2759/Cache

From CaseyPedia

Rescued from the Google cache:

[edit] 3/25/07

[edit] Traffic Trends, Casey Serin and My Objectives

Do you not find it the least bit worrying that this site commands more traffic and more comments than your SLC blog? - TK, "Realist" from Haterville

The greatest lie the devil ever told was convincing the world he doesn't exist. - Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects

The greatest lie the haters tell is Casey's traffic is down and Nigel gets none. - Anonymous

TK, the subject of traffic is one that frequently comes up concerning Casey and I. Lets take a look at what the average person can see about a site, vs. actually seeing the site's analytics. FYI, just to establish my level of expertise here, I've been doing web marketing and search engine optimization for 10 years. I've either worked for, or consulted for, a number of companies and organizations in various business categories including real estate, retail, travel, medical/health and education.

The average person can use Alexa to measure a site's reach. Reach is a function of traffic and inbound links compared to the rest of the sites on the Internet. Alexa is useful for measuring trends and will allow sites to be compared. Alexa is not an accurate measure of traffic, but more an accurate measure of web presence.

You can see here that Don't Hate Casey doesn't even register on Alexa because it has very few inbound links, it is very recent and it has very limited search engine exposure.

Compare my Utah real estate site with the key hater site and a different picture emerges.

You can see that my reach topped EN's for quite some time, but I know EN was pulling in three times the amount of visitors per day. This information came from back when they were on BlogTopSites. If you look at the dateline, you'll notice EN didn't start getting serious bumps in traffic until they left their roots and only talked about Casey. I estimate that now, EN's traffic is double mine.

As far as lies about traffic affecting Casey's site, again, the haters are wrong. Casey has thousands of inbound links, excellent search position and his daily traffic is about quadruple that of EN. His reach is also superior.

Like I said, Alexa doesn't provide accurate traffic measurements. So let's look at my Google Analytics numbers for SLC Real Estate.

March has been a great month traffic wise. I made a slight adjustment on my site that Google loved. Because of my inbound link work, after three months I achieved a PR of 4. Compare Casey's site which has thousands of inbound links and has a PR of 5. In March, SLC real estate has topped 10,000 unique visitors. Out of the two hundred plus real estate sites on BlogTopSites, it consistently measures in the top 25. This blog is serving all the purposes I intended it to.

So is SLC real estate being eclipsed by Don't Hate Casey? Let's have the numbers do the talking.

Comparing the same week:

SLC Blog - 2759 weekly unique visitors
Don't Hate Casey Blog - 1216 weekly unique visitors

Oh, and 68% of the DHC blog traffic came from my real estate blog.

So going back to the original question - Do you not find it the least bit worrying that this site commands more traffic and more comments than your SLC blog? - the answer is no. I'm not worried because it's simply not true. As far as comments go, I could care less how many comments I get at SLC. That is not important. Comments bear no relation to traffic. On the other hand, I do think comments </b>will drive this site.

Where comments do come into play is site stickiness or return visitors. People like to see their comments and will return to see answers to questions. Another way to facilitate stickiness is to supply fresh content. That's something I pay close attention to and my results show I've been successful at it.

The bottom line is SLC Real Estate is continuing to grow and the Don't Hate Casey blog has done nothing to stop that. In the same vein, Iamfacingforeclosure gets more unique visitors per month from search engines alone than EN gets from all sources. An IAFF "boycott" is a ridiculous concept especially when you consider the mainstream media coverage Casey gets and will continue to get.

Come on now, if you're going to tell such lies, at least tell something that can't be so easily disproven. Thanks for the conversation starter TK.

Labels: Casey Serin, web traffic