Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a site whose primary purpose is to give visitors a way to get detailed information about a certain type of retail store. I have an average of six of these stores in just about every state right now on trial subscriptions, and am working on getting more. My eventual goal is twenty per state on average.
To draw in visitors, I created hundreds of individual pages of widgets from different manufacturers. I knew this would be what people would find in the SE's, and they are.
With the SE's starting to rank the site higher for many search terms, traffic is increasingly rapidly. This month's traffic will be nearly double last month's, which was up about 50% from September when Google in particular started picking up the site.
However, the number of people viewing the stores' pages is declining, from 20% last month to 4% this month. I expected that when somebody was looking at an Acme blue widget page, they'd want to also check out the widget stores in their states. Some visitors are indeed doing this, but not every state has a store that carries Acme blue widgets, so the visitors may find nothing.
Also, the number of page views for the site as a whole has declined from about 5.5 pages per visitor to 3.6, and the number of repeat visitors has declined from 46% to 33%. The number of people bookmarking the site has also decreased, from 4.6% to 3%.
So, I'm getting increased traffic, primarily because of my correct idea that having the widget pages would draw in visitors. But they're not going to the pages I want them to, and they're not hanging around as long.
Any ideas on how to entice people to look at the stores' pages, and how to increase the stickiness of the site?
Any opinions very much appreciated.
Matt
