I've had more than a few people tell me they really missed our old advertising page, not because we sold any ads, but because our monthly traffic, search and referral stats were always there and relatively frequently updated. As consolation (and since I always did intend to keep SEOmoz's stats as public as possible), here's an exhaustive roundup of important analytics data (from Indextools) for the first 4 months of the year (old 2006 stats to compare are here):
Daily Unique Visitors:
- January - 165,568
- February - 268,444
- March - 237,496
- April - 230,909
Referring Domains:
Referring Search Phrases:
Search Engine Referrers:
Most Popular Pages:
- Page Strength Tool
- Keyword Difficulty Tool
- Home Page
- Blog
- IP 2 Location Tool
- Web 2.0 Awards
- 15 CSS Properties You Never Use (But Perhaps Should)
- Google Search Engine Ranking Factors
- Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers
- SEO Tools
Feedburner Stats:
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Overall, I'm pretty unimpressed and unhappy with our stats. We haven't grown at nearly the rate we did last year during the same time period, and while SEOmoz remains somewhat popular in the world of search marketing, our referring domain stats shows me we've yet to break out of that market at all. From a search perspective, the encouraging stat is that our switch over to static, semantic URLs in late February resulted in a 15% bump in the amount of search traffic we receive. Sadly, we've done no keyword research, nor made any concerted effort to focus on driving search visitors to the site.
If we were our own client, I'd say we ranked somewhere between barely acceptable and getting by. I think that if we can improve the conversion rates of our premium content, we'll be able to take some more time away from client projects to focus on SEO for SEOmoz.org, which is something I've been wanting to do for years.
On the external stats frontier, things aren't particularly positive, either. Google reports that we have ~350,000 unique external links (that number was much larger two weeks ago, oddly) while Yahoo! reports 466,466 (fairly steady from January when we had . We've steadily moved down Technorati's most popular blog list from a high of 103 (in February) to 137 today (with 21,393 links from 4,221 blogs). The latest PageRank update saw us stay at a PR7, but that's now spread to our blog page and several others, which is encouraging.
The best news by far has certainly been the success of YOUmoz - it's not only got a few hundred RSS subscribers, it's also pulling in search traffic and links (and real readers and commenters). I've been very happy with the quality, and while I wish there was more high level writing submitted that we could promote to the blog, I really can't complain - it's one of the most active communities of its kind in the search world, and all the more impressive because it's in such a small niche.
Perhaps I'll be cheered up a bit if we can win a Blogger's Choice Awards. We're nominated in three categories:
If you're feeling generous, perhaps you could hop over there and give us a vote in one (or all) of those categories. Of course, only do so if you really believe we deserve it. there's lots of other nominees in each category, so vote with your gut - I think, for example, that Brian Clark should win "the Blogitizer" - for "best writing on a blog".
p.s. The Blogger's Choice makes you jump through WAY WAY too many hoops to sign up and vote - it's actually almost ridiculous. No wonder they're getting so few votes on most blogs... terrible execution people, just awful.
p.p.s. Jason Calcanis - you're welcome, Michael :)
Say no to unique visitors.
The daily returning unique visitors line looks flat because it is measuring daily visitors who visit SEOmoz more than once a day.
Be honest, how many of us visit SEOmoz more than once a day? And even if you visit 4, 8 or 16 times a day you will still only count as ONE returning daily visitor. In other words, it most likely counts the number of contributors - those that comment or create YOUmoz pieces.
Friday Rant Mode: Total daily unique visitors isn't a very useful metric.
It is the sum of each day's unique visitors. That is, a person that visited the site every Monday, Wednesday, Friday of a month would be counted as twelve daily unique visitors in the monthly total.
If 10,000 users visit your site twice a day, your monthly totals are:
Which metric should I use? Most web analysts advocate using visits. Visits are a pure, pristine virginal statistic, untouched by uniqueness or nasty cookie, ip, useragent based methodologies.
Using visits we have 600,000 chances to convert a user to a premium membership, not 300,000 daily-unique-visitor-cookie-daily-thingamybobs or 10,000 monthly-thingamybobs.
