We speak about conversions on this blog all the time and one of the biggest questions we received from clients is why doesn’t our traffic convert into business more often. Business owners often tell me that their website receives 100 visitors a day yet rarely receive any enquiries or sales. 100 visitors a day for most business would be a solid amount of traffic and unless you had the worse web design in the world I would expect some of it to convert.
This scenario is all to common however and something that’s well worth investigating. Often upon review of Google Analytics it’s easy to pick out some clear warning signs that the visitors might not be of the human kind and instead bots and crawlers scanning your website for whatever reason. There are few different categories of bots and crawlers and some of them you really want and others not so much.
For example Google will crawl your website on regular basis and index your pages into their search engine, I think we all agree this is definitely wanted. However there are also a number of others such as semalt, simple-share-buttons and more that don’t add any value in terms of search referrals and can actually increase statistics such as bounce rate and average session duration. From a client perspective I want to present them with realistic traffic rather than explaining that it was nothing of interest.
Here is an example of a new website that was launched recently upon a day where it recorded a modest 75 sessions for the day. Not too bad in the scheme of things right? Most small business owners would be happy but most would quickly begin wondering why no enquiries were sent. Is the contact form broken? Let’s take a look at some of the key statistics in the below screenshot and see if we can understand what might be occurring.
Channel traffic
Out of the 75 sessions for the day 90% of the visitor traffic was sent via a referral website. Out of those 68 sessions there was a 100% bounce rate!?!?! 68 users that have visited your website and not browsed anything after landing on the initial page. This is a warning sign that maybe this traffic isn’t exactly what you expected it to be. Finally we can see that the average session duration is 00:00:00 i.e. nothing. So 90% of the visitors that have come to our website haven’t browsed any additional pages or interacted on our website in any way at all.
Doesn’t sound like a human kind of interaction to me.
Referral traffic
Let’s hop over to the referral tab and have a look at the websites that are sending traffic to our website.
Immediately I notice that for this particular day the top three referrals are a website called simple-share-buttons.com. After quick review online it seems that this website might be some kind of scanner imitating the legitimate site which is actually called simplesharebuttons.com. Once again we can see that out of all the visitors from this domain there was a 100% bounce rate and session duration of zero.
As you can see the greater the amount of traffic we receive from these types of sites the larger our average bounce rate percentage becomes. It also decreases the average duration of visitors on our website and individual pages. Now not everyone agrees but bounce rate is a potential ranking factor that Google can use to determine whether a websites content is engaging with your visitors. Although there is nothing written to say Google uses this information it would make sense to for them to use it as factor.
If the traffic is of no value then it makes sense then we should look at preserving our statistics as best we can
How to Block Crawlers & Bots in .htacess
Fortunately for us we are able to block this kind of traffic to our website using our .htaccess file. We spoke briefly about how to access the .htaccess on our guide on how to launch a new website and maintain your SEO so please read that for ideas on how to access it. In your .htaccess add a section such as the following for the domains you wish to block. You should be careful blocking websites that aren’t affecting your statistics and only block them when you feel it’s necessary. Each block should be tested to ensure that legitimate traffic is not affected.
Yes, Google Ads can be an effective way for lawyers to reach potential clients. It allows them to target specific keywords and phrases related to their legal services and geographic locations. However, it can be difficult for beginners and quickly become expensive as a lawyer is one of the most expensive PPC keywords.
How can I optimise my law firm’s Google My Business profile?
Optimise your law firm’s Google My Business profile by providing accurate and consistent information, selecting relevant categories, verifying your listing, utilizing Google’s post feature, uploading photos and videos, and optimizing for SEO keywords.
In 2013 Byron took the bold move to transition into his own agency and his hard work paid off, eventually turning PixelRush into a 14-strong digital marketing team that has helped over 150-200 businesses to date in countless which including spending over 10 million in ad spend and optimisation over 400+ landing pages. His personal motto is to lead with this value and this blog is here to provide you with successful strategies so you can learn faster, more efficiently and without the countless hours and hard lessons he’s had to learn along the way.
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