Huge increase in US direct visits to a UK site, why?
-
Hi all,
My UK website usually gets around 10,000 direct (Direct in Analytics) visits per month however for August this has shot up to 24,000! However the majority of these direct visits seem to be coming from the US and as a result the bounce rate is through the roof, 84%!
Why would my UK based site suddenly be receiving huge amounts of US visits? Any ideas?
-
Try applying this Advanced Segment, which will segment out your metrics showing only the traffic which originated from America:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XGA6--mISZqq4AT60sJBRQ
Once the advanced segment is applied, you can look around on various reports and try to see if you can find anything which seems out of whack.
-
Here are a couple of causes of that, which I've seen in my own analytics.
-
A website monitoring service was added, that was somehow triggering javascript. I found this by looking in the hosts section of GA, where you usually see what ISP people are using.
-
GA is for some reason counting one visitor going to a bunch of pages as lots of visitors going to one page. The visitors were all from the same city, all had the same resolution of their monitor, version of flash, etc. I verified this because we happened to be running a second stats program on the site, and I saw they were all from the same IP and just browsing the site.
-
-
Thanks for your responses guys.
What troubles me is that the pages per visit is just 1, the avg time on site from these visits just 3 seconds and then a huge bounce rate, making me believe that it could be an attack.
However there is no common landing page - i thought this maybe the homepage if i was under attack.
In a normal month we will receive 10,000 direct visits across 3,000 pages - this month it's 24,000 visits across 9,500 pages!
Even if these were genuine US citizens surely the odd hundred or so would click on additional pages before realising it was the wrong site?
I don't understand it.
-
Same here, the US often generates the largest traffic on english sites because there are many more users in the US... But the fact that those are all direct users is strange and might be a bug. Sometimes traffic is shown as direct, even though it's referred from other pages or even search engines.
-
Hi Mark,
A similar thing happened to a client of mine. When we looked into it a company of a similar name was doing an advertisement drive in America.
When people were typing in the name of the company into Google and only remembering part of it if our clients name came up as well as the other company and people were mistakenly clicking on our clients website.
It is worth checking to see if there are any similar named companies that operate out of America and check their website to see if they are running any promotions.
As Chris says it is also worth checking back over any changes you have recently made to your link profile as well.
Hope that helps.
-
Hi Mark,
Without looking in depth my first thought would be your link profile, take a look at your links and see if you have had a new link that is US based pointed towards you. Once/if you find it you can work on removing it if you are worried about the bounce rate.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I am based in the UK. I want to appeal to a UK and US market. One of my keywords is 'generalised' which gets way more traffic in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do?
Hi folks. I am based in the UK. I am about to launch a new blog, and I want to appeal to the UK and US markets. One of my primary keywords is 'generalised', which gets way more traffic (as seen using Moz's keyword tool) in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do? Any guidance would be great. I note this has been discussed before, but seemingly without a conclusion. I would really appreciate any help you can provide.
International SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites
Hello, It's been a year since we launched our website and at first, we did it with a domain name called misitio.co. We have just bought the domain name mysite.com and my doubts are what should I do with the domains I have in other countries, for example .mx .br, should I redirect them to mysite.com or manage them independently? Thank you very much
International SEO | | Isabelcabreromunoz1 -
International Site Merge
Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.
International SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Correct site internationalization strategy
Hi, I'm working on the internationalization of a large website; the company wants to reach around 100 countries. I read this Google doc: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en in order to design the strategy. The strategy is the following: For each market, I'll define a domain or subdomain with the next settings: Leave the mysitename.com for the biggest market in which it has been working for years, and define the geographic target in Google search console. Reserve the ccTLD domains for other markets In the markets where I'm not able to reserve the ccTLD domains, I'll use subdomains for the .com site, for example us.mysitename.com, and I'll define in Google search console the geographic target for this domain. Each domain will only be in the preferred language of each country (but the user will be able to change the language via cookies). The content will be similar in all markets of the same language, for example, in the .co.uk and in .us the texts will be the same, but the product selections will be specific for each market. Each URL will link to the same link in other countries via direct link and also via hreflang. The point of this is that all the link relevance that any of them gets, will be transmitted to all other sites. My questions are: Do you think that there are any possible problems with this strategy? Is it possible that I'll have problems with duplicate content? (like I said before, all domains will be assigned to a specific geographic target) Each site will have around 2.000.000 of URLs. Do you think that this could generate problems? It's possible that only primary and other important locations will have URLs with high quality external links and a decent TrustRank. Any other consideration or related experience with a similar process will be very appreciated as well. Sorry for all these questions, but I want to be really sure with this plan, since the company's growth is linked to this internationalization process. Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | robertorg0 -
Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO
Hi,
International SEO | | Awaraman
I have two questions. Question 1: is it worthwhile to redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO? For example, my company's webpage is www.example.com. Would it make sense to redirect the main site to address www.example.com/service-one-in-certain-city ? I am asking this as I have learned that it is important for SEO to have keywords in the URL, and I was thinking that we could do this and include the most important keywords to the subfolder / specific URL. What are the pros and cons and how important is it to include keywords to folders and page URLs. Should I create folders or pages just the sake of keywords? Question 2: Most companies have their main URL shown as www.example.com when you access their domain. However, some multi-language sites show e.g. www.example.com/en or www.example.com/en/main when you type the domain to your web browser to access the site. I undertstand that this is a common practice to use subdomains or folders to separate the language versions. My question is regarding the subfolder. Is it better to have only the subfolder shown (www.example.com/en) or should you also include the specific page's URL after the subfolder with keywords (www.example.com/en/main or www.example.com/en/service-one-in-certain-city)? I don't really understand why some companies show only the subfolder of a specific language page and some the page's URL after the subfolder. Thanks in advance, Sam0 -
Getting ranked in French on Google UK ?
Hellooooo the Moz community ! (#superexcited, # firstpost) Here's my problem. I'm working for a client specialised in Corporate Relocation to London for French families. (I'm reworking the entire site from the ground up, so I can manoeuvre pretty easily) The thing is, these families will either be : Searching on Google FR but mostly in English (French as well) Searching on Google UK but mostly in French ! (and of course, English as well) To be honest, I'm really not sure what strategy I should go with. Should I just target each local market in its native language and google will pick up the right language if people are searching in the "opposite" language ? I'd love some tips to help get me started. Sadly, I don't have a lot of data yet. (Client didn't even have tracking up on their site before I came in). So far here's what I got (on very small number of visitors): Location: 50+% from UK / 20+% from France.
International SEO | | detailedvision
Language : 60+% En / 35+% Fr Thank you. Tristan0 -
UK based people Need your help
I'm aware that this is not SEO related, but bare with me: Launching a new business venture and need some advise. the site will be located in the UK (for legal reasons) and since I have no experience with UK webhosts. I kinda need your help on selecting a good webhost. Money is not importants but what is: - excellent up times unlimited bandwidth So if you could share your experiences it would be much appreciated. thx in advance 🙂
International SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Multilingual site - separate domain or all under the same umbrella
this has been asked before with not clear winner. I am trying to sum up pros and cons of doing a multilingual site and sharing the same domain for all languages or breaking it into dedicated subdomains e.g. as an example lets assume we are talking about a french property portal with an english version as well. Assume most of the current incoming links and traffic is from France. A) www.french-name.fr/fr/pageX for the french version www.english-name.com/en/pageX for the english version B) www.french-name.fr/fr/ for the french name (as is) www.french-name.fr/en for the english version the client currently follows approach A but is thinking to move towards B we see the following pros and cons for B take advantage of the french-name.fr domain strength and incoming links scalable: can add more languages without registering and building SE position for each one individually potential issues with duplicate content as we are not able to geotarget differenly on web master tools of google potential dilution of each page's strength as we will now have much more pages under the same domain (double the pages basically) - is this a valid concern? usability/marketing concerns as the name of the site is not in english (but then people looking for a house in France would be at least not completely alien to it) what are your thoughts on this? thanks in advance
International SEO | | seo-cat0