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Understanding the Needs of your Visitors by the Logfiles

November 8, 2007 | Author: Mark | Filed under: Build a Niche Store, Step by Step, Everything Else

Since we are coming near the end of the Grill Auction series, it’s time to discuss how you can capitalize on why the search engines like your site! If you have done your work correctly, you should be getting several search referrals for the terms you targeted early on in the series. In addition to those phrases, you are going to find several other phrases that you never even considered!

To go through this section it will benefit you most if your site has been active for 30 days or more AND it is being actively indexed each day. If it is not indexed yet, then search engines are not referring visitors, thus no search terms to look at!

So lets dive in…

For this example, I am actually going to use the Get A Race Car site. One of the comments posted yesterday opened my eyes to the fact that I have NOT revisited the site in awhile and rankings that existed last month have dropped a bit. This article will discuss how reading my logfiles will allow me to make some minor changes to the site and recapture that traffic, even if it is different traffic. 

Log into your build a niche store hosting CPanel and choose the Web/FTP Stats link in the the 3rd or 4th row down. (If you have more than a single site on your account, you may need to choose the Subdomain stats link instead.)  On the resulting page, choose the AWStats option to view your logs in a visual interface, versus the raw form.

Your logs will tell you very informative and important statistics about your visitors. How many came, how many were repeat visitors or unique, how many pages per visitors, etc etc. I suggest everyone get used to and bookmark the location of your logs as you should be back here at least once a month after the site is well established and much more often in the early months! I find it the best to look at the previous month results and watch for trends… 30 days of data is much better than just 5 or 6 days.

I pay very close attention to 5-6 specific areas.

1 - Site Summary (view image)
The site summary gives us a quick and easy snapshot on how the site is doing. In this case, I can see that in October there were 1815 unique visitors that came in 2791 times. Of those, there were 9748 pages viewed or 3.49 pages per visit! The pages per visit is an important figure in a BANS store! On most websites, you would prefer that number to be as high as possible. With a BANS store however, between 2-5 is a good number to aim for. Why? Because your goal is NOT to have people looking around YOUR website, you want them to find what they came for and get into eBay as quick as possible so you can plant your 7 day seed!

2 - Search Robots / Spiders (view image)
Why is the spider information important? It tells you which spiders are coming to your site and how many files they are indexing when they are there. In this case, I can see that Googlebot was most active and provided 246 HITS + 108 robots.txt hits. In all likelihood, Google should also be the search engine that refers the most visitors since it has crawled the deepest. A few other glaring things I can take away from this section is that an unknown robot stalled in my robots.txt file. When I looked at the robots.txt file, I found that it was not even uploaded into my root of the site and thus every one of those robots hits should have an entry in my 404 section for file not found! Doh… Sometimes we get too busy and overlook important stuff! I can also see that there is a very notable bot missing the action… the MSN or Live bot. It may be that the unidentified bot IS the LiveBOT and didn’t know to proceed! Regardless, I will use that missing data to dig deeper into why the site is not being deep indexed by MSN.

Actions I need to take:

  • Correct the robots.txt file
  • Work on a plan to encourage other engines to spider deeper

3 - Pages / URL (view image)
The pages / URL section shows you what the most popular, or most often requested pages on the server are. In this case, I can see that the most popular page is the main entry page… that is probably due to the fact that many of you and other forum guests visit this site regularly by the url I have posted in this blog and elsewhere. In most cases, the sitemap is the most popular and highest indexed page. What I immediately take away from this section is that the search page is the second highest accessed page! The reason I have concern about that… I have no way of seeing WHAT people are searching for when they call that page… AWStats is somewhat limited in what it will give you and some other stats applications will actually allow you to see the strings that were passed. In this case, I will immediately make it a priority to wirte a MOD that captures those strings into the database and allows me an easy way to figure out what people are searching for and create product pages based on that info. (Note to self: Do not procrastinate on this one - you are losing business!)

Actions I need to take:

  • Develop a MOD that will capture all search strings being passed to the search page for review and optimization.

