Measuring website traffic and the success of your website does not need asking for user opinions on the attractiveness of your About Us page headshots. While this may justify your new haircut and make you feel better, it will not turn prospects into customers.
Specific website performance measures that correspond directly to your financial objectives should be monitored periodically. Here’s what you should look at.
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Online Traffic
In general, website traffic refers to the number of visitors to your website. You must track the quantity and quality of traffic, as well as what users do on your site.
Understanding your traffic is critical because more visitors mean more potential sales. Each site visit is an opportunity to make a good impression and assist people on their way to resolving their problems with your company as their guide toonily.
Here are some key site traffic metrics to keep in mind.
Sessions: A session is defined by Google as “a group of user interactions with your website that occurs within a specific time frame.” Multiple page views, events, and even e-commerce transactions can occur within a single session.
When reviewing session data, consider whether site sessions are increasing or decreasing. Are there any marketing efforts (or lack thereof) that can be linked to trends? Are there any seasonal factors that may be driving trends (for example, an increase in traffic at Christmas for an e-commerce site)?
Source, Channel, And Medium: Channels are the larger buckets from which your site traffic originates (direct, organic, social, email, referral, paid, display, and other advertising). The source and medium delve into the specifics. For instance, within your paid traffic channel, you could use facebook.com as a source and pay-per-click (PPC) as a medium.
Landing Pages: These are the pages that direct visitors to your website from specific sources. The pages that people visit from organic sources indicate how good (or bad) your SEO is. Email landing pages provide information about what your subscribers are interested in. Are people following your instructions?
Time Spent On The Page: Stay spent on particular pages can indicate if people are reading your material, engaging with dynamic aspects, viewing videos, and overall enjoying their time on your website. Low time on page suggests you are losing visitors and should be optimized.
Pages Per Visit: More pages per visit indicate greater interest, which increases the likelihood of conversion.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate should vary depending on the type of page. Your Contact Us page, for example, may have a higher bounce rate because people typically submit the contact form and then leave your site.
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SEO Technical Health
When I mention SEO, many marketers assume I’m referring to having blog posts optimized with keywords for search engines.
However, technical SEO is a much larger and uglier beast. It’s critical to get your arms around it because the better your technical SEO, the more value search engines will assign to your site and the higher your site will rank.
It Includes The Following:
Image title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text: All of these elements of a webpage assist search engines in determining what the page is about.
Backlinks are created when another website links to yours. More to come on this later.
Structured Data: A standardized format for marking up information on a page so that search engines can understand what it’s about.
Crawling is the process by which search engines look for content on the internet and examine the code/content that they find for each URL.
Indexing: The process by which search engines save the information discovered during a crawl. Your pages will not appear in search engine results pages if they are not indexed.
Rendering: When bots run your site’s code and evaluate your content to understand the structure of your site. The evaluation determines how your site ranks in comparison to others.
Mobile: How well your site is optimized for mobile use is an important factor in user experience.
Navigation, internal linking, and URL structure are all examples of site structure. The information architecture of a website must be clear to both users and search engines.
