What is a good content to search visit ratio for forums?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I own a pair of small 300 page sites that yield 5 and 6 visits per page a day on average overall. While nothing to brag about it's a modest amount for these two particular sites.

I launched a forum a year ago and with 22,000 total topics to date the site sees about the same 1500 - 1800 visits per day from search, or roughly seventy five times less traffic per page overall, from search.

Is receiving one visitor per day for every 12+ pages on a site really really low for a forum?

- Lots of threads are buried deep in the archives, already
- Lots of pages rehash the same topics

but still, one visitor per 12+ threads seems low... is it? If you have some forum experience what would you say is the bare minimum number of visitors per page before you begin to suspect some changes need to be made?

[goodroi]

I don't think you can use one ratio. It varies greatly depending on what industry you are in and what topics are being discussed. If you have a forum about a very rare medical condition, then you will have very low traffic just because very few people are seeking the content.

In general I would suggest you try to avoid duplicate conversations within your forum. Try to consolidate threads and redirect any links into the consolidated thread.

When someone starts a new thread try to link it to a relevant thread in your archive. This will help your users more easily find related content and also help search engines better crawl your site and understand the theme of your pages.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Great advice and I do my best to match older threads with newer ones as reference. I also use an automated method of pulling a few related threads as well so even threads in which I don't manually connect old and new can accomplish this.

I do have a lot of threads that could be improved, especially within the title, but not nearly enough to make up the difference in pageviews.

I can pull entire older threads that Google ignores and covert them into blog entries with some extra commentary and Google will send these traffic. Do you think it's the user generated content that Google doesn't trust?