Sure, your website looks nice… but are you even sure that it is actually getting traffic?
Referral Traffic
Wouldn’t you like to know how much traffic you are getting from external web sites?If you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea how much traffic you are getting from online directories you have listed your business and website on. You have no idea if you are getting additional traffic from other external sources.
Social Traffic
Wouldn’t you like to know how much traffic you are getting from social media? If you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea if your social media accounts are bringing traffic to your web site. Is LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter marketing working for you? What should you do more, what should you improve on? You don’t know.
Paid Traffic
Wouldn’t you like to know if your online advertisements are getting traffic? If you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea if the money you have invested in paid advertising is paying off for you. Do you want to continue to spend blindly on online advertising?
Direct Traffic
Wouldn’t you like to know how much direct traffic you are getting? If you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea if your print ads in newspapers and magazines, as well as you brochures, flyers where you put your web address on are actually bringing traffic to your website. Are you wasting your money on traditional advertising, or is it working for you? You don’t know.
On the other hand, if you are not running any traditional advertising campaign, then your direct traffic is the result of your online marketing campaigns.
People have clicked a link leading to your website on a search engine result, on a blog post or blog comment, on a local directory, on a social media profile or post, or on a promo link. You made such an impact on them when they were browsing your website—with your awesome content, articles, and videos; your attractive promos; as well as your overall branding—that they’ve returned to your website by directly typing your website address. They may even have bookmarked it! What’s more, they may have passed along your website address—“brand.com”—to their colleagues, friends, and family.
If you have no way of knowing how much direct traffic you’re getting, then you have no idea how much impact your content and overall branding is producing that it effects return direct visits and word-of-mouth referrals.
Bounce Rates
Wouldn’t you like to know if people, once they have reached your website, like what they see? How do you know if they are finding what they are looking for in your website? If you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea if you need to improve or optimize your design and content to engage your audience with pages and content that addresses their needs, that are relevant to them, and on pages that load fast.
Crawl Issues
Wouldn’t you like to know if there are issues on your website that prevents search engine robots from crawling your website? Issues such as DNS Errors, Server Connectivity Errors, Robots.txt Failure.
In short, issues that could keep your website from being visible in the search engines at all. Issues that could make it to where nobody could find your website.
If you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea if some, if not many, of your web pages are not being successfully crawled by search engine robots—and therefore not being indexed and had no chance of ranking in the search results.
Messages
What if Google, Bing and Yahoo could talk to you? What if they want to officially tell you that there are problems on your website to give you a chance to analyze and fix them? What if they want to talk to you but you’re not listening.
Well, they do send out messages. And if you have no way of knowing this, then you have no idea what serious issues to fix on your website. If these issues remain unchecked, then this would lead to the search engines removing your web pages from their index and therefore your web pages will no longer show up in their search results.