consistent online traffic to only three item pages

[sereneyarnart]

My reports show that I consistently have traffic to the same three pages on my online store. They are item pages for small dolls. I just can't imagine that 'real people' visit exactly these three pages day after day. What could be happening to create this? 

Side note: I have not done much to drive traffic to the site. Still early in the journey and in a learning phase. 

[_Violet]

Hi @sereneyarnart - I see this is your first post in the Square Community so I'd like to officially welcome you! 🎉👏 My name is Violet and I'm one of the Moderators here. Nice to meet you 🙂

I'm going to tag in a few of our Square Champions who also use Square Online, and see if they have any suggestions for you: @Donnie-M @HC_Charlie @Minion @rtfulk 

Could you also share your site's url, so we can take a look?

[sereneyarnart]

Thank you! 

URL is:  www.sereneyarnart.com 

The pages showing traffic are for the orange small doll 3 and the red and green christmas ornament. For a long time, the dark green small doll 3 was also on the list. 

Today I actually see a new page with a couple of visits: three color christmas ornament. 

[rtfulk · Accepted solution]

@sereneyarnart Welcome to the community. A few questions.  Were these the first few items you put up? When you look at traffic what’s the bounce rate? How long are they staying on your site?What location is the traffic coming from?

My thought is it’s a bot like google crawling your page, it’s not bad or invasive. It just sounds like google or bing or any other search engine is crawling your site.

1. Normally when you are building and uploading items to your site search engines will start crawling them. If those were in the first group of items you put up, it could just be the search going back to them.

2. If your bounce rate is close to 100%, it’s definitely a bot.

3. If it was a human they would stay longer and look.

4. If your traffic is coming from places like Ashburn VA or Des Moines IA, it’s probably a bot. Those are where major hubs are located.

[sereneyarnart]

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. I need to learn a bit more about the reporting part, but I'm pretty sure that traffic is 'drive by', so you are likely correct that it's bots. I'm very happy to learn that this type of 'crawling' of the page is not suspicious or worrisome. Thank you for making me feel better about it. 

I guess the upside is that some search engine is aware of my website. 😉

[HC_Charlie]

@sereneyarnart I cant be sure, but often times unusual traffic or visitors could be Google bots...if you've ever heard of SEO and Google searching/ranking, Google and other search engines send bots (fake people/customers) to a site in order to catalog items or just make an outreach. I don't understand enough why they do this, other than it helps them in their delivery of searches of websites. 

Another thing to check which I've found on my own website...check your "customers" list in your Square account. If you ever find a very strange or unrecognized customer in your customer list, this is an artifact from a Google hit to your website. I often delete these customers from my list, again I'm not sure why this gets created.

[sereneyarnart]

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I feel sure that what I'm seeing is some kind of bot. I'm glad to learn that it's not something weird or worrisome. 🙂

[Tyler_Humphreys]

Interesting question! I had a similar situation when I first started tracking traffic on my own small site. Sometimes, certain pages get picked up more by search engines or even social media bots, which can make it seem like those pages are disproportionately popular. One tip that helped me was adding some visually appealing content that also educates visitors. For example, I recently checked out Samsung interior film — they have some really clear examples of updating interior surfaces, which sparked ideas for how to make my product pages more engaging to humans, not just bots.

[Tyler_Humphreys]

I totally get what you’re seeing! Early on, I noticed the same few items on my site always showing up in traffic stats. As @rtfulk mentioned, a lot of it can just be search engines crawling your site repeatedly. One thing I found helpful was to create extra supporting content around those items to attract real visitors — like tutorials, tips, or inspiration posts. For instance, I sometimes browse Zerosigns to see how they showcase different signage ideas. Seeing their approach gave me ideas for making my own pages more appealing to actual customers.

[sereneyarnart]

Thank you for sharing your experience. It's helpful to know that this is somewhat common and nothing to worry about. I appreciate the tips! Next year I'm going to put some more effort into improving my site. 🙂