Searches vs. Visits

[rjwmotor]

I'm kind of curious if anyone has a rough idea of what an "average/good" amount of visits compared to searches for a particular kw on google is for a an average site? The reason I'm asking is that one of my sites(4 yrs old) was doing better in g than it had ever done for about the last 6 months but is begining to slide in the amount of visits coming in. The site ranks pretty well for a lot of search terms and is updated regularly. I hear a lot of talking about people getting tens of thousands of visits a day and I'm no where near that. I don't really expect to be as this is more of a niche site. Do any webmasters have a certain percentage they feel is good when it comes to: Visits/main kw searches on g in the past month?

Hopefully this makes some sense to somebody else...

[rjwmotor]

bump

[stinkfoot]

>I hear a lot of talking about people getting tens of thousands of visits a day

Its a webmaster forum .. you dont really expect people to tell the truth about how many visits they get do you? They are just flexing thier virtual hits profile :)

[rjwmotor]

I realize people exagerrate(?) their hits, etc..I'm just trying to figure out if there some kind of baseline people use to decide if their site is getting a nice average number of visits based on kw searches. This might be too difficult to gauge but I was just wondering...

[decaff]

This is going to vary widely from site to site and sector to sector...and also depending on many other factors..
market dynamics for that sector, seasonal variations, reliability of site availability, what the search engines themselves are doing in that sector to grab some of the traffic for their own revenue channels...etc...etc..etc...

[JKMitchell]

...of visits compared to searches for a particular kw on google...

I may have missed something but how do you know the number of searches?

[rjwmotor]

I kind of figured it would be difficult to do this...anyone else have an idea?

[SuddenlySara]

There's many ways to determine the number of searches made of keywords from search engines and that's what you need to find out too I think. Maybe you rank well as you say but how many people are looking for what you have based on your keywords?

Decafe said it well above.

MANY factors you want to figure in but I think a great start is to analize those keywords (find your money words that makes someone click you).

I'm really not sure of the rules here but I could lay down a list of keyword tools that would help you determine what's searched for and then you can determine why a surfer would click on you.

[desi_curry]

I have been doing the SEO for a while. When my sites where on page 2-3 I was assuming that the top 1-2-3 results might be getting tons of hits and hence having lots of business. But actually the results doesnt change exponentially. I was doing one website which provided software for hotels. After 4-5 months I managed to get No.1 spot in google, yahoo and MSN. But the total hits where just around 150/day from what it was 50-60/day. Infact our site ranked in top 5 for all the targeted keywords, still the number of hits wherent that significant.

Recently I am doing seo for a site where the top keywords shows the searches in months in lacs in overture. We are already on page 2 on google now, No.3 in MSN and on page 2 in yahoo but still there are hardly 60-70 hits a day.
One important things is that with most of the SE's having the diffrent search results according to diffrent countries we need to make sure we are everywhere if your business is global.

Hope this helps a bit.

[MHes]

For what its worth ( no flexing virtual muscles!).... we get around 20,000 uniques per day but the so called target phrases where we rank position 1 produce a tiny percent of the traffic. Keyword targeting can be a huge distraction and as people get better at searching, keyword phrases become less predictable and important. Everyday I'm amazed at the search phrases used to find us and these are good relevant traffic (well done google!). I'm not surprised that you find achieving high rankings for a phrase may not have a dramatic effect. If your site is a very specialised one then the variations are limited and you have to go for a few obvious phrases, but most topics can be searched for in thousands of ways and this is where the real traffic is. If you are selling 'cheap widgets' my guess is that 90% of searches will be 'cheap widgets with blue spots' or 'green spots' or 'purple spots' etc. etc. There will be 1000's of searches for these variations and although you may rank high for 'cheap widgets' you may not rank high for the variations so in fact you are targeting 10% of the potential traffic and missing 90%. Using traffic search tools like overture can be missleading. Overture publishers may make a call on overture for a phrase on a page which has 1000 visitors per day. However, the overture call may be for 'blue widgets' and the traffic is coming to the page from google for 'pink widgets'. This will give the impression that blue widgets is a popular phrase.... wrong! :)