DIY Graphs: Make Your Data Speak Up!

18th July 2014Annabelle

Have you tried playing with graphs and visits data in the Botify report? Perhaps you would like to see examples?

We’ve been talking about the new Google Analytics import feature. You probably know by now that the Botify report includes organic and social visits information per page, as well as visits statistics. We showed the visits graphs that were added to the Botify report.

So many possibilities… where to start? Here are a few ideas.

You can create as many views and insights as you want, with this visits information combined with data from the Botify crawl (Botify Analytics, in short!). That’s exactly what the URL Explorer is for. But sometimes, when everything is possible, we don’t know where to start, right?

Let’s take an example and see what we can look at. This is a site with the following traffic pattern:

• Organic traffic: approximately 60K monthly visits generated by 6K active pages
• Social traffic: approximately 1K monthly visits generated by 200 active pages

A new perspective on crawl analysis brought by organic and social visits information

First, let’s try to understand if and how these two types of traffic overlap. Then, we’ll try to see if this hints at possible optimizations.

Here are the pages that generate the most organic traffic, and the traffic they bring, both organic and social.

Squinting to see the yellow for social visits ? It’s so small it’s almost not visible. There are no more than 2 or 3 social visits per page, if any.

Let’s now look at the top pages for social traffic (below). Half don’t have any organic visits, and the page with the highest number of organic visits is not even in the Top 100 for organic traffic.

So, on this website, active pages for organic traffic and active pages for social traffic don’t overlap much. Why not see pages with social traffic as potential organic targets? That’s what we’re going to look at.

Hands-on info: how to get these graphs

But first, some practical information: if you want to do get the same graphs for your website, it’s easy: select Organic / All in your Botify report’s visits tab, scroll down to the ‘Most visited URLs’ block, click on it, and then click on ‘Explore URLs’. This will bring you to the URL Explorer, showing the full list of URLs with organic visits over the imported 30-day period (applied filter at the top of the page) and the following fields displayed:

We need to display social visits as well:

Click in the ‘fields to display’ zone and select ‘Number of visits from social’ (you can start typing to narrow down the choices).

Click on ‘Apply’, and once results are displayed, click on ‘Export as CSV’.
Unzip and open the file in your favorite spreadsheet software, sort by number of organic / social visits and create a cumulated graph with the top lines and organic + social traffic figures.

You can do the same for top social visits, starting in the Social / all section of the report – or get all in the first export by including social visits as well : in the filter area at the top of the URL Explorer, click on ‘OR’, select ‘number of visits all social’ and ‘greater than 0’.

We know that internal linking matters for SEO. Show how much it does!

Figures used to build this graph are in the Botify report (in the comparison table between active pages and inactive pages, for each type of traffic).

Some pages with social traffic have great organic potential – find out which!

Social traffic doesn’t care about metadata uniqueness. But organic traffic does.

It’s no news that pages with unique metadata attract more organic traffic than duplicates. But here is proof. The first line of the graph below shows pages with organic traffic, the second all pages with no organic traffic, and the third line those with no organic traffic, that have social traffic. So we know what to work on to make pages with social traffic more attractive for organic traffic.

Figures for the first two lines in the graph can be found in the organic traffic page of the report, in the table that compares metrics from pages with visits (active pages) and pages without (inactive). The third line is from an export in the URL Explorer.

Mesure SEO quality criteria for socially active pages

In our example, most have duplicates

This graph results from an export of pages with social visits and their various duplicate counts.

Most socially active pages receive less internal linking than average

This graph results from an export of pages with social visits and their internal linking count (follow links).

Excessive depth

This shows the depth of active pages for social traffic, with more than X social visits. This graph is generated by the URL Explorer: go to the ‘most visited URLs’ block in the report, click on ‘Explore URLs’ to go to the URL Explorer with all visits, and filter to ‘more than X visits’. You’ll find the graph below in the “depth distribution” tab of the URL Explorer.

It is worth checking what these pages at depth 8 are, and place them in a higher position in the website structure if they are good candidates for organic traffic (depending on their content). Of course that’s not going to be the case for all pages with social visits – for instance, product or editorial pages are good candidates, and pages with user-generated content generally aren’t.

Page download performance below average

In short, there are many areas for improvement on socially active pages that are good organic traffic targets.

Where organic and social traffic indicators meet

Here are other ideas:

Find the overlap

Although there is little overlap between pages with organic traffic and pages with social traffic on this website, we can find pages with both types of traffic. Pages which are near the higher end of the spectrum for social traffic and on the lower end for organic are interesting, because we know they already rank for organic traffic. This is a good place to start when looking to optimize socially active pages for search engines.

Make use of entry pages with high engagement : usage statistics count!

We can also focus on pages with high engagement, and check if they have all they need to perform to the best of their ability in SEO and SMO.

And also, use them to promote other pages! If users stay longer on the site when they enter through these pages, why not place links there to content you want to promote for organic and social traffic? We know that usage statistics is key for middle tail organic traffic, and these pages looks like a good place to encourage clicks.