Using Your Visitor Logs - Length of Stay and Making it Pay
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Visitor traffic logs normally maintain a record of the length of stay for each visitor. Keep in mind that you are tracking unique visitors. As you search through your records, you will discover that many visitors arrive, stay only a few moments and leave. What they found at your site was not to their liking and did not solve their problem.
Short Time Visitors
If you have a large number of short time stay visitors, check the pages at which they entered your site. If the pages in question are not content rich, there is no need for visitors to remain on your site. Their needs were not met. If some entry pages are showing fast exits from your website, it's time to revamp those pages with some new content.
It is also a good idea to have links to other pages on your site prominently displayed as alternatives for the visitors. If you can solve their needs on other pages, your traffic may remain longer on your site. Longer stays mean higher proportions of conversions to customers, whether at the present time or in the future. The raw number of visitors is not as important as the conversion rate of visitors to paying customers.
New Visitors for Old
Every website needs a steady influx of new visitor traffic, whether from search engines or from links on other sites. To enable visitor traffic growth, new visitors are constantly required. At the same time, a webmaster must retain already existing visitors and customers. The previously acquired traffic forms a base for new arrivals to build upon, increasing the traffic levels overall.
In your visitor logs, there will be records of new visitors and of returning traffic. Be certain to determine the percentage of your traffic that is new, against the percentage of previously existing visitors. A large drop in new visitors could indicate that your keywords are not ranking very highly in the search engines. Your links perhaps are not being clicked, or your other website promotional activities are not as effective as they were in the past. It is necessary to take some action to remedy the situation.
In the case of your visitor logs, you possess the data to make the needed changes. If you are not ranking well in the search engines, it would be time to do some website optimization. The best place to begin is by adding more keyword rich content. More pages of content will also help your site toward potentially becoming an authority site in your area. Combining that activity with an active linking program to increase your Google PageRank and incoming links can help as well.
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