Here is a sobering press release from Nielsen Netratings (shooting themselves in the foot) that highlights the danger in using unique visitor metrics:
This September 2005 press release was used to showcase their 'upcoming' data integrated methodology, which to this day, still has not been implemented in Australia - seems like too many users of Nielsen Netratings seem to enjoy their bloated unique visitor figures :)
I agree with Shor - ditch the daily stats - I've never worked with a business who paid more than a cursory glance to dailies - weekly and monthly visitors strike me as giving a much more rounded impresion of your site's reach...
Although I am one of the freaks who regularly visits more than once a day!
Unique visitors is a terrible metric, created by the analysis industry early on but with little/no/or misleading value.
When selling things, such as premium memberships or reports they invariably involve multiple visits. The more expensive the items sold the more time spent in evaluating the expenditure and probably more visits.
Heheh.......change the price of premium memberships for a year to $1 and unique visits may have some meaning.
Isn't that the usual case? Making time for "our own stuff" is a battle cry shared by many.
While I think you are completely right to have concerns and to evaluate priorities, I don't think you should beat yourself up too much about it.
Over the last few months SEOmoz has...
That you haven't really dug in with keyword research and better optimization isn't too surprising. Now that the dust is starting to settle, I imagine that will get the attention it deserves.
I agree with Chuck and earlpearl... something seems a little funky with the return visitor numbers. Just seems like there should be a little more postitive movement there.
I come directly to the site for the blog, but I wonder what the breakout is between site readers and feed readers or how frequent feed readers make it back to the site?
It's the same reason cobbler's kids have crappy shoes.
It's definitely the case. I've been trying to work on a few things for my own site for what seems like forever and only seem to be able to get to it on weekends after I've done what I can to make sure the bills are paid.
Thanks for sharing those stats Rand. I voted SEOmoz for the Blogger's Choice Awards.
Um, I was happy to break 250,000 on Technorati. :)
I really appreciate the transparency, Rand; I think there's a lot we can learn from each other as small shops if we take a sensible approach to competitiveness and drop the paranoia.
The Oatmeal thing is hillarious.
Thanks for the peek into your stats very appreciated
it should be noted however that after conducting some research, I have concluded that a stick can be shaked at these stats.
I can take a picture of it if you like.
shaked? shaken? shook?
I'm not sure if we're properly conjugating the verb here.
Nonetheless, happy stick shaking!
the initial challenge was finding a stick, luckily I don't wash my hair often and i was recently venturing through a forest.
That was the first thing I searched for "oatmeal" just to see what comes up.
that made my day hahahah. I love looking at other people's stats
I miss some of the people who used to comment here on a regular basis when I first started visiting back in Dec. 2006: EGOL, G-Man, and Michael Martinez. We hear from EGOL once in a great while, but not from the others.
My favorite new addition is Whiteboard Fridays. I like the keyword difficulty tool, too.
Identity is right about all the changes you made all at once. This may be a case of losing a battle to win the war. He forgot to mention the wedding proposal too. Enough work for half a year, I'd say.
I agree with Tinkerbellchime, SEOMOZ used to be less chat
The first thing I noticed was exactly the same thing as Chuck; that return visitor stats were flat. Could that be a reporting anomaly. If you looked at return visits over longer time frames (checking return visits from a starting baseline time frame I'd expect you would see significant growth.) If not, then the site has no "stickiness" and I don't believe that is the case at all.
A second thing was that the referring domains stats don't seem to jive with the reports that show almost 200,000 visits from search engines. (I'm assuming that the entire number of additional SE engine visits not shown don't total up to something like 50,000 additional search generated visits).
Third, as with many sites the long tail volume of searches has to be rediculously long....based on the aggregate percentage total shown above.
Lastly, I recently converted, Rand. You have been a long time quality provider to the industry--keep it up. Thanks
Dave
PS and off topic--installing Yahoo search for SEOMOZ is a huge improvement. It works very well. Kudo's.
