Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Search Marketing Analysis from Web Stats - How to Use Web Stats in your Search Marketing Efforts
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Learning how your site is attractive to search engines can be done through your web stats. Search engines are visitors too. Many web stats programs track the visits of search engines differently than that of human visitors. Some stats track all visitors, including search engines. If this is the case with your stats program, you can still determine which visitors are search engines, and which are not.
Many of the search engines can give you IP addresses of their robots and spiders. Simply browse the search engine’s help pages for that information. Comparing IP addresses against the data your web stats program collected can help you separate out the search engine spiders. Also, search engine spiders and robots tend to fly rapidly through links and pages on your website in a fashion that humans do not. If you are determining that there are 30 page views from this visitor in one minute, then the chances of this being a spider or robot is very high. The navigation paths of the search engines will also give you clues as to which type of visitor this is. Many search engines will stop at secure pages like login, checkout, or account creation; then they will move on to other pages.
Search engine spiders and robots will crawl your website, amassing many pages. If your average page views per visitor is 5 or 6 pages, and a visitor is browsing hundreds of pages at a time, then you can be relatively sure the visitor is a search engine. A dead ringer for search engine spiders is a request to the robots.txt file. Since the reputable spiders will request this file with every single visit, it helps you determine frequency of their visits.
Now that you’ve determined which visitors are search engines, you need to look at, compare, and chart the data. A few questions also about your human visitors should come up during this charting process as well. Are visitors coming into your site from search engines? Which pages are those visitors landing on? Those are the pages that have been indexed by the search engines, and therefore how those visitors found you. You should also determine which keywords your visitors used to find your site, and compare those to your keywords that you are tweaking for each of your pages. You can also determine which landing pages are the top requested from the search engines. You can be reasonably sure at this point that those top requested pages are being ranked well. You can also determine which pages are not being ranked well, and why.
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