Pages vs. Visitors

How many pages/visitors-per-day?

[Tonearm]

How many pages of content do you have vs. unique visitors per day from Google? I actually have about 350 pages and about the same number of visitors per day from Google.

How does that compare to the average?

[tedster]

I just checked a bunch of sites in various markets and of varying sizes. I see everything from 0.5 to 1, to over 30 to 1. I don't know that there's anything to be learned from that ratio, except that some sites have better rankings for high volume keywords than others do.

[Tonearm]

Hey tedster,

What seems like the average? 15 to 1?

edit: Specifically, 15 pages to 1 visitor-per-day?

edit #2: I'm in retail myself.

[edited by: Tonearm at 4:29 am (utc) on July 8, 2007]

[tedster]

Well, not actually running the numbers but just eyeballing it, 15 to 1 is in the general ballpark for this set of data. But the bigger a site, the less informative that ratio can be. And trying to average out such a widely divergent spread of data, or even finding the mean, is not likely to result in any real actionable observation.

For instance, how many pages are in a site's checkout process? If you find a way to remove one page, then this ratio we're discussing probably went lower -- but most likely, you've improved your conversions and your income.

Also, since we're talking about uniques coming from Google, if you happen to rank for some poorly targeted searches, then this ratio goes down because of one-hit-wonders. That kind of poorly targeted earch ranking definitely happens -- and it can happen more often as urls begin to grow in PR.

[Tonearm]

First of all, I was wrong about getting 350 organic visitors a day from Google. It's more like 150 from Google and another 100 from (generally unconvertable) Google image searches.

That puts me at around 2.3 to 1. I guess that's a pretty good ratio based on the data you're looking at. It feels like I should be getting more Google traffic, but maybe not.

How many pages would you say the sites in your sample have on average?

[edited by: Tonearm at 5:32 am (utc) on July 8, 2007]

[tedster]

The smallest site in this data set is 85 pages, the largest is 65,000. Looking at data from about 40 sites.

It feels like I should be getting more Google traffic

Doesn't it always ;)

[followgreg]

It feels like I should be getting more Google traffic

Doesn't it always ;)

hehehe :) that was refreshing!

[Tonearm]

From what you see, does the pages/visitors ratio generally increase as the number of pages increases?

[thecityofgold2005]

hum. i have less than 20 pages and 5,000+ page views per day.

[Tonearm]

cityofgold,

Do you have data on your Google search referrals per day?

[thecityofgold2005]

I don't see the point of this thread.. Surely different types of sites will have very different ratios according to the business they conduct? What use is a comparison of these numbers?

For what it's worth 54% of my traffic came from Google over the past week!

[Tonearm]

It's a matter of me trying to decide where to focus my efforts. I wasn't sure if I needed to work on SEO some more to generate a good pages/referrals ratio, or if my ratio was good and I needed to add more pages. Basically trying to eliminate a possible bottleneck.

Of course it varies dramatically, but if I'm on the better end of the range, I can make an educated guess that I don't have too bad of a bottleneck going.

[trimmer80]

" see everything from 0.5 to 1, to over 30 to 1"

Maybe im missing something, or maybe it was a joke but "0.5 to 1"? lol, now that is a poor bounce rate. People are leaving your site before they get there.

[tedster]

LOL! That number was calculated from total pages, not page-views. That's one of the pitfalls of just tossing around various numbers. Things can get very fuzzy very fast.

[subhendu]

toneram: From what you see, does the pages/visitors ratio generally increase as the number of pages increases?

I strongly agree with this,
In my site I am 5 popular sections ( each one in one directory ). Out of which 3 I regularly add pages. I started calculating ratio and found that more the pages I have more hits I am getting from google in that directory (when I see unique hits / page ).

Then I display the pages group by each directory in the order of highest to lowest hits they get. It was very clear that the highest of groups with more pages are way ahead ( where more pages are there ) in hits than other groups.

This is not a great discovery , it is there in google guideline that the content around the location also matters.

So I focus in one area and go deep even though I know I have some more related areas to start.

[Tonearm]

subhendu,

Are you saying that the more pages you have, the more Google referrals you get *per page*?