Search Engine Traffic vs. Other types of traffic

What percentage of your forum traffic is driven by search engines?

[seunosewa]

Hi,

I started a regional forum recently. It first I got about 120-130 visitors a day from yahoo (only), then it abruptly stopped sending me traffic. Suddenly, the level of traffic from yahoo dropped to 3-4 per day, and the level of traffic from google started going up really slowly.

I would like to know if it's possible for me to know what percentage of traffic on a typical forum is from the search engines and what percentage is from repeat visitors or word-of-mouth referrals fo I can stop wasting my time trying to optimize for search engines and concentrate on creating the best user experience.

What percentage of your forum's daily visits are from search engines?

[Reflect]

I would look at my raw log files and see what SE is reffering to what pages. Most any log file analyzer will tell you this information.

Take care,

Brian

[seunosewa]

You misunderstood my questions. What I'm trying to find out is whether other webmasters get most of their traffic from search engines or from regular visitors.

[rogerd]

On a typical busy forum, most traffic will be generated by members and repeat visitors. These people will view dozens of pages and perhaps return multiple times during the day.

However, it is likely that the majority of NEW traffic will come in through SEs. Furthermore, if you look purely at the number of unique visitors, SE traffic may account for half or more (depending on how well optimized the forum is, what kinds of search terms it does well on, etc.)

Some forums display the number of members and guests online - in my experience, it's fairly common to see around a 50/50 split. Some of the "guests", of course, may be regular lurkers or members who aren't logged in. On the other hand, there's probably a lot more turnover in the guests; i.e., if you have 100 guests viewing the forum, and 15 minutes later you still have 100 guests, many in the second count are probably new visitors.

For attracting new visitors, SEs are likely to drive the most traffic unless you have some really outstanding links/ads on high traffic sites.

[seunosewa]

Hello, wmvclark.

Thanks for the stats. Can you tell us how many visitors you got for the same day? (visitors not from search engines?)

[FourDegreez]

Zero. My forums are private and do not allow spidering. It's a marketting feature. =) My members like the idea of a private community and feel more comfortable to speak freely in such an environment. My traffic comes from links on other domains I own.. between 10 and 20 new sign-ups per day.