How your traffic got there:
- search engines
- referring sites
- direct
Delve a level deeper and you can find out what keywords visitors used to find you, which search engines send the most traffic to your site, what sites referred visitors to you…it goes on and on, and will give you some fascinating insights into what’s happening, and you’ll get some added inspiration to keep going.
That’s a really nice breakdown of traffic sources to have – I’ve frequently found it difficult to get a good balance between all three depending on the particular site or blog.
When it comes to growing your search engine visitors analytics are especially useful. As you mentioned it helps with writing article titles and also with internal linking as you know what anchor text to point to which articles.
@Marketing Ideas – It is hard to get a balance – but it’s good to have it as a goal.
BTW, I really like your site – you have a lot of good marketing info on there!
Google analytics is definitely one of the best resources to use.
Google analytics is definitely one of the best resources to use, it provides very good in depth details
@Marquees and Holiday Cottages – I like it the best of any I’ve used.
i got aware of what you are talking about too. sadly my traffic comes from Google mostly (around 85%). I have learnt the lesson too late but i hope to recover from it. Depending from Google completely is bad and make you wake up in the morning and think: how many visitors has google sent to me today? i have to learn how to become more visible in the blogsphere, just like you said. Besides, it is not just a matter of SEO and keywords because there are so many blogs out there that use SEO and are better than my blog that i have to play my game in other fields for sure. Anyway thanks for talking about a topic that i just got to know
Web Talks last blog post..How to increase the performance of SATA hard drives in Windows Vista
Web Talk – You’re right, competition is fierce, so you have to get involved in social networks.
Really Google Analytics package falls behind two very important features most search engine marketers need.
@Software outsourcing – what two features do you think Analytics is missing?
Google AnalyticsIt also has Ecommerce tracking features.
@Symbyo – you can learn a lot about your customers from those features, too.
im working on getting more direct and search engine traffic
thanks very interesting
@Oliver – it takes time but you’ll see results if you keep at it.
Most of my website traffic come from google. My blog traffic is less dependent on google. I get a lot of viewers to the blogs from fellow realtors who are not my cleints now. They want to see what I am doing so you never know who you are reaching.
Eric- New Orleans Cos last blog post..Julia Place Condos-New Orleans Warehouse District- Good choice for a second home!
Google Analytics is a great tool ive been using it for like a week now and its good to see stats and what makes it best is its free
Daniel Dumas :: Mr Night Mans last blog post..Showin’ some love with Comment Luv
I haven’t checked stats as much as I should (yea yea bad me), but if I was to say off the top of my head….networking with like-minded bloggers is my #1 source currently.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Are You Like Jack?
Answer: yes, and it displeases me. Lovely theme, by the way.
I only recently just started using google analytics and I think its a great tool, However SEODIVA I think they should somewhat include backlink(s) to your site(s) that updates daily, This would be a great update.
I know that in webmaster tools they have “External links” but these update every 2-4 weeks.
What do you think about my suggestion?
I still think traffic from Google is still a good indication. Although direct traffic is definitely the best.
You’ve established some great brand name recognition Diva to receive that amount of direct traffic, I am envious. Good work.
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Good pie chart. A great way to know about your traffic.
Yes looks good and analytic s is one of the best stats solutions.
My traffic mainly comes from G and Y
@Eric – it’s easier to promote blogs on referring sites, but if you use your web site URL instead of blog URL on comments, it should help the site.
@Daniel – you can get a lot of help from analytics.
@Dennis – I love getting referrals from other blogs!
@Niccolo – Thanks!
@Dbz – That would be a great update. Have you noticed that they have been making a lot of improvements to analytics? Maybe they’ll make that change, too.
@Roger – My favorite is referral traffic, because it usually comes from relevant sites.
@seo – Google has a lot of charts available within Analytics.
@SEO – Y gets about 20%, and some of my sites rely on it…
One tip if your traffic is too heavily skewed towards google and search engines is to buy expired domain names from snapnames, namejet and tdnam. You can get all those backlinks for pennies and alot of traffic both direct and referral.
@Misprinted – Good tip. You have to be careful not to lose those backlinks with your purchase, though. Changes is the Whois database can trigger their loss.
I second you SEODiva…Google analytics is the best tool we have till today. Keep digging in and you find a lot of amazing stuff about your website.
@deals – and now they’ve added even more features!
Google analytic is the best tools I heard. That’s very dept path to tracking.
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I always screw up my stats by going to my own website too often =/
@Baby Car Seat – it’s a great tool, and free is nice, too.
@Aury – you can configure it to ignore your IP address.
Is trafic from google only or from other sites
I have same problem my stats also get screwed up by visiting my blog again n again
Google was a main source of my traffic. But then it droped and now traffic from social network is my main one.
Google traffic is not stable except it is high CTR. I am trying to bring back those traffic from Google.
Aloha Nemas last blog post..Saving Teen Lives While Driving
we only can can our traffic resuelt from google analytics am i right?
Google analytics is best tool for seo.I had used this for my sites and blogs.Very helpful tool.we can get more details from google analytics like our visitors and our website or blog status in google.I like it.
I enjoyed well while reading your post.
Thanks for sharing your information with us!
Thanks for the tip on Google Analytics……. I like the pie chart……
Determine Your Keyword Phrases
Finding the best keyword phrases to target is an iterative process. First, start with a
list of keywords that you want to target with your website. Next, expand that list by
brainstorming about other phrases, looking at competitor sites and your logfiles, and
including plurals, splits, stems, synonyms, and common misspellings. Then triage
those phrases based on search demand and the number of result pages to find the
most effective phrases. Finally, play the long tail by targeting multiword phrases to
get more targeted traffic and higher conversion rates.