The other day i was looking at stats for leaving-cert.net which we bought a few months ago. As i said before, it’s going be to swallowed up by our larger site (theleavingcert.com) but what i found interesting was how stable and predictable the traffic was for both sites…
This is a summary from 1st june until today for leaving-cert.net…
And here’s the same period for theleavingcert.com…
Virtually identical in terms of appearance. Huge difference in terms of traffic volume though. 11k -v- 41k. What’s interesting here is that theleavingcert.com is 50% smaller than leaving-cert.net in terms of content, however it gets almost 4 times as much traffic.
Quite simply, theleavingcert.com is just better optimized for search engines but it shows just how much traffic leaving-cert.net is / was missing out on. You ask yourself if theleavingcert.com had double the content, could it get double the traffic it gets now (80k)? Or on the other hand, if leaving-cert.net had the same level of SEO as theleavingcert.com could it could it get 80k visits in that time frame? It’s not quite as simple as that as a lot depends on the content itself, but it does make you wonder…
Both sites are in the same niche which as you can see from the charts above is pretty predictable. We can predict when traffic will peak (it’s not hard – basically any time exams are on or deadlines are coming up). From buying leaving-cert.net we’ve not only strengthened our content & traffic, but we’ve gained valuable info. We’re more aware of how our competitors are doing and we’ve also learned that the niche is very predictable. We can now assume all sites in the niche have similar patterns.
We can use that to our advantage… it’s like knowing the weather in advance. Looking at your own stats is always interesting but looking at a competitors stats is even more valuable. Although we now own leaving-cert.net (so it’s no longer a competitor), the stats have given me a valuable insight in to what has worked and what hasn’t and where it’s strong and weak points are…
These days i’m getting much better & quicker at spotting trends and seeing opportunities with google analytics stats. A couple of years ago i would have just looked at headline numbers and that would have been that. I’m still a great believer in ‘making’ and contributing to stats rather than analyzing them but perhaps that analytics qualification gave me more than just a piece of paper after all 
