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When your site has established a significant position in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), the sources of your traffic can show more variety than just search engine results for certain keywords. Webmasters of other resources can also find your site while searching for keywords relative to their own theme, and find your site worth linking to even without keeping you informed. If you run some link exchange campaigns, all the Web sites you exchange links with become potential sources of your traffic.
It is possible to treat not only search engines and pages as your traffic sources, but also keywords. Some of them may prove much more productive in referring visitors to your site than the others. By analyzing keyword productivity you may adjust the next cycle of your SEO campaign. As you remember, the Promotion Cycle starts with researching and selecting keywords and key phrases. Now you can supplement the site-independent data (like Page Rank and Alexa traffic rank of the top-10 sites) about every keyword suggestion with the actual indication of how each key phrase works for your specific Web site. The reports indicating the traffic performance of your referrers can be found in HitLens under the "Referrers" group. Let's start with the report entitled "All Referrers" to get a general picture of how certain categories of traffic sources work for you. 
The "All Referrers" Report From the picture above, we see that our site "weatherscreen.com" gets much more traffic from search engines than from other traffic sources; at the same time, we get very little traffic from referring pages, compared to other traffic sources. Depending on our advertising budget, we might want to increase input into campaigns and paid advertising, or leave it intact; however we will definitely want to lift the number of visitors coming to us from the referring pages, consisting mostly of our link partners. That's why we plan to enhance and deepen our link exchange campaign. As long as our search traffic statistics are satisfactory, we don't plan on any additional SEO activities. The next report, "Referrers Trends", is similar by meaning; however it allows you to get more details on how the number of visitors from different sources changes over time. Referring sites and pages The "Referring Sites" and "Referring Pages" reports show you the productivity of your link partners and simply the sites that are linking to you without entering a link partnership. 
The "Referring Sites" Report Imagine we had a link partnership or advertising relationship with "weather.com", "joeant.com" and "comcast.net". We see that these sites are less productive in referring visitors to us then some of the sites mentioned at the top of the list. Our steps may be to analyze their visitors' average profile and create more targeted text links or banners for these sites, i.e. improve the quality of our creatives. The "Top 100 Referring Pages by Sites" report allows you to understand which pages within the analyzed sites refer the most visitors and which ones are least productive, allowing you the opportunity to adjust the creatives on the underperforming pages. Search Engines and Keywords Further, you will see a number of reports providing details on search engine performance. The first of them is entitled "Search Engines": 
The "Search Engines" Report From this report we find out that our optimization efforts have proven most efficient on MSN which refers most visitors to us. Since we are not very satisfied with the performance of Google and not satisfied at all with the results we get from Yahoo!, we will plan to add more "Google-optimized" and "Yahoo!-optimized" pages to our site in the next Promotion cycle. Also, we might want to continue our link popularity campaign to increase our visibility on Google and get the most out of this search engine. 
The "Search Keywords" Report The "Search Keywords" report is most crucial for our SEO campaign, as it shows how its results correlate with the keyword profile of our site we've compiled while researching keywords. From the report shown in the picture above, for instance, we see that "weather forcast" (a typo) and "long-range weather forecast" bring us most visitors. We also optimized our pages for "horoscope", however this word isn't as productive as we've hoped. The reason is probably that it's too general and few searchers use it in their queries. Therefore, we should plan to pinpoint the "Daily World Searches" for this keyword with the help of the WebCEO keyword suggestion tool and re-optimize the pages for other keywords if possible. You may also come across the situation where you didn't optimize at all for a certain keyword, yet it still brings you a noticeable amount of traffic. In our case, we could think of the key phrase "long term weather forecast" as of an example of this situation. Most probably, this page appears high on Google because we optimized for "long-range weather forecast" and Google associates "long-term" and "long-range" with each other according to the Semantics principle. Well, it's a nice keyword suggestion, after all. Let's thank Google for it and add several pages to our site which we will optimize for "long-term weather forecast" to further increase our visibility on these terms. If we wish, we may use Web CEO Ranking Checker to find out our current positions for this keyword. The general rule is as follows: each your page should be optimized for three keywords maximum (it is best when it is optimized for one or two). So, if you find out that some keywords you've optimized the pages for are underperforming, and the other keywords which are absent in your site keyword profile are relevant and well performing, you should switch off the inefficient ones and re-optimize the pages to increase your visibility on the keywords that are more efficient in referring visitors. Another report worth noticing is "Pages found on keywords". It directly lets you know whether the page you've optimized for certain keywords brings you traffic based on that keyword. If you find out that the search engine considers that page relevant to other keywords and key phrases, the first thing you should do is to calculate the main keyword parameters (prominence, proximity, density and frequency) for that page and the keyword it is ranked high for. Thus, you endeavor to discover the real formula matching the search engine's ranking algorithm. The "Search Engines History" and "Search Keywords History" will show you the performance trends of engines and keywords respectively, so you see the dynamics of referrers' productivity over time. You can compare this to your optimization log to find out your most successful and unsuccessful actions. What you should remember - Your main referrers are the pages that link to you, search engines and search keywords.
- The general rule is to focus on those referrers that don't perform as well as you planned, and figure out how to improve their performance.
- "Search Keywords" and "Search Keywords History" reports bear the highest importance for you to estimate the accuracy of your optimization actions over time.
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