How To Find Out Where Your Non Search Engine Visitors Are Coming From
Understanding website traffic is not just important for people who want to be found on search engines. Your site may be popular because it gets references from dozens, hundreds, or millions of other sites on the internet, and understanding your site visitors can help you build a profitable online strategy. Better yet, you can often reach out to sites that are sending you traffic and work with them to either increase the number of visitors to your site or channel profitable visitors to the best possible pages.
Many Web.com Search Agency customers use Google Analytics, since it is free to install, easy to use, and has plenty of ways to understand site visitors. In this case, the tool we would use is on the left hand side under Traffic Sources>Referring Sites.
The referring site visits (below) generally are more interesting than normal search engine traffic because referring sites can bring better visitors. Many sites will reference your site by way of a link, so the reader, who is already invested in the referring site, may spend more time on your site looking for information or a solution to a problem. Conversely, if you are buying sitewide links on less relevant sites, you will see that referring site customers from these sites actually spend less time on your site or leave quickly when they don’t get the results that they want.
How can you use referring site traffic information to improve your results and your bottom line? First of all, you can identify the “winners” and “losers” in your list of traffic generators. In most cases, you would not stop free traffic coming from low-value sites unless it is consuming a lot of your bandwidth. For the sites that produce better visitors, or visitors that convert into cash, you can examine these sites and see if there are any opportunities for improving your visitor volume. For example, if you see that the link to your site is buried in text further down the page, you can negotiate with the site owner to make it more prominent. You may even come to an advertising agreement to make your link into something more enticing, or get more links of the referring site itself.
An age-old piece of advice from Google is to design your site as if search engines did not exist. Even though search engines have been around for as long as the Internet, the advice rings true because a lot of site traffic comes from other site links, and Google used this networked approach as a basis for its PageRank algorithm. If a customer is coming to your site without using a search engine, it is incumbent upon you, the site owner, to make sure that (a) they can find what they’re looking for and (b) they would be likely to recommend the site to someone else. After a time, your “organic” profile among referring sites can increase in a manner similar to search engine rankings, and these visits and links will contribute to your SEO profile at the same time. Best of all, a better understanding of your inbound traffic sources can help you identify demographics and interest groups that you had not previously pursued, which can lead to increased profitability for your business as a whole.
