Your Guide to Analyzing Web Traffic

When it comes to analyzing web traffic for SEO in Ottawa, there are more than a few things to keep in mind. In fact, you may spend all your time looking at the accumulated data if you’re not careful. Therefore, it is important to not only know what you need to look for but also what you can avoid focusing on too much.

Still, the reality of SEO in Ottawa is that it will vary depending on the website’s purpose, industry and intended audience. After all, the definition of the “best” traffic for an online magazine will be substantially different than that of a small soap-making business. So, how do you decide the right tools to use and the right areas to focus on?

Start By Defining the Objectives of Your Website

Before you can do anything to benefit your Ottawa SEO, you’ll need to take a long, hard look at your website. Ask yourself what the objective of the site is:

• Are you trying to drive sales?
• Are you trying to establish a regular user base?
• Are you an e-commerce website trying to establish yourself in the retail space of your product?

Once you understand the objective of your website, you can begin to consider your target audience and, by extension, the kind of web traffic that you want to garner the attention of. To do this, you’ll need to understand the various acquisition strategies available to you, which we’ll get into right down below.

Choose the Right Mix of Acquisition Channels

Website traffic can come from a number of different sources. Search engines net you search traffic from people looking for your services or services related to your industry. Referring sites are other netizens websites that send people back to your website with referral links, source references and similar referrals. Direct traffic is as simple as it sounds, referring to the users on your website who type your URL directly into their search bar and travel to your website with no in-between. The final acquisition channel is your marketing efforts and includes paid advertising, email marketing and whatever else you do to attract users directly to your website.

At this stage, you might be thinking that it is best to dial up the acquisition channel that you see the most value in, but that would be a mistake. Instead, you should consider each of the four channels an integral part of your website traffic as you will always get a certain mix of each of them. This means that you will need to focus your efforts on choosing the right priorities and shoring up the sections that fail to show significant results.

What’s an Acceptable Mix of Traffic from the Different Acquisition Channels?

Again, it’s important to restate that different businesses and websites will have different traffic needs. But, in general, you can expect about half your traffic to come from search results. You can also expect about a fifth of your traffic to come from direct traffic. The remaining 30% or so should be split about two to one for referring sites and marketing, respectively.

With this knowledge, you can use the GSC features available to you to dig into the website traffic your site currently has and make any modifications necessary to improve or augment it as needed. This process will not be immediate, but take your time and find what works for you over time. This will yield the best results and, certainly, the longest-standing ones.