Web traffic

In our recent marketing website upgrade we have taken a serious look at our web traffic. Historically our marketing efforts have focused on networking and selling to individuals can companies that we have specifically targeted. We have not focused on the web as a primary marketing tool but rather as a support where people can find additional information about us.

Now I would like to put this site to use and help it generate business for us. It's time for the website to get to work! But how do I make our site easier to find and more useful to potential clients?

The first thing that I needed to do is study our current traffic. How were people navigating our site? How did they find us? How popular were we?

It used to be that you had to use special software to analyze your log files to determine the behaviour of visitors. This is no longer necessary. There is a free tool from Google - 'Google Analytics' that allows you to automatically track user behaviour by just adding a small piece of code on your pages.

With these reports I could also see what visitors searched for to find our site and how they navigated the site. It is interesting to see what people click on - it was not what I expected! This information was very informative for the site redesign!

The next thing I wanted to know was how we compared to our competitors. Was our site more of less popular than theirs? Again, there is a useful web tool to help us figure this out. Alexa at www.alexa.com tracks and maintains statistics on web traffic for several years back. The site allows comparisons of different sites so we can see how we fare against our competitors.

First of all, the results tell us that we are in a very small niche. In terms of popularity rank on the internet here are some of our clients:

• Traffic Rank for cadillacfairview.com 756,450 - (756,450th most popular site on the web)
• Traffic Rank for oxfordproperties.com: 2,347,908 -
• Traffic Rank for redcliffrealty.com: 4,276,079
• Traffic Rank for dundeerealty.com - insufficient data!
  

And here are the results for service providers - including us:

• Traffic Rank for realnet.ca: 2,587,071


• Traffic Rank for spacedatabase.com: 3,851,993


• Traffic Rank for xmeasures.com: 6,076,412


• Traffic Rank for lasertechfloorplans.com: 8,924,117


• Traffic rank for stevensonsystems.com - insufficient data

As you can see, we are doing quite will without any web marketing or search engine optimization! There are, I believe two reasons for these good results. First, many clients log in to our online system to manager their files. Second, we are embedded in many client sites and serve up reports and drawings that would count to our web traffic.

If we look at the web traffic analysis, we find that less than 25% of our visitors reach us through a search engine. Without our web applications, our popularity would be much lower. We clearly have some work to do if we are to raise our web profile.