Analyzing The Traffic To Your Scuba Diving Website
Something that scuba shops tend to overlook when they are reviewing their business is the effectiveness of their website. Websites can be an invaluable tool to converting visitors on the web into customers at your dive shop. It should be obvious that understanding what these visitors are doing on your site should be incredibly important to you.
I am going to start with the first mistake that a lot of people have. They look simply at the traffic to their site. It looks great to see your daily visits go from 10 to 100, but if the number of bookings and reservations doesn’t increase, is there really a point? There is a crazy amount of web traffic that is pretty much useless to your business. You can get 1000’s of visits from countries in Southeast Asia, but if you are dive shop in Florida who gets the majority of your business in the USA, is there really any benefit to that? There are also bots that are crawling the web at all times some for good purposes, some for not so good of reasons. Is this traffic really valuable? To understand the value of the traffic you are getting you have to dig a bit deeper.
The first thing that you should look at when you are analyzing your traffic is the time spent on a page. This should be done individually for different pages on your site as it will tell you which pages are being found for bogus reasons, where the visitor gets on your site, realizes they aren’t where they want to be, and quickly leaves. This is a negative indicator to search engines about the value of the page to visitors based upon the search term that they found your site for. In contrast, if a visitor finds your page, stays for a few minutes, visits a few other pages on your site before moving on, this looks much more positive in the eyes of the all mighty Google.
The next thing that you should look at is the pages that are being viewed the most on your site. This will give you a good indication of where you should focus your attention. If a page you didn’t think would be viewed as much on your site is being viewed a lot by high quality, potential customers, you want to focus your efforts to turn this page into something that can convert a visitor into a customer. Forms to capture data, more photos, sales graphics, and videos, can all be ways to capture the attention of these visitors. Likewise you should look at where visitors are exiting your site from. If you are noticing that visitors are exiting your site from the photos page, maybe you need some new photos. You expect visitors to exit from certain pages for example the Contact Page. If there is an unusually high number exiting from certain pages, it is important to look at that traffic and figure out what is leading to that action.
After you analyze the page traffic on the site, you should look at the demographics of where the visitors are coming from. If you are a tourist destination and get customers from all over the world, this will give you a good idea of what countries you are reaching. It will also give you an idea of the ones you aren’t and should maybe focus a future blog post or article on. You can also work on your off site marketing on websites in those areas.
The next important thing to look at is what search term you are being found for. This will give you an idea of what search terms you are doing well for what you should improve upon, etc. It is crazy when you look at some of the long tailed search terms people type into their search engine. You can find people typing in terms such as “what is the best dive shop near Playas del Coco, Costa Rica?” A search term that is incredibly long and may only happen a few times per month, but that is much easier and quicker to rank 1st overall for than something like “scuba diving Costa Rica” which may take several months to rank for.
Lastly and maybe most importantly is using Google Analytics to determine how useful your marketing dollars are being spent. Chances are you are advertising on some site somewheres on the web. Websites all make claims about how much traffic their site gets and how many bookings you will get from this traffic. It all sounds great but Google Analytics will allow you to see which of these sites are taking your money with little to no real returns. You will be able to see which domain the visitor came from to find your site. So, if you are paying $50 per month to be listed on a directory and get 25 visitors from that site per month maybe it is worth it. Digging a bit deeper will tell you for sure. If you look at the behavior of those 25 visitors and see that 20 of them visited multiple pages on your site and ended up on the contact page where they filled out an information request or reserved a diving package, then you are getting your return easily on that money. If you look and see that not a single person went any further than the front page of your site, well then chances are you aren’t.
This is a huge topic that is incredibly hard for me to put its value of into a blog post such as this. If you are interested in getting a free, no obligations analysis of the traffic on your site, click the banner below to be taken to a page on my site where you can fill in your dive shops information. I will install google analytics on your site, let it run for a month and then give you a report of what it is I would recommend to improve your site.
