Increase website traffic. In most cases when a client gives directions with respect to the goals to be achieved by an SEO intervention, it boils down to this: ask for more clicks, more users on web pages. And it is always interesting to show the project referrers the upward graphs.
But is that really the ultimate goal? Clearly not, we are here to turn web marketing tools – specifically the blog, the website, the ecommerce – into gateways for potential customers. That within the web pages must become such. Or maybe they first turn into leads, send an email from a landing page and then ask for more information about the services.
At this point the workflow takes another step in the inbound marketing funnel. But there is one point in this path that we are insistently interested in: the traffic generated by the website, whether through Google or other sources. What do we need to know to avoid chasing useless pipe dreams?
How to monitor website traffic?
Let’s start with the basics: how do you get the information with respect to the visits coming to your portal? There are different ways, at least theoretically. For example, a few years ago Shinystat with its counter was used a lot. Today to monitor website traffic there is Google Analytics.
This free tool (in the basic version) from Mountain View has created such a high and professional standard that it cannot be surpassed. So, among the tools for monitoring and analyzing traffic on an ongoing basis I suggest installing and testing the code on the website.
A code that can also be used for another decisive tool for analyzing website traffic: the Search Console also from Google. This platform – in addition to a number of technical functions – plays a crucial role. That is, it records clicks to the site obtained from organic traffic.
Thanks to the search performance report, you can get valuable data on SEO ranking on Google, change in ranking, and visits obtained thanks to the visibility achieved in the SERP. Are there alternatives to this pairing for analyzing website traffic? Perhaps StatCounter.
This solution allows not only to monitor visits but also to record the activities performed on the site, clicks performed and mouse movements. In short, it works as a session reply and replaces at least some of the work done by tools such as Clarity, Hotjar and CrazyEgg. But it is difficult to do better than Google.
Must-read: how to analyze key performance indicators
What do you need to analyze with these tools?
Website traffic, in its absolute form, is a number that tells you how many people visited your portal in a day, in a week, in a month. Obviously a higher number is a good sign, it means that the website is growing. But how? By sacrificing what? How does all this happen?
Google Analytics together with Search Console allows you to get just that: a refined look at website traffic to help web performance people understand what is happening, what to optimize and what, instead, to prune mercilessly. So what and how to analyze?
User behavior
One of the fundamental aspects with respect to the analysis of visits received: do not stop only at the sheer count of clicks received, which could become an exercise in useless narcissism. This is why it becomes important to assess the quality of visits.
You don’t need to get visits that immediately abandon the site. Through the use of Google Analytics you can start reasoning about dwell time, number of page visits on average, bounce rate–interactions with elements on the page (buttons, videos, sliders, etc.), how many people abandon the domain after visiting a single page–and other metrics that can help you understand if there are usability issues.
One important detail: remember to exclude your IP from Google Analytics to prevent internal traffic from also being counted among site visits. To achieve this you need to create an internal filter as the official guide suggests.
Completed goals
This is one of the fundamentals of good website traffic analysis. Google Analytics allows you to create goals to flesh out the efforts you make to give visibility to your project with corporate blogging, sponsorships, email marketing, SEO and more.
Goals, in fact, are filters that allow you to monitor website performance based on KPIs defined upstream. The web’s most popular traffic monitoring platform gives you the opportunity to choose a good number of goals that you can easily set in your account:
- Event: you perform an action on the website, like watching a video.
- Duration: higher or lower website viewing time.
- Pages: higher or lower number of pages per session.
- Destination: page affected during browsing.
A concrete example: we can add a destination goal to observe how many people arrive on a particular landing page. Then we insert another goal on the thank you page.
In this way we not only monitor how many visits arrive on the conversion page, extrapolating how they get there, but we can cross-reference the data with that of the thank you page.
The thank you page (or thank you page) is the one that starts when there has been a conversion. All of this gives you insight into what percentage of users arrive on the sales page and complete the action you have budgeted for. To all this you can add other objectives to find out whether people are following your directions and showing more or less interest in your work.
Traffic sources
This is an issue that not everyone asks, only data analysts with a good SEO sensibility go over Google Analytics numbers. Which by the way are useful even in the basic version but do not go beyond the concepts of organic, direct and referral. Want to record more interesting metrics?
You have to use URL tracking to give clear parameters to web pages that are filtered by the web traffic analysis tool. There is always Search Console that gives great satisfaction, though.
At this juncture, you cannot do without it. In fact, this SEO tool can monitor website traffic that comes from very specific areas, such as Google News and Discover.
Not forgetting that search performance can also extrapolate positioning and visits related to video and image results. In addition, there are clicks related to Light Google Web pages, which are reduced versions of publications that appear when the connection does not allow anything else to load.
Can I find out the web traffic of competitors?
You can get estimates. You don’t actually have the ability to find out the traffic of a website other than your own, however, there are SEO and SEM analysis tools that allow you to work your way through the process of getting useful information to estimate and hypothesize numbers. This is done in a simple way: by recording your Google rankings and relating the ranking you get for certain queries.
Queries that have a certain search volume, you come to the possible conclusion. Also drawing graphs with respect to traffic increases, decreases, surges and depressions.
All this, for example, is possible with Seozoom and SEMrush: of course, we must always consider that we are working on a hypothetical plan but always useful in the benchmarking phase, the analysis of online competitors necessary to define well-considered web marketing actions.
On the other hand, if we want to expand our analysis, we can use high tools such as Facebook Ad Library and Not Just Analytics to find out the target audience and the topics on which our competitors are most focused.