Part II: How Consumers Access Your Website
In Google Analytics, the term “channels” is used to describe how consumers access your website. Using a rollup of most of our 100+ customers, we’ll provide some generalized information to help you understand these concepts. As is true for any analysis of website measurement, looking at how your marketing strategies affect the numbers can help you make smart business decisions.
SEO (44% of visits)
44% of traffic to REACH Maine Marketing client websites comes from users searching Google, Yahoo! or Bing. These organic searches account for the largest segment of website visitor acquisition by a wide margin and we believe this is percentage to be representative of most websites.
If SEO is not the channel bringing most visitors to your website, it is probably because:
- your website is recently launched and hasn’t been “crawled” by search engines, or
- your are doing a fantastic job driving traffic to your site with social media, or
- your TV, radio or print advertising is driving a great deal of traffic (unlikely)
This topic is widely discussed in the marketing world. (We’ll provide more detail in future posts.) The following image provides examples of what a SEO customer looks like:
Organic search result via mobile device for keyword search “restaurant”
Local Pack Search Result for “restaurant”
Results from search for “restaurant” using Google Maps via mobile device
Looking at SEO (Organic) visits to REACH Maine Marketing client websites, 84% come from Google searches, 14% from Yahoo! or Microsoft Bing and the remaining visits are from aol.com, Baidu.com (China) and a small number of other search engines. You can clearly see from the numbers why marketers spend so much time optimizing for Google. (Future posts will delve into the differences between organic search, Google 3 Pack Local Results, and Google Maps Search.)