Rand,
Good morning
I am one voice, but all of you do an egggcellent (mr. burns) job here at the moz. There is a lot of competition out there, but I must say that the moz is unique. All of you are well articulated, put in the time to do the research before you post, are open to varying views, and (something that you can't learn) have personality.
I come to the moz at 6:30 am eastern every weekday morn as I get in the office. I know that I will be met with something informative wrapped in individual personality coming from each contributor.
You guys have been doing the whiteboards (which I've said before is a spectacular idea), always look to increase your knowledge of different areas of SEO, and (most importantly) have fun doing it all.
I don't think the "numbers" reflect your popularity or your impact on the industry. Stay positive bro, you are doing a stellar job .
When the moz has its own Saturday morning cartoon, Broadway play, action figures, and E-True Hollywood Story you will looking for a break from the limelight.
Hard to tell from just a snapshot, but it looks like the return visitor number is relatively flat, which seems surprising given the growth in feed subscription.
Wild how dominant Google is in search referrals - further evidence of demographic differences between the engines?
Regardless, seems like you'll need to give YOUmoz more time to catch on, since that's the engine for more than incremental growth in the future.
We show full posts in our RSS feed as a convenience to our readers. Unfortunately, that means many (if not most) don't click through to the site, hence the low return visitor rate despite RSS growth.
You could always do what Techcrunch does, link your own pages excessively in your posts so you end up clicking through to other posts.
Off topic: I couldn't get the comments to work in Safari; good thing there's always Firefox!
The SEOmoz blog reads PR5 on my toolbar.
It reads PR6 on mine (firefox plugin)
edit: my mistake, the firefox plugin was playing up
It reads PR5 on mine as well.
The fact that you're holding steady is commendable. Its a tough business you're in. New, competent competition is popping up all the time.
I'd be curious to see some stats on the net-wide SEO user base to see if it's growing.
It would be interesting to see the conversion stat for the premium contents and if it helps to remind people about it in the posts?
Rand, first your company financials, now this. You get the "Open CEO" award. Thanks for being a geniune leader, not just in "things SEM", but in "things business" as well.
- Old School
Amazing! Stats are amazing. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Interesting that you get so much traffic from the phrase "Oatmeal". Someone may be asking for a raise ;)
Nah, he was just doing an experiment with Titles and Meta Tags. Check out result number 4 on Google and you'll see why so many people click through.
Maybe ground up pigeons are actually a good ingredient in oatmeal. This is definitely a page that should utilize adsense.
I already have adsense on it (you can't see it if you're an SEOmoz member) and it's earning us a a heart 25 cents a day.
Its interesting that Google search takes 90% of natural referrers. I have this sam experience with https://www.rrove.com. But if Google takes 60% of N. American traffic, shouldn't Y!/MSN natural search be sending the 40%?
I thought I was doing something wrong for Rrove (or G was reporting funky), but it turns out its correct info.
Anyone with insights?
I love stats, cheers for that Rand.
I found it interesting how much traffic was generated from images.google.com
I wouldnt have thought that the terms that you target would drive much traffic on an image based search, but its in your top ten referring domains.
It'll be interesting to see our own stats when our news site goes image happy. (although we wont have so many images of a confused looking google bot)
Love your blog.
Voted For SEOmoz!
all things considered (market, workload, etc) I think you guys have not only been solid contributors but also helped many make solid contributions.
Yesterday I was at a networking thing where someone told me a story of an SEO company who really ripped them off. This was told to others with no SEO agency experience, warning them off SEO as a whole as a bunch of criminals. This is what we have to fight against.
You do an excellent job of flying the flag for proper, responsible SEO.
Thank you
I went back and looked at last years stats and you have that return visitor information. Over most of the last 1/2 of the year seomoz hit about 60-70,000 return visitors--- and that was a big jump from the beginning of the years; all of which indicates that there is a lot stickiness. And if those numbers are growing.....that is a real strong indication of reader satisfaction.
If they are flat--then I'd be working to improve those totals. Personnally, I'd do all cartoons all the time. They are a riot!!!!!
Awesome post Rand. Thanks for sharing.