This week saw another landmark milestone for my main photography website, http://gavinthorn.com, that of achieving over 1,000 visitors to the site in a rolling one month window, as measured by Google Analytics. That’s absolutely staggering for a small site, designed and built by me with my QTSoftware hat on, that only went live on January 2nd 2011.
Over a thousand visitors! I still cannot believe it.
Furthermore, the traffic is still increasing and long may it continue to do so.
So, where is it all coming from? The pie-chart on the graphic above gives a big clue – most of it is coming from search engines. Drill down into the next layer of data and it’s mainly Google, several flavours of Google in fact but also featuring are Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL. The very fact that nearly 60% of visitors are finding my site this was is testament to all the SEO work I’ve done. I wrote a blog post about that here and I think it’s now time to write a follow up on that site too
Next on the list is Referring Sites at nearly 27.5%. Again, drilling down into the data, the largest proportion of these is of course the Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Probably no surprises there either.
What I did find surprising though is the number of visits from people directly typing in the URL to my site. Some, but not all of that is me 😉 and I find this result really encouraging. Its also why I chose my URL to be http://gavinthorn.com rather than http://gavinthornphotography.com. The latter is far too long for people to want to type in and the chances of introducing a typo significantly greater. (BTW, if anyone is interested the longer URL will work but you’ll just get a much older version of the homepage.)
The next trick is to turn that traffic into bookings but that dear reader is the subject of another post entirely.
Hasta la proxima,
Gavin
This is also having a positive effect on my Alexa.com rank too 🙂 as of the time of writing http://gavinthorn.com is currently sitting at position number 50,088 for the UK.