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on a typical day my site gets around 300 se referrals using 150 different search terms. is this unusual and does it indicate anything? it makes it real hard to descry patterns. thanks in advance.
It means search engines (mainly Google) are delivering better quality.
But more importantly, searchers are getting better at searching.
(using more words in search terms)
since few words/phrases stand out doesn't this make it more difficult to optimize?
i also find curious that some weirdo search term will come up 4 or 5 times in one day that has never been seen before or since.
Do you use a specific tools for doing that, Or just browse all the phrases and come to your own conclusion?
I find that to be a fairly common pattern on my websites as there will always be people who will find you for some phrase that no one else would dream of.
But, if your visitors are spread out fairly evenly among those 150 phrases, you may want to put some work into optimizing your site more clearly. It could be that you're ranking not very well for some high trafficed phrases and you are picking up the traffic that trickles down to pages 2, 3, 4, etc... In that case, by optimizing for some heavy hitter phrases and moving up to page 1, you might see those traffic numbers explode.
i like the idea of discerning general areas of interest or themes, but my catagory is so competitive that many general terms are largely out of reach. i really must be creative with specific ones. misspellings, etc.
20% of searches are on 2 broad searches, the rest of the top 20 provides another 20%, and the remaining 60% of searches are fractional to the top ones, like a pyramid.
I guess if my site were to diversify and grow, the pyramid would be much more clearer and defined, and if I managed to get 100% referrals for all search terms related to my site, then it would pan out to look like a nice keyword vector or something fancy, illustrating the google algo ;)
Do you use a specific tools for doing that, Or just browse all the phrases and come to your own conclusion?
No I just come to my own conclusions. The important thing is to make sure that your reporting software shows all your key phrases rather than say just the top 100. (I use Webtrends basic package for this)
20% of searches are on 2 broad searches, the rest of the top 20 provides another 20%, and the remaining 60% of searches are fractional to the top ones, like a pyramid.
I have been running a small adwords campaign that produced 2000 clicks. More than 1000 of the phrases used were unique. The top keyword only accounted for 10%. I was amazed because I thought it was one of those markets that would be dominated by one keyword. It really brought home how many people have a really indepth knowledge of a particular niche field and search accordingly.
Edited for typo
The important thing is to make sure that your reporting software shows all your key phrases rather than say just the top 100.
The problem is the time spent analysing it all -bye,bye ROI :( , especially when you have several sites, it is just not possible, even when they are parsed, arranged etc.
I have seen nothing in log analysers/trackers that helps out with this.
If you could somehow majically cluster/filter/categorise all your google refs, how would you do it :)