4 - Connect to Site From (view image)
As I stated a bit ago, with Google being the deepest indexing spider, it should also be the one that provides the most search engine referrals. I am not disappointed with what I found… the search engines referred a total of 1265 visitors last month and of those, more than 85% came from Google. There is both good and bad in that statement… Great, Google is coming in and definitely referring traffic. Since Google is generally the hardest to rank with, I focused the majority of my research based on the Google KEI in September when the site was launched. Now I can see that I need to revisit my research documentation (Spreadsheet from Wordtracker) and take action on the high KEI phrases with the other two major engines to continue feeding them. Yahoo likely didn’t index the site until late in the month and looking at the current month, I can see that the results are a bit more balanced, but nowhere near the level of Google referrals.

Actions I need to take:

  • Revisit my wordtracker spreadsheets and create categories/product pages based on both Yahoo and MSN KEI data.

5 - Search Phrases and Words (view image)
In all likelihood, this is the most important section of your logs. In the two separate sections it spells out exactly what the search engine users are typing into the search box and being referred for. In this case, there were 548 different phrases (Left column) made up of 312 different words (right column)

When I did my original research, the top phrases listed on the left are the exact terms that I wanted!

  • Dirt Track cars for Sale
  • Circle track cars for sale
  • off road race cars for sale
  • etc etc…

In addition, the single words on the right side were falling into place exactly how I wanted! The top words are sale, for,cars,race - in other words… “race cars for sale” when combined to form a phrase. Now, when you start adding in the other single words, you start to see the trend coming to shape… Dirt, track, circle, offroad, etc etc… The words have formed the long tail phrases I have been targeting.

What I also see in both the phrase and word list are several that I had no intention of marketing to at all, or at least, didn’t see during my research.

  • Dragcars for sale (Slightly different form of the current category)
  • Used Road race cars
  • Late Model Race cars for Sale
  • Pro Street Cars for Sale
  • Legend Race cars for sale
  • NASCAR Racecars for Sale
  • etc etc…

The point of this is that in ALL of those phrases, I have already established high saturation of the 4 main words “race, cars, for, sale” so adding “Late Model” to the front of it makes it an easy target…. by the end of the day today, I will spend an hour with the getaracecar site and make adjustments to my category/product pages and add in these relevant terms to capture more of the search users.

Also, In late October Google has a fairly substantial upgrade or update to its algorithm which has caused some of my targets to start missing … that is never good, but you get used to it in the world of search marketing and optimization. While several are still in the top 20, many of the others have dropped out completely which means I need to go back and revisit my KEI terms for ALL engines and make some minor changes.

Actions I need to take:

  • Revisit my wordtracker spreadsheets and create categories/product pages based on what the users are already finding the site for.

All in all - your logfiles are going to be the most common place you visit to know what changes you need to make on the site. If it has low indexing, you will see why by the number of robots that are coming. You will know what your most popular pages are and be able to redesign your categories to focus on that page more. You will most importantly, know the terms that people are using ALREADY to find your site and expand on those terms to catch more of the same visitors…

The only other section I did not discuss was the 404 section. 404 errors are files that cannot be found on the server. It may be a robots file or a image, or anything that the server cannot find when a page was called. With BANS, the ONLY activity you should in your 404 section are images that just don’t seem to make the ride from eBay to your own website. There is not much you can do to change that. In mine, I also found the reference to the robots.txt that was being called and not found by search engine spiders, which has been corrected.

Happy Reading…

Mark

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 and is filed under Build a Niche Store, Step by Step, 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.



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[…] Understanding the Needs of your Visitors […]

Build a Niche Store Process Series | Build A Niche Store - The Domain Monetization Project wrote on November 8, 2007 - 4:03 pm |

mark , What needs to be in the robots.txt file ??..Otis

james jordan wrote on November 8, 2007 - 8:04 pm |

@ Otis -

A very simple:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Will invite ALL spiders to follow all links they find.

Save it as: robots.txt to the main root of your site. This is the same area the index.php file is located.

Mark wrote on November 8, 2007 - 9:06 pm |

Very helpful post, I had forgotten to upload my robots file also! LOL

Guess I should make a checklist of EVERYTHING that needs to be done with a new store, this isn’t the first time I’ve forgotten this!

Adrienne wrote on November 9, 2007 - 10:22 am |
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