Is overseas traffic of any use?

If you ever study your analytics (and you should - monthly at least), you'll see traffic from all over the place, not just your home country.  There's always a fair few from India and Russia (more often than not they're spammers or hackers) and from the USA.  I looked at our stats for this month on AWStats (part of cPanel).  You can do the same sort of thing with Google Analytics, though GA can have an accuracy problem in its reporting and is better suited, in my opinion, for watching trends.

For the first 6 days of this year, the USA tops the traffic polls.  In fact, it regularly comes in at #1.  Of course, this is partly because that's where the Google, Yahoo et al spiders live, so you'd expect traffic from them.  I would be dismayed not to be seeing this - having your site spidered regularly is a good thing! But what of the other countries? France, Great Britain, Canada?

An interesting thing occured this week.  I got a submission off the site from a guy in Fort Worth, Texas, wanting a .co.nz site built.  Did he look in Texas?  Not sure, but the company he selected was us here in NZ!  So is that overseas traffic good?  you betcha! 

Another reason ANY traffic is good is that the search engines take into account traffic volumes when deciding on rankings.  Simplistically, they equate high volumes of traffic to be "votes" for a site's authority and relevance.  Conversely, low traffic is considered a vote too, but in the negative sense.  This is one reason I recommend strongly the use of a blog (and updating it regularly) along with RSS feeds, galleries and forums (as appropriate) as these are all features that are simply updated and continue to draw visitors back in.

So the takeaway is this.  Consider ALL traffic good (yes even the hackers and spammers count as a hit!) and never thin you won't get business from overseas.  Lastly, if you don't have a blog, get one now and start writing, and watch your stats regularly.

Happy New Year!