Hard data: SEO Drives a Growth in Web Traffic over Time

There’s a lot of good advice out there about how to grow a website, but relatively little accessible data.  As Arpan and I are data driven decision makers, we decided we would track our site’s analytics and share our progress to give other a better sense of how our particular strategy works.  Our previous updates regarding our analytics suffered from insufficient data.   But with two months of growth now behind us, enough time has elapsed to clarify the result of our efforts.

As we’ve outlined previously, we decided to engage in a search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing strategy that consists of the following elements:

• the steady addition of content that targets long tail search engine terms (define long tail with link)
• the gradual increase in incoming links that results from regular publishing (the site’s PageRank act as a crude metric)
• use of social media to reinforce distribution of content, primarily twitter (read why here)

So, just how has this strategy fared thus far?

Results

The two months of data we’ve accumulated indicates that this tactic seems to work.  As illustrated in the following graph, traffic has more or less grown consistently each week, except for the holiday break at the end of December:

Pageviews per week

January saw a month-over-month increase in pageviews of over 100% compared to December and a breakthrough of the 1000 pageviews per month mark.  This is coupled with a jump from a PageRank of 0 in mid-December to a PageRank of 4 at the middle of January.  However, a month to month comparison isn’t completely fair, as January was our first full month of blogging, given the previously mentioned break in December.  However, when we isolate the four weeks in January, we see roughly a 100% increase in growth in pageviews per week from the start to the end of the month.  Because 59% of the traffic over the two month period is being directed to the site via search engines, we attribute the bulk of growth to our SEO optimization efforts.

And therein lay the rub.  Visitors from search engines tend to have a specific question in mind and, upon receiving an answer, bounce off to another site or another search engine query.  Our results suggest this is happening at the BizJournal, as Pageviews/Visit have remained flat over the course of our experiment:

Pageviews per visit by week

However, as our goal is to serve as a knowledge resource for small businesses, we’d like to ensure that all visitors are informed about the information available at the BizJournal.  Thus, we will take steps to increase this ratio over time.  This doesn’t detract from the results mentioned above: SEO successfully grows page

Two months of data may not be enough to a generate a baseline growth rate, but we decided to have a bit of fun and consider where we are headed assuming continued linear month-over-month growth.

In the above figure, the blue bars represent estimated pageviews per month assuming a 25% month-over-month increase.  This exponential growth model was constructed from BizJournal statistics for the first five weeks of activity.  The orange bars are the actual pageviews per month.  The pink line projects from this actual data the expected number of pageviews per month should grow occur in a consistantly linear fashion, ala ProBlogger’s study.  However, as others have reported that traffic grows exponentially (increasing traffic drives an increase in traffic), this linear projection may fall short.

Ongoing Experimentation

Our future endeavors include:

• a continued examination of the aformentioned SEO and social media tactics
• an evaluation of how post recommendations (backtrack) and a search (backtrack) feature affects pageviews/visit.

You’ll notice both additions are now currently available, so with hope we’ll have positive data to report on this front during our next update. If you have any questions about our methodology or analysis, please feel free to ask in the comments.

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