A glossary of terms for our monthly website reports

Written by Mark Enrega on Friday, January 31, 2020

We provide a simple monthly report to our website customers which provides valuable insights into the performance of your website and your online business. It gives you a snap-shot of both the volume of activity on your website and the current SEO status of your website. This article describes the terms used in the website report we send out each month.

Each of the items that appear in your monthly report gives you an overall measurement for that particular metric. More detailed information for each of these metrics can be obtained from our customised analytics reports

Sessions

A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. Think of this as the all-important number of visitors or "hits" to your website. A single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions. A single user can open multiple sessions. Those sessions can occur on the same day, or over several days, weeks, or months. As soon as one session ends, there is then an opportunity to start a new session. Each time a person comes to the website, a new session is started. If one person visits the website multiple times, this will be recorded as multiple sessions.

Users

This is the number of unique people that have visited your website. It isn’t always 100% accurate. For example, if one person visits from both a desktop computer and their smart phone, this will count as two unique visitors. Equally, multiple people visiting the website using a shared computer will count as just one unique visitor. But overall, it is a pretty accurate number.

New Users

This is the number of new people who have visited your website for the first time. The higher this number is, the better, because it means that the website is attracting a new audience, which can lead to potential new business. If you subtract this "New Users" figure from the "Users" figure, you can get an idea of how many of your existing audience are returning visitors who are coming back for more.

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of visitors who viewed one page on the website and then left it without looking at any other page. If this number is high, then this could be cause for concern. It can mean that the website is attracting visitors who are not finding what they want, which could be caused by false or misleading keywords being used. Or, it could also mean that the content is lacking in substance and is not engaging enough to keep the users captivated. Or, it could mean that there is something technically wrong with the configuration of the website that is preventing users from interacting with the content effectively. If you get all this right, and from our experience, a bounce rate around 30% is a very good target.

SEO Score

This is the overall SEO score for all pages that have been scanned on your website. It is a 0-100 score, with zero being the lowest score. This score represents a combination of the ratio of issues found to the number of checks performed by our audit tools. Use this as your main guide to keeping track of your SEO status over time. You should be striving for the highest score possible to maximise your rankings in search engines.

Critical Errors

Critical error are the number of issues that have the highest impact on the overall SEO health of your website. These errors are usually the most technical, so you may need help from our support team to correct them. 

Warnings

Warnings are less impactful errors to your overall SEO health, but they do contribute the overall SEO score and they are things that need fixing in your website. These are usually less technical and are things most people can start fixing immediately. 

Recommendations

Recommendations have little or no impact on your SEO health, but they are still important to be aware of and they should be corrected. These ae usually the easiest issues to fix.

What is SEO?

To find our more about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and why it is so important to your online business, read the following articles on our website:

Want to get all the details and more valuable insights?

There is a wealth of information available to you which can help to optimise your content and ultimately get more customers. We can provide customised analytics reports that will give you the insights you need to make better business decisions and improve your online content. The report will include results that are specific to your business and it will outline the SEO improvements that are needed to fix any issues.

Need SEO help?

Our SEO service is designed specifically to increase the overall visibility of your company website and your brand. We combine in-depth keyword research, on-page and off-page SEO, as well as quality content creation that will engage your target market and get your website into tip-top shape.