My Secret That Will Help You to Grow Your Blog's Traffic
Almost every person who has a blog probably knows about Google Analytics. If you do not already have it on your blog…get it! It will provide you with an endless amount of data that can help you to exponentially grow your blog.
Plus, it allows you to understand your readers and apply what you learn to improve your blog. I absolutely love looking at statistics. I try not to dwell a lot on my blog stats but understanding the reports that Google Analytics has to offer has helped me to increase my traffic to my blog.
This post may contain affiliate links.
If you feel overwhelmed with Google Analytics, its ok. You are not alone. A lot of bloggers that I know struggle with figuring out what each report means.
Today, I am going to share with you one of my secrets to getting traffic and how you can use it to help increase your blog’s search engine traffic.
Most people use the reports to look at how many page views they received or to check on their referral traffic, which is great, but if you dig a little bit deeper you can really use what you learn to benefit your blog.
Have you ever wondered exactly the search terms people are typing in to land on your blog? Do you want to increase your search traffic?
If you answered YES to the questions above then read on and I will show you how you can see exactly what terms are being searched when someone lands on your site, which in turn can drive more traffic to your blog.
- Login to your Google Analytics Account
- Scroll down on the left hand side and click Acquisitions > Search Engine Optimization > Queries
This will bring you up with a list of keywords in order of impressions. These are the exact terms people are typing into a search engine and landing on your blog. You will see they are broken down by these following items:
Impressions: This is the number of views your post received in the search results of a search engine page. Do not confuse this with the amount of people who clicked it. This is just the number of people who saw it appear as a result of doing a search.
Clicks: This is the exact number of times that someone clicked on your post title from the search engine result and wen to your blog to read the article.
Average Position: This number refers to the rank you are on the search engine results page. Your goal is to get that search term as close to 1 as possible. This way it will increase the chance of someone clicking on your post to read the article because you will appear in the first spot in the results page. Worried that some of your numbers are way too high for terms that you are trying to rank for?
Keep in mind that SEO takes time. You may write an amazing post and do everything you could to make sure it was optimized, but not see benefits for a few months. To increase your rank in Google it will take time.
CTR: This simply means click through rate. I have a post about your CTR that you can check out to gain more insight into what this means, but basically it is the rate that users click to read your post from the search engine results.
You can learn a lot from this report. For example, say you have a ton of impressions but not a lot of clicks then you know there could be a problem with your title or even meta description. If it is showing up as a result, think of why someone would not be clicking on it? Does your meta description accurately portray what the post is about?
Take the time to analyze this report. Are the words showing up words you are trying to rank for? I actually rank for a lot of words that I used when I first started my blog. They are not necessarily terms that I focus on with my blog currently, so when I look at this list I skip through those and looks for ones that are relevant to my topics.
Take it a step further …
On the left hand side and click:
Acquisitions > Search Engine Optimization > Landing Pages
This report will allow you to see a list of your most popular pages and posts on your blog. Most of the time you will see a direct correlation with these posts and the keywords that you saw in the last report.
Again, this is broken down by the impressions, clicks, average position and CTR.
There is so much that you can do with this information. For example, if your most popular post is not something you are really proud of, go back in and edit it.
- Update the images
- Link to relevant posts on you blog to increase the chances of readers sticking around
- Add in any affiliate links that could potentially help you to earn money from that post
- Create a call to action
Since this post is getting the most amount of traffic take a good look at it and see what you can do to make it a better reading experience for your audience.
Another thing to pay attention to is the CTR. If the percentage is very small you want to take the time to make some adjustments.
Like I mentioned above it could simply be editing your meta description so that people are compelled to click on your link in the search engine and read your post. Or even editing the title to make it more interesting.
If you are looking to show up more in search engine results then there are a few things you can do to move up your ranking:
- Be sure to follow SEO rules. You can check out my post on things you should be doing before you hit publish to make sure you are correctly optimizing each post.
- Go back to your top posts that you found on the landing pages report and organically add in your keyword a few more times throughout the post.
- Write more posts that are similar to the topics that bring in the most traffic. This will allow you to interlink to more posts on that same topic.
- Essentially you are creating a web and increasing your search engine rank because you are showing Google that you are an authority on this topic by providing quality content.
I hope this was not too overwhelming.
It may seem difficult, but once you start doing it, it becomes a part of your routine for writing new blog posts. By knowing which keywords and posts are bringing you the most traffic you can capitalize on it by making changes to help other similar posts increase their ranking in search engines.
You will need to decide on what keywords you want to rank for and start working to do the above steps to help you rank for those relevant terms to your website. This little trick, or secret, can help you to grow your blog traffic.
What is your secret to getting blog traffic?