103bees - Web Analytics with a Twist

I discovered 103bees a month ago and decided to give it a go after reading some good reviews about it. It's an online traffic analysis tool that focuses purely on organic search engine traffic without fussing over other frivolous data (e.g. unique visitors, pageviews, ip addresses, browsers, OS). This is especially useful for anyone who's concerned about how their sites rank for specific keywords on major search engines. With 103bees, I can easily see which set of keywords I should work more on to further increase traffic, and maintain those I rank strongest for. For this article, I'm using my gaming site, Dota Allstars Strategy, as our focus.

103bees' real-time analysis is sliced up into several sections:

1. Latest search hits: Tracks the latest keywords used in search engines that led to your site.

In this example, the keywords "mystic staff" were searched in Google for which my site is ranked between 1-10. The "Page" link points to the landing page on my website listed as the search result for "mystic staff". The "ToDo!" link adds "mystic staff" to my ToDo list. This is useful if you find that your ranking for some keywords is very poor. You can go back to this list under "Manage Projects".

2. Top landing pages: Lists the most popular pages on your site that received hits from search engines.

What's terrific about this is you can drill down to the tiniest details of each landing page through the links located on the right of each: Traffic, Phrases, Questions, Keywords. These are also part of the general overview of the site analysis, however I'd prefer to use a landing page as an example for a more thorough explanation. Let's use the downloads.html page as our sample.

Under Traffic, a bar graph roughly shows search engine traffic to downloads.html over a 7-day period:

Phrases shows a list of search terms used to find downloads.html. In this case, the phrase dota 6.39 ai download was the most searched for, 90 times:

Questions generates a list of search terms as well, but in the form of a question:

Basically, all the who, what, when, where, how phrases will be shown in this page.

Lastly, Keywords examines each word used as a search term:

3. Search Engines: Shows which search engine gives you the most traffic.

4. Rankings: This one is interesting. It shows you how far your visitors go within the search results to find what they're looking for.

Looking at the numbers, 95.5% of the time my site was clicked on when it was ranked between 1-10. Notice the discrepancy to when I'm ranked 11-20 — that's only 3%! And see how poorly I did when my site was on pages 6-10. This simply underscores the importance of ranking highly in search engines if you want decent traffic.

5. Long tail: This is where it gets a little confusing. But it's quite simple actually. The following line graphs describe the distribution of search term popularity.

If we magnify the graph above we can easily differentiate the "short head" from the "long tail".

The short head represents the few search terms that gives me the bulk of my search engine traffic. The long tail represents a long list of search terms that gives me additional traffic, but is minimal compared to the short head.

Analysis of my search term distribution:

Most used: 262 terms / 5 % / 8338 visits / 57.9 % of traffic
Used only once: 4193 terms / 80 % / 4193 visits / 29.1 % of traffic

As you can see, the short head contains only 262 terms, or 5% of all search terms. But despite that, it gives me 57.9% of traffic compared to just 29.1% from the long tail. This is an indication that my search engine traffic is quite good. If your graph lacks a "head", it means that your traffic comes from mostly unique combinations of keywords. You can research on the most popular keywords of your niche and work on those to build more popularity. But your success depends largely on the saturation of your market. If your graph lacks a "tail", that means you're near or on the top of your niche, and you may have an easier time ranking for unique combinations of search terms.

I highly recommend 103bees if you want to get serious about search engine optimization. Its vast array of robust features (and the fact that it's free) will definitely get you ahead in your efforts of increasing site traffic.