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5% traffic increase simply by making our site’s XML Sitemaps available to search engines

In January this year I was doing an analysis on the traffic sources to the hobby-based site I run (SuperMotors). Since we run the site as a hobby, it must pay for itself via direct subscriber fees and advertising revenue (on a CPM basis). From ad revenue standpoint, more traffic to the site equates to more revenue. Simply increasing the pageviews that existing traffic is already making is not enough in a CPM environment because ad networks will optimize ads to show less frequently to visits/sessions that have already seen their ads. Instead, we needed to look at creative ways in drawing in more visits to the site.

Referring search traffic is a significant driver in website traffic

What I found over an 8-month period -- I knew it was the leading referrer in traffic, but it was surprising to see that it was the leader by a clear mile -- was Google Organic search was driving over 37% of traffic to our site. The next closest traffic referrer was only at 11.7%.

Google's search index of our site (in January '09): 56,800 pages

Perform a Google search on your site index with this query: site:www.yoursite.com . In the case of SuperMotors, the 37% of traffic being driven by organic results in Google was a result of 56,800 pages in the Google index for www.supermotors.net. Not bad, but when compared to competing enthusiast sites who had indexes in the several hundred thousands, it was substantially low.

Bottom line: we were missing out on revenue opportunities by having a small natural search index.

Google Webmaster Tools: Adding Sitemaps

Sitemaps are the single most cost-effective way at increasing search visibility for your site with Google and getting additional, free organic traffic driven to your site. The premise is simple: the more content that Google indexes from your site, the more keyword hits there will be for your site. Rankings of these pages are another story altogether, but long tail search can account for a substantial portion of traffic being driven to your site. Here's the link to Google's webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Here is a screenshot of one of our sitemap indexes (for photos posted by our members), there are 11 separate pages each with 50,000 records each:

Even 8 months after submitted this Sitemap, of the 529,979 unique URLs submitted, Google has still only indexed 339,578 or 64% of them. Over time, this figure will continue to grow as the Googlebot absorbs more and more pages out of the Sitemaps.

Google's search index (8 months later) of our site after adding Sitemaps: 1,200,000 pages

For the past 8 months, the Googlebot has been methodically inhaling more and more pages from our various sitemaps to increase our searchable index for SuperMotors.net in the Google Search index. Our search index increased from 56,800 to 1,200,000 -- a 2100% increase in indexed content free of charge.

Your results will vary -- we have a lot of user-generated content and the 1,200,000 million pages represents forum messages, pictures, sounds, and videos posted by 10's of thousands of members over several years. For sites without user generated content, indexed content will probably be much lower -- and this is OK. Apple.com for example, has approximately 115,000 indexed pages in Google at the time of this writing.

Referring organic Google visits have increased 5.76%

As the result of simply adding Sitemaps and telling Google about them via the Webmaster Tools page, we have seen a 5.76% increase in organic visits from Google. All other things equal, when you increase site visits by any percentage free of charge, this will result in increased revenues from CPM advertising programs. Or in the case of e-commerce/retail sites, this should increase online sales provided that you're converting these visits at the same rate as other visits.

Look at some of your favorite websites in Google's search index -- impressive results or not really? When you have a big brand name, you may not spend as much effort in the Sitemaps arena. However, organic search is highly qualified traffic because someone has searched for a keyword that you have on your site. Increasing your search index size is the first step in taking share away from your competitors online. Optimizing the content on those pages is another tactic altogether -- but content optimization won't matter if Google doesn't know the page exists on your site.