Definition: Website traffic is the number of visits to a website within a certain period of time. If the multiple visits of a single visitor within this period are combined into a single visit, this results in a special form of traffic that measures the number of different visitors, namely unique visitors.
Content
- Traffic sources
- Measuring and understanding website traffic
- Increase website traffic
- Turning visitors into customers
- Our references
The amount of website traffic can be a critical success factor. This is particularly the case if the website in question is used as part of the company's marketing mix. The higher the traffic, the higher the absolute proportion of visitors who are interested in a product or service. A central task of search engine optimization (SEO) is precisely to increase the website traffic of a website, e.g. by generating new visitors.
Traffic sources
It is important to understand where your visitors are coming from. From this, you can draw conclusions about which previous traffic-boosting measures have been successful and where you can make improvements. The proportion of visitors per source is different for each website and website type.
Google Analytics shows the sources of traffic in the acquisition report:
- Direct are direct visits to the website. This means that the visitor has entered the web address of the page in the address bar.
- Organic search includes all search engines and search services such as Google, Bing or Google Image Search. Anyone who has come to the website via organic search has previously clicked on a search result.
- Paid search and display are sources for which the website operator has paid for advertising to be placed in search engines or partner networks. (More about advertising)
- Referrals are generally visits via external links. If a link (backlink) to your website is placed on another website and a visitor clicks on it, this visitor is counted as a referral visitor.
- Social refers to traffic that comes from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, XING, YouTube, etc.
This brief overview already gives you an indication of which channels or sources you can invest more in.
Measure and understand website traffic
If you want to understand whether the traffic on your website is above, below or average, you need to know what the traffic is like in your industry in general. However, this is difficult to find out because nobody wants to give out their figures. Hubspot provides a rough overview. A study compares the traffic of different industries and company sizes. However, other tools give an indication of whether you are exploiting your traffic potential: You can check the click-through rate(CTR) in Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console. A higher CTR means more traffic. However, if the CTR is low, you should check the reasons why search engine users are not clicking on your search results.
The time dimension of traffic is important. Some companies typically have "lows" at weekends because their customers are not working. It is therefore important to understand when your visitors come to your website.
It is also important that you do not count any"internal" traffic from yourself or employees. You can find out how to filter this out in Google Analytics here.
Increase website traffic
Look at your traffic from different sources:
- Direct traffic is almost impossible to influence, because it comes from the fact that your website is known to the visitor. A high level of awareness therefore ensures high traffic.
- To increase paid traffic, you can invest more money in your campaigns or more time in optimizing your ad texts.
- You can increase traffic from social media by becoming active in these networks and sharing content from your website there, for example.
- Referrer traffic can generally be increased if you receive more backlinks from other websites.
We have written detailed articles on traffic-boosting measures.
You can increase organic traffic by offering good content, comparing the search result(SERP snippet) with the search queries and search intent and adapting it accordingly. You can also build special landing pages for certain keywords with a high search volume to attract your target group.
Turn visitors into customers
Traffic alone is useless if visitors do not "buy" your products. You therefore need to design your website in such a way that your visitors ultimately reach the checkout or, for example, the contact form, i.e. that you achieve a conversion.
The percentage of user traffic that opts for an operational service is known as the conversion rate (CR).
The digital agency arocom can help you to improve your website traffic and your conversion rate. Get in touch with us!
The following video provides tips on how to increase website traffic:
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