Ask a business owner how their website is helping their business. You’re likely to find one thing in common. Most of them want more traffic.
About 63% of marketers say that their biggest challenges are driving traffic and generating leads. In order to do that well, you have to get traffic. According to an expert SEO Cambridge company, sometimes getting traffic isn’t actually all that hard, but getting targeted traffic that leads to enquiries and sales is where the challenge lies.
That process starts by doing a website traffic analysis. You’ll walk away with insights that tell you where your traffic is coming from and what those people do on your website.
Are you ready to learn how to look at website traffic analysis and increase website traffic?
Keep reading to find out!
1. Set Traffic Goals
You can find a measurement for almost any action on your website. That makes you go down a crazy rabbit hole of information.
That will waste your time and confuse you after a while. You’ll end up with so much data that you’ll get overwhelmed and do nothing.
That’s why you need traffic goals. You want to set goals and choose the measurements that show your progress.
You can set a traffic goal to get more visitors from search engines. You can then look at the sources of your website traffic to make sure you reach your goal.
2. Use Website Traffic Analysis Tools
How can you get the data you need to conduct a website traffic analysis? Fortunately, there are tools to help you with that.
It sure beats trying to look at your web host’s server data to do a traffic analysis.
Google Analytics is the go-to tool to measure website traffic. It’s also free. You just need to create an account and install a tracking code on your website.
There are other tools such as SEMRush, Search Console, and Hot Jar that measure other aspects of your traffic.
Search Console measures your traffic that comes from search engines. Hot Jar measures customer behavior and how they use your website.
3. Understand the Terms
You do need to get up to speed with the terminology of website traffic analysis. Some of them are general traffic numbers.
Unique visitors measure the number of people that visited your website. Returning visitors measures the number of people who visited before and came back.
Visits measure the number of people who visited your website. These can be unique visitors and returning visitors.
Session duration indicates how much time someone spent on your site in one session. You want this number to be high. A person that spends over a minute on your site has a much better chance at converting to a lead or a sale.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that only visited one page on your website. You want to keep this number as low as possible.
Acquisition tells you where your traffic comes from. This insight is incredibly helpful in seeing what marketing efforts work.
Also read: How to Improve Website Security for Small Businesses
4. What Do Your Traffic Analysis Numbers Mean?
Your website traffic analysis gives you enough information, but you have to interpret it correctly. You need to look for patterns in the data to draw the right conclusions.
Take the time to learn the significance of the numbers. A very high bounce rate means that your website took a long time to load or the design turned off customers.
You could find that all of your traffic comes from one place. You should work to diversify your traffic sources. That gives you more power in case one source of traffic suddenly disappears.
The mistake that many marketers make is that they make assumptions based on limited data. They’ll look at their traffic after a major algorithm change and panic because traffic dropped.
A day’s worth of data isn’t going to give you the information you need to make decisions. Let the changes roll out and look at the patterns after a few weeks.
When you conduct your traffic analysis, look at the past 90 days. Then take into account any seasonal adjustments. For instance, if you sell grills, you’re going to see more traffic in the spring and summer than in the winter
5. Plan to Get More Traffic
You analyzed the numbers, now it’s time to act. A website traffic analysis is useless if you don’t do anything with the data.
Your next step is to make a plan to make improvements. There are two areas to focus on after you do a website traffic analysis: the user experience and marketing.
The user experience is what will give you a lower bounce rate and encourage people to spend more time on your site.
There are a lot of basic things that require your attention. The page load times are significant because people abandon your site if it takes a while to load.
The overall design of the site matters, too. The text should be easy to read. The design should be clean and easy to navigate.
When looking at your traffic, make sure that you remember to target the right kind of traffic. Think of your target audience, and where they are online.
Be sure to have an online presence in those places. You can use that as a way to turn digital marketing into more traffic.
You can get assistance with this part. You could find someone on your own or use a site like seoclerk.com to compare your options.
Conduct a Website Traffic Analysis and Take Action!
A website traffic analysis has to be part of your overall marketing plan. Otherwise, you won’t know what works in your business. It’s easy to do with the right tools.
That information doesn’t do a lot of good if you don’t take action. You have to follow your analysis with a plan of action.
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