Mark Meshulam is an expert witness and consultant for window, glazing and building exteriors.
Sometimes the story behind the story is as interesting as the story itself. Today’s article, our last for 2009, tells the story of ChicagoWindowExpert.com’s growth from nothing on February 1, 2009, to a well-read authority site today.

ChicagoWindowExpert.com's web hits 2009

Since its inception, ChicagoWindowExpert.com has had:

7,387 Unique Visits
30,617 Page views
4.14 Pages/Visit
2:34 Avg. Time on Site
79.07% New Visits

In the tracking of web activity, it’s important to know where the traffic comes from. “Direct traffic” refers to when a visitor finds us by typing our web address into the browser’s address bar. Referring sites are other sites that have links to our site. These include www.GlassMagazine.com and our own www.buildersarch.com. Search engines are dominated by Google, but they also include Yahoo! and the Microsoft’s up and coming Bing search engine. We don’t utilize any paid advertisment.

ChicagoWindowExpert.com traffic sources

Email blasts we send out to notify subscribers are grouped with “Direct traffic”. Thus, despite our 3500 name subscriber list, Google supplies more than double the traffic than do the email notifications. The quality of the traffic is different, however.

Here is the profile of our direct traffic visits:

ChicagoWindowExpert.com direct traffic

Referring sites perform remarkably similar to direct traffic:

ChicagoWindowExpert.com referring sites

Compare the performance of direct and referred traffic, representing about half of our traffic with the other half, that of Google and other search engines. Predictably, these web surfers click their way through web pages faster than other visitors, but nonetheless, they stay quite a long time – almost 2 minutes per visit. The ability of a website to hold the visitor’s attention once they arrive is called “stickiness”. I think it can now be said, we are sticky!

ChicagoWindowExpert.com traffic from search engines

Another interesting variable is geography. Thanks to analytical tools that are now available, we can now see where our visitors come from:

ChicagoWindowExpert.com traffic by global region

I find it gratifying that, for example, we have 50 visits from the Phillipines with visits averaging over 6 minutes. Then again, some of our excellent staff is from the Phillipines. Could this be their families back home? If so, may I tell them, “Magandang tanghali po!”

ChicagoWindowExpert traffic by region - top 16

Keywords and phrases

Any self-appointed expert in search engine optimization (including myself) will tell you that keywords and phrases are critical in bringing search traffic. Although I don’t obsess about forcing keywords into the text for the purpose of attracting traffic, I do observe all the typical protocols of inserting keywords where not shamelessly obvious. Luckily the content naturally contains keywords that you, our readers, seem to want to know about, so I can spend little or no time stuffing keywords.

And so, without even more ado, here are the top keywords and phrases that pulled traffic our way in 2009:

ChicagoWindowExpert top 20 (of 2,837) keywords

Wow, 10 of the top 20 keywords involve window leaks! Looks like a hot topic. Next year I will look for more opportunities to address this moist topic. In addition…

Next year in Chicago Window Expert

• Online Documents for Building Management
• An Interview with Sak
• Hope on a Rope: the Bosun’s Chair
• Historic Window Renovation
• A Solar Thermal Installation
• Window Replacement Using Panning
• Self-Heating Glass
• Strategies for Core Daylighting

and much more…..

Mark Meshulam, Chicago Window Expert wishing you many windows of opportunity in 2010