Being a blogger, search analytics is something you will have to learn: people may come to your new posts from social media shares, links from your friends’ sites, etc. But it’s search traffic that will in the end will create a steady stream of targeted visits.
You may feel unwilling to actually “optimize” your pages for search traffic (even being a search marketer, I don’t care about the keywords when I blog because this somehow limits my creativity) but search analytics will give you way more than you may expect:
1. Have a constant stream of inspiration
You will be amazed at what people search to stumble at your site. This is like seeing what people ask relevant to your current blog content:
- See search referrals that drove the least traffic (these are the ones that were about your post content but not exactly, so your post didn’t rank high enough and drove only a fraction of traffic. These are good for finding some “neighboring” topics for follow-ups on the existing content);
- Focus on “long-tail” phrases: those that contain 3+ words. These are usually the most fun to research and the most revealing as well.
2. Pinpoint the posts that attract attention
Traffic analysis is a great way to find what most appeals to your reader:
- Identify pages which get most of the views and analyze how people got to them.
- Check those pages where people spent most time on. This is a great way to research what type of content is best to engage your readers.
Now, give them even more exposure:
- You may want to check out some WordPress plugins that feature those most viewed posts;
- Write more posts like those that attract attention and engage.
- Link to the older posts from your newer ones. This will both boost your older post performance and give you another reason to write something fresh on the similar topic.
How do I do that?
Now that you are convinced that you need to know the basics of traffic analytics to better interact with your audience, the natural question to follow is how to actually do that. Well, there are quite a few very details and well-outlined bloggers’ guides to search analytics; below I am listing a couple of posts that really help (both are based on Google Analytics):
- Blogger’s guide to Google Analytics: a very detailed, clearly written step-by-step tutorial targeted to bloggers. Have it bookmarked and go through one section a day (and you will learn it very soon!);
- Google Analytics Plugin: you will need this one to easier install Google Analytics to WordPress.