Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Moz Community!

I'm doing research for a client and trying to gain insights around their competitors website data. Specifically trying to see what landing pages on the competitors site receive the most traffic. Does anyone currently use a tool that shows estimated traffic here? As an FYI, outside of MOZ Pro (which I love), I use SpyFu and SimilarWeb.

Right now my client's landing page traffic is mainly homepage traffic and we want to make reccos on where to grow outside the homepage to increase visibility in other specific areas where there is search demand. We have a good idea but I'm hoping the competitor web data will back up those recommendations.

Any recommendations here would be super valuable!

Thank you in advance for your time.

Abbi

Technically speaking, you are allowed to write about whatever you want. There are numerous factors that play into ranking well on search engine results pages like on-page SEO, domain authority/page authority, a secure and accessible website, technical SEO and mobile friendliness. Your chances of ranking well are increased when these factors are in great shape.

When focusing on optimizing your web content (on-page SEO), I prefer to start with keyword research and then form the content around what the main topic is going to be along with the support topics that help drive relevant search queries. Looking at your competitors keywords in your designated space is a great way to form your keyword research list as you mentioned!

MOZ has a great keyword research tool called "keyword explorer" where you can type in the topic you're going after and it will supply a list of keywords in this space. You usually want to go after keywords with a higher search volume (preferably with a lower competition score as well).

Once you completed your keyword research, the next step is to select 1-2 focus keywords to use as your H1 header tags and then select support keywords (5-7 roughly) to use in your H2/H3 title tags and copy. DO NOT keyword stuff. As long as you flow in the keywords naturally and have a fair ratio per the amount of copy on the page, you should be okay.

Best of luck!

First thing I would look at: is the current website ranking well? If it is, sometimes the expression "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rings true here. Your website overall will be stronger and have better ranking if you keep it to one domain.

From my experience and research, I don't think that UK buyers have any preferential trust to one TLD or another (.com vs. .co.uk) - so long that it is clear on the website that you serve UK customers (UK phone number listed at the bottom of page etc., about us page could mention it here too)

Why you would want to use a ".co.uk" TLD: Your business is targeting a local UK customer base. If it's a local business like real estate, tradespeople (plumbing, electrician), ".co.uk" TLD would be recommended.

If your client has aspirations to grow the company and target international regions, I would say that having a .com would be more suitable than a .co.uk since .com is an international TLD.

If I was you, I would go back to the client and ask what they are hoping to achieve with two separate websites. This may help give you more clarity, however from my knowledge, I recommend keeping it to one site with the TLD as .com.

Hope this helps!

Finding out why you see a sudden spike in direct traffic sessions on your GA can be a bit tricky due to the lack of source information. However, we can make some safe assumptions by looking at the other metrics. Easiest way to analyze the direct traffic is by grouping the data into two categories:

1. Relevant Traffic

-Direct, relevant traffic are the loyal readers/visitors who are going straight to your website by typing in your URL or have your site bookmarked. This is the ideal scenario all of us would love to achieve. This type of traffic would have a low bounce rate and spend a considerable amount of time on your website (good avg time on page/multiple page sessions).

2. Irrelevant Traffic

-Internal traffic that is not being filtered, especially if you recently did heavy testing on the site. To avoid this install IP filters for you and your team or block internal traffic with GTM and cookies.

-Bot direct traffic, this the most common scenario and also the most complex to solve. Real user and bot traffic can share some characteristics so it is important to narrow down the one that comes only from spiders before filtering or segmenting out this traffic.

Common characteristics of bot traffic:

• A sudden spike in direct visits.
• Default Channel Grouping: Direct
• Landing Page: most of the time is your home page usually represented by a backslash / or /index.html
• Bounce Rate is usually really high close to 100%
• Average Session Time is very low: close to 0 seconds
• Page views average 1 per session

To find the bot trail, go to the Direct traffic report on Analytics select the home page (/) and start adding different secondary dimensions to find common patterns. The more you find the better!

Dimensions recommended to check:

• Browser/Browser version
• Operative system/ OS versions
• Browser size
• ISP or Network domain
• City
• Flash version

Once you find 1 or more patterns from the previous step, you can use them to create an advanced segment to exclude this traffic. This way you are able to analyze true data that isn't skewed from bots to get an actual representation of your visitors behavior.

