Benchmarking Current Traffic Sources and Volume
The most fundamental objective of any SEO project should be to drive the bottom line. For a business, this means delivering more revenue with favorable ROI. As a precursor to determining the level of ROI impact, the SEO practitioner must focus on increasing the volume of relevant traffic to the site. This is a more important objective than anything related to rankings or number of links obtained. More relevant traffic should mean more revenue for the business (or more conversions, for those whose websites are not specifically selling something).
Today’s web analytics tools make the gathering of such data incredibly easy. Two high-quality solutions are available that are completely free: Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics. These tools are sufficient for many smaller sites, though larger sites will probably need to consider a paid solution such as Omniture.com, IBM Unica NetInsight, or Webtrends.com.
Figure 4-14 shows a sample of basic “unique visitors” data from Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Figure 4-14. “Unique visitors” report from Yahoo! Web Analytics
If you dig a little deeper you can see the sources of the traffic as well, as you can see in Figure 4-15, which shows a Google Analytics report.

Figure 4-15. “Traffic sources” report from Google ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access