Finances & Money

2007 Traffic, Referrers and Keyword Review

Well, it’s the end of the first full year here at Clever Dude. It was also the first year I earned any money on the site, so I’m considering this the year anything real happened on my site too. I might have another post to talk about my income via this site, but don’t look for any hard dollar figures, just percentages.

Now onto the traffic information. The numbers below come from Google Analytics, which vary from my Sitemeter and Statcounter numbers in both good and bad ways. Also, some of my numbers from the beginning of the year are lower than actuals because during peak traffic from Lifehacker and Digg, I had to remove some of my java code to increase site response time. Therefore, some of the totals are lower by a few thousand visitors and pageviews:

2007 Total Visitors: 190,224
2007 Total Pageviews: 310,807

Traffic Breakdown

• 63.66% of my traffic came from referring sites, which includes other blogs as well as any non-search engine traffic.
• 21.54% of my traffic came from search engines
• 14.77% was direct traffic
• .03% was “Other” (what does that mean?)

2008 Site Traffic Goals

In 2008, I want to surpass 1 million pageviews (total), which means I need to more than double my pageviews next year vs this year. I don’t have specific visitor count goals, but I guess the more the merrier.

Regarding my traffic breakdown, I’d like to flip the numbers between search visitors versus referral traffic. Search engine readers are the ones who click ads the most, but honestly I don’t have any specific SEO plans in place to change those numbers. I still like writing for an audience rather than for the search engine, so if I come across improvements, I’ll implement them. Otherwise, I’m not planning on actively working on SEO for this site.

2007 Top Referring non-Blog Sites

First, let’s cover the main referrers that aren’t personal finance blogs. I’ll note the total % of visitors of each in () after the name:

1. Google Search (17.31%)
2. Direct Traffic (14.76%)
3. Digg (14.41%)
4. Lifehacker (7.58%)
5. Google.com (5.75%) – this includes Google Reader and Google Homepage
6. StumbleUpon (2.35%)
7. Yahoo Search (1.97%)
8. Del.icio.us (1.50%)
9. Consumerist (1.35%)
10. Bloglines (1.18%)

Obviously Digg and Lifehacker have been good to me, especially back in February-April when the majority of the traffic hit. Lately, some of you readers have been Stumbling my articles, which has been great for more steady site traffic growth. I appreciate it all!

2007 Top Referring Personal Finance Blogs

Now for the fun stuff. Let’s see who sent me the most traffic this year from my fellow PF bloggers with their rank among all referring sites in (). This includes search engines, etc.:

1. (#6) The Simple Dollar – this was the only PF blog in the top 10 of all referring sites with 3.84% of my total site traffic this year. Thanks Trent!
2. (#12) Five Cent Nickel
3. (#13) No Credit Needed
4. (#14) Mighty Bargain Hunter
5. (#15) Blogging Away Debt
6. (#16) The Digerati Life
7. (#18) Get Rich Slowly
8. (#21) My Money Blog
9. (#27) Money, Matter & More Musings
10. (#28) Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
11. (#30) Free Money Finance
12. (#32) Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge
13. (#35) Frugal For Life (actually from her old Blogspot address)
14. (#36) Mint Blog

I actually have over 1600 different referring sites over the past year, but I obviously can’t thank all of them without getting carpal tunnel. From all of me to all of you, THANKS!

Top Keywords

I find it interesting to look at what brought people to my site, and I’ll bet you won’t guess (don’t look yet!) which keyword was my top traffic producer for the year…Are you ready? I’ll list the word, and what I expect is the main target article for that word and the total % contribution to site traffic:

1. webkinz (9.00%)- nothing like making the Google search results front page on a hot keyword, and nothing like having a bunch of 9-year-olds commenting on your site with gibberish about their Webkinz collection.
2. technical service bulletins (4.19%) -I added together a few variations of the search term including GM technical service bulletins
3. free laptops (3.06%) – I seriously thought this would zbring in the most traffic, but I think most of the traffic went to Digg, then to my site.
4. clever dude (1.53%) – well, duh! I also added in “cleverdude”
5. car fax (0.76%) – I guess most people don’t realize the company is one word, “Carfax”
6. amish built homes (0.34%) – Amazingly this article from back in February ranked high on the list

I’ll just end it there at 6 because many of the next few are variations on the first 5. Interesting, huh? I guess I need to work more on my keywords for better search engine positioning next year.