Please allow introductions. My name is Meagan, your new SEO coordinator. At BSG, we develop, deploy and maintain a good deal of technology that is not always easily explained and/or understood to those not immersed in computer technology. Therefore, allow me to offer a primer; an educational piece explaining one part of what I do for you and what it accomplishes.

Greetings to Our Valued Clients!

One element of my work is handling and filtering your referral traffic. If you noticed your site traffic numbers have been a touch off kilter lately, the back story is that BSG is filtering out websites that bring unnecessary and unusable traffic to your site. That adjustment dropped your overall number of page views. However, this had a good purpose.

The basics of referral traffic are pretty simple. Other websites might post a link to your site, whether it is relevant or not, thus directing essentially worthless traffic to your site. Think of a roadway detour that runs through your street. Things get crowded and annoying and unproductive. The result is that high numbers of people go to your site, but leave immediately, giving you a high “bounce rate”. This brings down your rankings in both Google and Bing Analytics.

Another problem with misguided referral traffic is that the “session” duration (a.k.a. the length of time someone has spent on your page) goes considerably down. Yes, sometimes you may wish to obtain more sessions, these are not the sessions you want. A very high bounce rate can be interpreted that the website is bad, when in fact people were just misled and disinterested in the subject matter.

Overall, at BSG, our team is looking for metrics that prove your site is being visited thoughtfully and intentionally. In controlling those badly detoured visitors, the metrics begin to get a lower bounce rate. However, there comes a higher session duration, and more pages viewed per session because the people visiting your site actually want to be there.

BSG steers and encourages this positive traffic to you. A minor drop in overall visits will be supplanted by an eventual boost metrics and make your websites far more favorable for organic searches! I hope this small explanation of my work on your behalf helps provide clarity to the heart-wrenching moments when analytics aren’t showing a lot of new traffic. Fear not, your site will be shining more brilliantly in no time.