There are thousands of bots crawling the web for different purposes; there are good and bad bots. In extreme cases you will need to block them from your server, the hosting services are usually very helpful with this type of stuff.

I hope this helps!

Yes, it is very likely that the company hosting the webinar will send you a recording or a link to an on-demand video after the event. This could be immediately afterwards or be a few days later.

If you don't receive a copy of the webinar after several days, I do recommend to reach out to the company to request a recording and I'm sure they would be more than happy to send you a copy.

Finding out why you see a sudden spike in direct traffic sessions on your GA can be a bit tricky due to the lack of source information. However, we can make some safe assumptions by looking at the other metrics. Easiest way to analyze the direct traffic is by grouping the data into two categories:

1. Relevant Traffic

-Direct, relevant traffic are the loyal readers/visitors who are going straight to your website by typing in your URL or have your site bookmarked. This is the ideal scenario all of us would love to achieve. This type of traffic would have a low bounce rate and spend a considerable amount of time on your website (good avg time on page/multiple page sessions).

2. Irrelevant Traffic

-Internal traffic that is not being filtered, especially if you recently did heavy testing on the site. To avoid this install IP filters for you and your team or block internal traffic with GTM and cookies.

-Bot direct traffic, this the most common scenario and also the most complex to solve. Real user and bot traffic can share some characteristics so it is important to narrow down the one that comes only from spiders before filtering or segmenting out this traffic.

Common characteristics of bot traffic:

• A sudden spike in direct visits.
• Default Channel Grouping: Direct
• Landing Page: most of the time is your home page usually represented by a backslash / or /index.html
• Bounce Rate is usually really high close to 100%
• Average Session Time is very low: close to 0 seconds
• Page views average 1 per session

To find the bot trail, go to the Direct traffic report on Analytics select the home page (/) and start adding different secondary dimensions to find common patterns. The more you find the better!

Dimensions recommended to check:

• Browser/Browser version
• Operative system/ OS versions
• Browser size
• ISP or Network domain
• City
• Flash version

Once you find 1 or more patterns from the previous step, you can use them to create an advanced segment to exclude this traffic. This way you are able to analyze true data that isn't skewed from bots to get an actual representation of your visitors behavior.

There are thousands of bots crawling the web for different purposes; there are good and bad bots. In extreme cases you will need to block them from your server, the hosting services are usually very helpful with this type of stuff.

I hope this helps!

First thing I would look at: is the current website ranking well? If it is, sometimes the expression "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rings true here. Your website overall will be stronger and have better ranking if you keep it to one domain.

From my experience and research, I don't think that UK buyers have any preferential trust to one TLD or another (.com vs. .co.uk) - so long that it is clear on the website that you serve UK customers (UK phone number listed at the bottom of page etc., about us page could mention it here too)

Why you would want to use a ".co.uk" TLD: Your business is targeting a local UK customer base. If it's a local business like real estate, tradespeople (plumbing, electrician), ".co.uk" TLD would be recommended.

If your client has aspirations to grow the company and target international regions, I would say that having a .com would be more suitable than a .co.uk since .com is an international TLD.

If I was you, I would go back to the client and ask what they are hoping to achieve with two separate websites. This may help give you more clarity, however from my knowledge, I recommend keeping it to one site with the TLD as .com.

Hope this helps!

Technically speaking, you are allowed to write about whatever you want. There are numerous factors that play into ranking well on search engine results pages like on-page SEO, domain authority/page authority, a secure and accessible website, technical SEO and mobile friendliness. Your chances of ranking well are increased when these factors are in great shape.

When focusing on optimizing your web content (on-page SEO), I prefer to start with keyword research and then form the content around what the main topic is going to be along with the support topics that help drive relevant search queries. Looking at your competitors keywords in your designated space is a great way to form your keyword research list as you mentioned!

MOZ has a great keyword research tool called "keyword explorer" where you can type in the topic you're going after and it will supply a list of keywords in this space. You usually want to go after keywords with a higher search volume (preferably with a lower competition score as well).

Once you completed your keyword research, the next step is to select 1-2 focus keywords to use as your H1 header tags and then select support keywords (5-7 roughly) to use in your H2/H3 title tags and copy. DO NOT keyword stuff. As long as you flow in the keywords naturally and have a fair ratio per the amount of copy on the page, you should be okay.

Best of luck!