I spend a number of hours every week, carefully studying the statistics of hundreds of TSDG-designed websites.
Your website statistics will give you a lot of useful information; the geographical location of your visitors, what browser/platform combinations they are using and a wealth of info that will help you plan future marketing projects.
One statistic I always spend time studying is the list of keywords used to find websites. These are actual searches performed by the people who have been to your site; in other words, exactly how they found you.
As I was looking at some site stats this morning, it reminded me of how many times I have heard, or read, "you need to be on the first page of the search engine results".
Really? Being on the first page is great, being in the top three is wonderful, but are your visitors always coming to your site from page one results?
I can assure you that this isn't the case. This morning, I saw that one of our clients had a site visitor who has searched for interior design - just those two words. As you can imagine, there were over 40m results. And where was our client's site in these results? Page six. And yet the person who made that search had clicked on the page six link and visited the client's website.
I noticed a few more when looking at some of our food service clients' statistics:
scalloped potato gratin - page five
menu miso sea bass - page four
cooking magazine - page four
tuscan bar design - page four
... and my favorite of the day - guava coffee cake - page fifteen! Yes, someone had performed a search for guava coffee cake, waded through fifteen pages and clicked to our client's website. What's more, the statistics show that this visitor spent some considerable time on the site.
So yes, it's wonderful to be in the first few results of search pages and your site should be there for your most important keyword combination. But remember that the pages of your site which are listed on page two, three or even fifteen are still attracting visitors and working for you.
-------------------
RELATED TOPICS:
Search engines and plurals
How is your restaurant's website?
Give your website the attention it deserves
Using your restaurant's website
Should your restaurant have a blog?
Color perception
Comments