Are these good Search engine results?

[Tizer]

The site in question is one for a small hotel in a resort town in the UK with a small holiday season.

I am getting around 550-600 uniques per month with around half coming from Google and most of the rest of the results coming from Yahoo, MSN, AOL, search engines, Ask Jeeves UK, AltaVista, Search.com, Ask Jeeves in that order.

Keywords and phrases are targetted and unique hits are spread throughout the month...

Is this good or should I be expecting/aiming for more hits?

[shabbirbhimani]

go for more backlinks and you should get some more better ranking in google.

[matt-]

Hi Tizer,

Depends on the keywords that you are ranking on.

Id say, for a small hotel and the visitors being targetted, 550-600 a month is a good number - perhaps you should look at the number of enquiries / bookings being generated from that, as a way to determine if you need to get more visitors or not?

Of course, the actual website may need to be improved to higher the conversion rate, but that depends on how involved with it you are. If you're just doing SEO, id say thats a fair rate, and gentle but continual improvement is the way to go (assuming you have a ongoing contract).

Hope that helps,
Matt.

[tke71709]

If a million people a month are searching for information related to the accomodations in the area then those are horrible results.

If 800 people a month are searching for information related to the accomodations in the area then those are awesome results.

How long is a piece of string anyway?

[Tizer]

go for more backlinks and you should get some more better ranking in google.

What kind of backlinks should I go for - any or within the same niche?

The keywords are good - exactly what we aimed for, but i have no idea over bookings as I just build the site... he has asked for another site though so I must be doing something right!

If a million people a month are searching for information related to the accomodations in the area then those are horrible results.

If 800 people a month are searching for information related to the accomodations in the area then those are awesome results.

Is there anywhere to find out this information - or is this the 'holy web grail'.

[revsorg]

here...

[matt-]

In my opinion it's not always about achieving the maximum amount of visitors for a given market, all you have to do is to achieve enough visitors for the business, e.g. getting a million visitors to your hotel site isn't going to achieve much, because they can only book out x amount of rooms.

Aslong as the level of enquiries / bookings are sufficient, and you make a steady improvement on the seo campaign over time, you're doing fine. Do enough work for the client to make a good return on investment, and you're done - no need to go any further, especially if the business cannot take anymore value from it anyway.

Matt.

[I, Brian]

It's not the number of visitors you get - it's the number of conversions.

If you want traffic, just host some topless images. You'll get great traffic, but your conversion rate will suck.

However, if your traffic is well targeted, then the conversions should be good.

The question you really need to ask yourself is how well you are converting visitors to customers - if you're not sure, then offer a promotional code on the site, and log anyone who uses that as a web visitor.

That will give you a better idea of how well your campaign is going. Obviously, if none of your visitors are booking, then that is a bad sign.

[matt-]

Thankyou Brian, thats what I've been trying to say, but couldn't quite get it out