Taking time to review your web reports may seem like a boring task.  After all, at the end of the month, there isn’t much to look at besides how many people visited your website, right?

No!

Your web reports give you insight into a number of different aspects about how people are finding your website, and how people are taking action when they arrive.  Understanding different elements on your website will help you to make major improvements which will lead to even more leads and better rankings in the search engines.

Almost every website vendor provides a free web reporting tool, and if they don’t you might want to find a new one.  Actually if you don’t currently have a free web reporting tool, try using Google Analytics which is a powerful free tool you can add to almost any website.

Although there are literally hundreds of ways you can evaluate the data from your website, here are a few ways that will help you to keep the focus and get information that you can take action on.

1. Time on website – This metric demonstrates how long someone spent on your website.  The longer someone spends on your website the more likely they are to give you their information.  For a real estate website if they are spending less than 2 minutes on your website you have work to do!  Look at the information you are providing and make sure it is of real value to get people to stay longer.

2. Keywords – Of course you have taken the time to optimize your website for the most competitive keywords in your market, but are you actually being found on those terms?  Look at your keyword report to determine which keywords you are actually being found on.  Dig deep and look to find out what landing pages are being displayed for specific keywords.

3. Traffic sources – Search engines aren’t the only source of traffic online.  Look through your referring traffic and find out what other websites are sending you traffic.  You might be pleasantly surprised to find out your blog comments are driving traffic, or maybe a local blog picked up some of your content and is linking to you.  When you find a great source of traffic look to see if you can make that source grow even bigger!

Web traffic reports are a true wealth of information.  Taking time at the end of each month (or even week) will allow you to see how your online marketing efforts are working.  Each time you review your reports make a note of what you will do to improve your results.  Making improvements after you review is a sure fire way to ensure your website will climb to the top of the search engines.

By James Bridges of Online Real Estate Success

Online Real Estate Success offers training and coaching programs for real estate professionals who want to succeed with online marketing.  Programs are step-by-step and cover everything from real estate SEO, pay per click marketing, real estate blogging, socoial networking, and even converting leads into fresh appointments that turn into sales.