With so much concentration on Google in the SEO industry, it’s easy to forget that there are other sources of traffic out there. It’s logical most of the time to focus on the top dog in the search industry, but sometimes it can get you into trouble. It’s important to make sure that Google is the right target for your SEO campaign.
It’s true that Google provides the majority of search traffic for the majority of sites. It’s highly likely that the search engine should be the focus for your business, but there is always the slight chance that you should take a different approach. Knowing where your target users come from is the first step in constructing the right SEO campaign for you.
Checking stats is vital to SEO planning
Your existing statistics should play a huge part in all of your planning for search engine optimisation. Even if one of the aims you have for your site is to hit bigger and better things, your existing statistics can provide you with invaluable information about your site’s users. Talk to our consultants at SEO Consult Australia about gathering user information. This information can be used to build on your existing traffic profile.
When looking at your statistics, there are at least three things you need to make note of:
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Referring sites. Tracking down where your users are coming from is one of the first things you should do when planning your optimisation campaign. Obviously, the main aim of a SEO campaign is to alter your traffic patterns. However, it’s much easier to build on something than to start from scratch.
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Time spent on pages. Most people look at their time-on-page stats because they’re concerned about their bounce rate. When you’re looking at stats for search engine optimization planning, you need to look at time-on-page to see which pages are attracting which users. Your time statistics can provide you with an idea of which user groups are attracted to your site. For example, if you discover that you’re getting 3,000 visitors each day from whycatsarefunny.com and they head straight to your ‘cat health’ page, you can be fairly sure you have a solid following of cat lovers.
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Knowing which users are visiting which pages enables you to tailor your SEO plan more carefully to attract more of those users. It gives you a focus for your keyword research, and makes it much easier to draw up a profile of your target groups.
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The referring search engine. This should be taken as a separate category from general referring sites. Internet users are strange creatures at times. Although Google holds a huge majority of the search industry, some people are die-hard fans of other search engines. Your target group might all come from another engine.
The information you gather from your site’s statistics can help you greatly with your SEO plan, but has to be analysed before it will be of extensive use. It helps to think outside of the box. Use your stats as a base.
