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There’s Gold in Your Logfiles - Start Panning!

September 27, 2007 | Author: Mark | Filed under: Everything Else

Monday, I wrote a small piece on how to build real traffic to your niche site. After reading it through a third time I discovered that I had left out one of the most important resources you can use for farming traffic to your site, your site logs!

Most hosts… OK, ALL hosts who are worth their salt, will provide you with some tool to view your site logs. The logs contain all of the basic information you need in order to see how many visitors are coming, how many are unique, how many pages they are viewing, etc etc. Another great feature within the logs is that you can see the search terms which  may have brought that visitor to your site! While there is a HUGE amount of useful info in the logs, all I want to discuss right now are the key words and phrases that drive traffic to your Niche Site.

The Hostgator account I am using for my Build a Niche Stores has a few options on the stats package you want to use. Webalizer or AW Stats. I personally prefer the AWStats program since it drills a bit deeper into the details. If you have no stats package, Google Analytics is a good tool and there are also several other free stats apps available on the web.

So, where do you start? Since we are going to be looking at the words and phrases - lets jump right into that section by looking in the “Referrers” section. For AWStats, this is the “Search” link that is to the right of the Referrers heading on the left. Once you click on the search link, you should have two tables in front of you, the left table is the “Search Phrases” and the right is “Search Keywords”. At this point, you can only see the top 10 for each section but clicking on the “Full List” link, will allow you to see EVERY phrase or word that delivered a visitor, which is where the gold lining exists.

Please know ahead of time that everything I am writing about is only one method that works for me! There are several people who have different methods and strategies for farming their site traffic, and while each may or may not work effectively, I can only attest for the methods I personally use! This is one of those methods…

At this point, the ONLY reason I look at the “key phrase” list is to compare it to the “key word” list and should be able to spot trends in the key word list fairly easily! For instance - the list below is a MTD snapshot of the top 20 key words from our Wholesale Clothing site, CarolinaCloseout.com 

  • Term - Occurances 
  • wholesale  924
  • gymboree  368
  • closeouts  358
  • closeout  316
  • clothing  315
  • qvc   279
  • shoes   204
  • lots   198
  • mens   115
  • merchandise  102
  • womens   102
  • girls   102
  • accessories  102
  • baby   101
  • jewelry   100
  • wedding   91
  • vintage   90
  • apparel   89
  • shoe   89
  • bridal   87

Looking down this top 20 list, it is fairly safe to assume the top 5-10 KEY PHRASES, will contain many of the top words from the list. Ideally, the top words, Wholesale, Gymboree, Closeout, Closeouts & Clothing, are in my short list of targets… if not, I have spotted an opportunity! In my case, about 2 weeks ago, I noticed the word “QVC” popping onto the radar in my word list and ran over to WordTracker to see how I could use it effectively! Ideally, I will find it combined with some of the other words I am already doing well with… In this case, Wholesale, Closeout, Closeouts & Clothing, since Gymboree is very brand specific.

From WordTracker, I was able to see that “QVC Closeouts” is a good traffic term, fits into my site Niche, and fortunately, has one of the keywords that I am already seeing as a high volume word in my word list! I took the term and created a store category specifically around “QVC Closeouts Shopping“. Why did I add shopping to the phrase? The top 7 phrases in wordtracker all have the word shopping somewhere in the phrase. Might be QVC Shopping, QVC Home Shopping etc, but regardless, the term is used steadily and I eventually want some of the traffic! :-)

Today, just 2-3 short weeks later, the CarolinaCloseout website ranks very well in 2 of the big-3 search engines (Dont count Google yet, but MSN and Yahoo always rank better first) for:

  • QVC Closeout (#1)
  • QVC Closeouts (#1)
  • QVC Wholesale Closeouts (#1)
  • QVC Wholesale Closeout (#1)
  • QVC Wholesale (#14)

As you can see by the list, All I have done is taken the first non-targeted term (QVC) , matched it to the terms people are already looking for, (Wholesale, Closeout, and plurals) and developed a new category within the BANS store.

Is it really that easy?? Yes! You just have to set yourself some time once or twice each month, to go through your log files. If you are not looking at the logs - you are missing a HUGE piece of the SEO and traffic pie!

Mark

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.



Stumble it!

1 person has left a comment

Great tip. Always good to check on what terms people actually used to find your site.

Reminds me that I’ve been meaning to suggest to the BANS folks (or kludge something together myself) something like a search report. Just a brief rundown that will show me what people have searched for via the search box within the site. Let me get even more granular with what I’m targeting… :)

Sean wrote on September 27, 2007 - 2:07 pm |
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