Making you’re site stronger
By mow you should be making sales after putting in all those hours and hard work BUT are you getting all that you want from you positioning in the search engines. When you sit back and take a moment to think about things, you could be making more money than you are now, just think if those 10 sales turned into 20? Rather than make 10,000 GBP per month, how about 20,000 GBP per month? I bet that caught your attention right? After being an active SEO Specialist for quite a few years now I certainly know what a difference rankings cans make to my (or a clients) bank balance. But the thing is, you can have the highest traffic site in the world but that doesn’t mean you’re going to make a killing from it. Now you need to find out what you’re visitors really want.
When thinking about increasing sales from your existing traffic we tend to think about conversion optimisation. Well your right if you think that but you also need to know exactly what your visitors are doing on your site and you need to know all the imperfections of your site so you can improve upon them. The best place to start is you’re stats.
Webalizer & AWstats - Chances are your web hosting provider offers some sort of free stats program like the ones listed. These programs are pretty basic and you can’t customise them much but for the beginner or someone who doesn’t want to be blown away with information, these two would be good ones to break you in because they are very easy to read and understand.
Google Analytics - The good thing about this one is you have the ability set targets so you can track users who are landing on specific pages. If you’re running a PPC campaign you can also track through analytics. Probably the best free stats program available.
So what am I looking for?
Right ok so you have picked you’re weapon of choice but what are you looking for?
Visitors - Pretty basic to understand but this is what it sounds like. I’ll tell you how many visitors you have had to your site in a certain time period. The main thing here is you want to see them visitors increase over time. You’re stat program will also give you a good indication to see if the links from external sites are sending traffic your way or not.
Referrers - This basically tells you where you’re traffic is coming from. What engines and what ads you may be running.
Keywords - Your site is already ranking so you know how to do that part but what does it mean? Well this section of the stats will tell you which keywords are performing and which are not so you can do some tweaking on the less performing ones.
Exit Pages - This is probably the most over looked, yet probably the most important stat you can look at. This will tell you what pages your visitors are leaving. This could be a good signal that something might be wrong with that page. It could be a broken link or something silly which makes them leave but that equates to you losing money.
Right ok, I have all this data, now what?
When you think about trying to increase your sites conversions, you need understand what’s going on with your site. You will spend time looking for flaws, other time you’ll be reflecting upon that missed opportunity but never forget there is always room for improvement within you’re site, no matter how well designed it is you will come across a page which is the top exit page. So you will always be testing something.
What you should do
Check you’re stats often, I am a stat whore and check them everyday but you don’t need to so this if you don’t want to. You can do it weekly, bi-weekly or whenever suits you. But make sure you do check them because it’s going to help you know what’s going on with your site and where you’re traffic is coming from and what the visitors are doing on your site.
Summary
There is no way in hell for me to cover all the things you should be looking for in the stats because there just is simply too much information in them. What I have given you is the most important ones (or what I feel are the most important) to keep you’re eyeballs on.
