Want to know if blogging is worth your time? If you’re doing it ‘right’? If it’s having any impact on your business? There are some key insights you can gain, for free, that will help you answer these questions and help you to develop fresh new content that will generate results for your business.
Now, how do you get this so-called “free advice”? Log into your Google Analytics Dashboard!
By looking at key metrics and continuing to refer to your keywords, you will gain powerful insights on how to blog better and more efficiently for your targeted audience.
It’s that simple.
Start here:
Refer to your analytics. With Google Analytics, you can find valuable free information. You can quickly see which content is the most popular you’re your visitors, and which gets the least attention. Furthermore, it can help shape what your future content will look like. This will help you be more efficient with your time and blogging efforts. There are two key analytics we suggest you look at:
“Average time on page” This is the average time a visitor spends reading each blog post. This metric allows you to understand how long each visitor spends engaging, or not engaging, with the content you wrote. For example, if the average time on page for a longer blog post is only twelve seconds, it’s safe to say that most visitors may not be reading the entire post or even skimming it completely. This kind of information is helpful in creating future content. Now you can dig deeper to find trends: if this is happening with all of your longer blog posts, it may be the length or style of the article that they’re not responding to. Switch it up by writing posts of varying lengths and styles, such as lists and video blogs, to see which your visitors respond to best.
“Bounce Rates” show the percentage of visitors that leave your site without viewing any other pages. By digging deeper, you may find this happens only to some blogs, the ones without any calls to action, or without cross links in the body. It’s important to keep visitors on the site until they convert, and provide them multiple opportunities to stick around and click on related content. Try going back to edit your blog posts which do not contain any calls to action or cross links, add them in and promote the blog posts to your viewers to see if that improves the bounce rate on those pages.
Next, refer to your strategy and keywords:
Content Strategy: You want to provide content and tools that are as relevant and useful as possible to your targeted audiences. For example, let’s say I have a travel site. I have several types of articles on destinations, money management and travel planning. I am targeting a married woman with children. If I find that these women are primarily interested in information on traveling outside of the country, then I know that I want to provide information specifically on related topics. This allows me to focus on what’s working and deprioritize other content.
Targeted Keyword Discovery: Doing keyword research based on what your targeted audience wants, not just the existing content on your site, is a great way to build your keyword list. You may find there are needs that your website is not meeting. Knowing that your target audience is interested in traveling outside of the country will help you to write new, fresh content that correlates to the keywords your prospective customers are searching for online, thus helping your website rise to the top of those organic searches.
Now it’s time to use this information to better tailor your site blog content to visitors’ behavior and enhance your SEO.
Want to learn more, or see if what you’re doing is leading you in the right direction? We offer a free website or online marketing assessment for website visitors. Contact us today to get started.