Nowadays there is a variety of web statistics software that you can use. These may come bundled with a free website builder or be external tracking services like SiteMeter or ,Google Analytics. Whichever method you use it’s always nice to see all of those visitors arriving at your site. But web statistics can do so much more than just tell you how many visitors you have.
Search Engine Metrics
Your search engine metrics can help you out in a number of ways:
- Tell you phrases that people are using to find your site - you might find that people are using completely unexpected phrases to find you. It that’s the case you may want to consider optimizing for those phrases to boost your rankings;
- To test if your SEO is working – if you have optimized for a phrase, “hot chili sauce,” for example, and no one is finding you using that phrase, then you know that something is up with your SEO.
Visitor Path
The visitor path allows you to track how people are navigating through your site. Are they easily finding the most important content or is it getting lost? Some things to look out for:
- What are your visitors looking for? The visitor path will tell you what your clients are interested in;
- Evaluate whether your navigational structure is getting your visitors where they want to be;
- Check which pages are the most popular with your visitors. Are there adequate links to get your visitors from those pages to others with important information?
Landing Page
The landing page is the page that visitors are landing on when visiting your site. This may not be your home page. It could be a page that has particularly good SEO or that is linked to by lots of other sites. The top landing pages may not be the pages that you expect. But, once you know which pages they are you can make sure that they have adequate links to other parts of your site and that they contain any important information that you want all of your users to have.
Visitor Sources
Links are like currency on the internet. You want people to link to you and drive traffic to your site. One link from an influential website or blog and you could see your visitor count spike. In order to encourage link-love it’s always good to link back to people who have linked to you. If someone has blogged about your site you can find out where they have written about you and post in the comments. If someone has recommended you then you could have on your site “As recommended by….”
Time Spent
Your website statistics will tell you how long a visitor has spent both on your website as a whole and on individual pages. You can use this information to see which of your pages is the most popular. Is the content there more engaging than on other pages? If you have a text-heavy page that visitors are spending a lot of time on then you know you’ve got the content there just right. See how you can improve other areas of your site to emulate it. Is there a product that particularly attracts visitors? Maybe you want to feature it on your homepage.
If visitors are coming to your site but only staying for a few seconds then you’ll need to ask yourself why. Your SEO may be working but something about your copy or design is putting visitors off. Look at all of these aspects closely to see if you can encourage visitors to spend more time on your website.
Regularly checking your web statistics can help you improve your visitors’ experience of your site. It will make sure you are meeting your SEO targets and help you to learn about how your visitors are behaving on the site.
WIX TIP:If you have a free website and are interested in tracking your site stats, upgrading to a Wix Premium account enables you to integrate with Google Analytics. There you will receive all the info you need to track those visitors.
