How much traffic?

[John_Caius]

Recent updates of the Google index have included all our content, about 400 pages at present. Our homepage PR is 7, with all pages scoring between 4 and 7. Our industry is competitive (travel informational content) and we have 25,000 words of unique content on the site. How much traffic from search engines alone might we expect from this kind of site?

We're currently achieving a rather disappointing figure of 100 to 200 visitors per day but based on previous experience with other client sites, we'd be hoping for a lot more than this. My most successful client gets 20,000 uniques per day for general health informational content, with 27,000 pages each with a typical PR of 2 and very limited optimisation. Based on our much better optimisation and much higher PR, I think we should be doing better per page than this client, given that the two content areas are similar in popularity. Neither site has any profile outside search results at present.

Any other ideas about specific things we could do to drive traffic to the site, other than paid methods (we have extremely limited funds at present)? We're thinking of developing sticky features like a discussion forum and other interactive elements, but we want to have some confidence that this is going to make the site more profitable.

[jimbeetle]

This is very, very surprising. If my little travel-type site were a PR 7 I think I would expect somewhere along the line of >25K visitors per day.

A discussion forum would be hard to get off the ground with only a couple of hundred visitors a day and the problem is getting folks to the site in the first place.

I know you've done all of this and more but it's probably time to go back and look at the individual pages. Check your logs and see for which key phrases searchers are reaching the site. Are they the ones you expected or are they secondary and tertiary phrases? Are you pulling any traffic at all from your primary phrases? Has G's new stemming affected things in any way?

As you can see I'm just whistling in the wind here but PR 7 with good optimization should pull in a bunch of traffic so it's time for my 'back to the basics' mantra. Open up your SEO toolbox and do it the old-fashioned way: Analyze a couple of the site's pages in depth, ones you think should be performing better, and compare them against competitors' pages that are performing well. Check all the basic stuff and see what, if any, differences pop up (keyword density, link text, keyword position on page, blah, blah, blah). You know the drill.

That's my 2 cents, other folks will be along with whatever I overlooked.

[figment88]

Other than highly competitve city names, you don't have any keywords.

What kind of keywords do you want people to find you site by? How are they finding it now?

1) Figure out the answer to these questions.

2) Go use wordtrackker to make sure you put them in ways people search for them

3) Put the phrases on your pages and in your titles.

I worked on a site where the owner said I want to be number 1 in Google for a three word phrase, I said fine, don't you think you should then include that phrase somewhere on your website?

[John_Caius]

That's a useful observation. Having only generally worked in non-commercial keyphrase territory before, I don't really have a handle on the kind of visitor count you can achieve for ranking well for a single highly competitive keyphrase. Over the last couple of weeks, we've had something like 350 different search terms used to find the site, but the most popular got only about 15 uses. So we're currently on a very broad but shallow base. For small, less well-known locations, we get some hits for the city name alone, but for most it's secondary or tertiary phrases, for example 'location [feature of location]'.

The next phase of development is to add in optimised commercial content around the existing non-commercial structure - this will add in a lot more competitive keyphrases related to each location. However, my concern right now is that we might not see the benefits we'd planned for if the optimisation is not as effective as we had hoped.

[jimbeetle]

Stupid me, I didn't think to look in your profile.

add in a lot more competitive keyphrases related to each location

Sure 'nuff, those aren't there and they are what searchers use. Add those highly-searched for sections in and you should start to see an increase in traffic. Just be sure to use strong link text from your already strong PR pages and the site should become a traffic magnet.

Stay on course, it looks like you're going to be in pretty good shape.

[John_Caius]

The original site design was built around strong link text - however worries about over-optimising anchor link text being penalised in the Florida Google update led me to question slightly whether this was still advisable. Common sense tells me that you should always be rewarded by using accurate link text to say what's on a page, but many webmasters here reported adverse effects of such a strategy. I think I'll still go with it, but my personal style doesn't favour the ridiculously-keyword-stuffed travel site model so I'm hoping I'll be ok.

[SlowMove]

Besides keywords, I noticed that there are some pages with only a few sentences. I would think that 300+ words per page is reasonable.