Number analysis will be a regular part of your site’s maintenance routine, and can be helpful to discuss with your SEO consultant. When facing the numerical outcomes of your search engine optimisation campaign, you have to know what you’re dealing with.

The numbers your server churns out for you every so often are the raw signs of your success or failure. Looking at your basic traffic will not give you an idea of who is visiting your site, why they visit or how they are coming to you. This is the reason for the analytical part of a good SEO campaign. Analysis should be done on a site’s numbers before and after it is optimised. Continued analysis is also advisable. Approach us at SEO Consult about analysing your site’s SEO success.

The way in which you approach analysis of your numbers is important to the smooth running of your site. Most businesses will have an understanding of the terms involved, but just in case, here are some basic terms that will come into play when discussing the results of your site’s SEO:

Traffic – The basic rate of people or machines looking at your site.

Hits – The number of times your site has been accessed. This can be any time a web browser asks for a file from your site, meaning that number of hits is not at all indicative of the popularity of your site.

Referrer – The web address from which your site has been accessed. An analysis of referrers is important if you want to know in which areas your keywords are doing best.

Unique Visitors – The visitors who access your site in a time period from the one IP address. Counting only unique visitors eliminates the risk of overestimating your traffic in case of spam. If someone visits your site several times a day, their visits will be counted only as one visitor.

Bounce Rate – If someone visits your website and then leaves without exploring it, they are considered to have bounced off your site. The number of viewers that leave your site without looking at your other pages is called your bounce rate. Understandably, you want to keep this number low.

Conversion Rates – If you operate an e-commerce site, a high conversion rate is your goal. Your conversion rate is the percentage of your viewers who do what you want them to do. In the case of e-commerce this generally means buying something. A conversion rate can be calculated for any offer you make to your site’s viewers and many sites will watch their conversions for things such as subscriptions.

Crawl Rate – The crawl rate is the period of time between visits of a search engine’s spiders to your site. Updating your site with fresh content is a way to attract search engine spiders to trawl your site more frequently.

When looking at your SEO results, remember to put your expectations somewhat to the side. Some of the best results in SEO come from unexpected sources. You may find that your site is ranking for a different keyword to what you planned. Keep an open mind, and use the results as a foundation to build on further.

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