One of my favorite blogging tools in Google Analytics. It tells you where your visitors are coming from, what they’re visiting, which links they are leaving you through. And as much as I feel that you shouldn’t become obsessed by your statistics and visitor numbers, I think that knowing certain things can help you become a better blogger.
For example, what percentage of your visitors are coming to you via search engine results? How many arrive directly at your blog (from a bookmark on their computer, for example)? Who is linking to you and how much traffic are they sending your way?
I noticed some interesting things for Almost Frugal’s search engine results a few months ago. There was about 30% of traffic from search engine results, but visitors weren’t clicking on the results.
I took a look a Google Analytics and the results were illuminating. I was ranking highly in search engine results for two kinds of keywords only; nine of the ten top results were some variation of ‘describing yourself’ or ‘cutting a little boy’s hair’. Both fine posts, to be sure, but not exactly heavy on the keywords I want to drive Almost Frugal: frugal, frugality, saving money etc etc.
See for yourself:
Only one result relates to frugality, and that is the name of the blog itself, which implies that people aren’t using the search results to find out about the blog, only to find its address. Next I ran another (unofficial) experiment; I did a google search for frugal blog. And the result? Almost Frugal was on the 13th page of search results. Not exactly what I was hoping for.
Changing search engine results takes time, and is an uncertain science at best. Nobody is really 100% certain of what goes into the Google algorithym, although there are a lot of experts on the subject.
There are some basic things that can be done, however, to improve your search engine results. I’ll be blogging about the experience as I go along. But first, some homework: Install Google Analytics on your blog (it’s quite easy) and find out what percentage of your traffic is coming your way thanks to the mighty G giant, and what terms they’re using to find you. You could also take a look at Sitemeter, which will tell you how long each visitor stays on your site; I noticed that a lot of my visitors through search engines weren’t even visiting, or only staying for a few seconds.
Where are your visitors finding you from? Are you happy with your search engine results?
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Can’t wait to see the results! I’ve got Analytics installed and I’m ready for the next step!
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Very helpful! thank you for the information. I think I found you through BlogCatalog.
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Hi Kelly!
Not sure how you found out that you were on the 13th page of the Google search.
Did you manually click through the next page link twelve times and read the pages until you found your blog? By the way, I googled “frugal blog” and you are now turning up at the 7th place (of the first page)!
Your article gave me a good idea for a first Perl script to work on.
Check out:
http://damienlearnsperl.blogspot.com/2009/01/retrieve-search-rank-for-your-blog.html
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Hi Damien,
That’s exactly what I did- just clicked and clicked and clicked away! I do that for every search term I’m targeting- to get a real life idea of what the results are.
Kelly
Be careful with Sitemeter’s results. I too have a lot of search engine visitors with a “0 second” visit time. This only means that the visitor never went to another page on the blog. Sitemeter uses that to determine the total visit time. If it says “0 seconds” the visitor only read that landing page and then left. They could have stayed there for a full minute reading the post, but Sitemeter won’t know that.
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