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Blog is a Four Letter Word

Published on 14 February 2012 by in Blog, Blogging, Creating Content

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traffic graph 300x199 Blog is a Four Letter Word

To increase traffic to your web site, blogging the key

Every week, small business owners tell me they don’t think their online presence is working for them. So the first step here is to look at the level of traffic that’s actually stopping by your web site. There are a few key indicators to look at and see if it’s improving over time. Check out this post so you know where to start and what to look for.

The only way to know for sure is to monitor your stats over time. But it’s important to also know that if nothing ever changes on your web site, there’s really no reason for anyone to return. While that sounds kind of harsh, it’s the truth. The best way to add fresh content to your web site is to add a blog.

Blog is actually a contraction of words web and log and a really simple definition is that it’s just regular entries of commentary. In order for people to want to read what you have to share, you want to make sure you’re providing useful and valuable information and if you can make it entertaining, even better.

Web sites that have a blog get 55% more traffic than sites that don’t have a blog. Adding regular content to your web site by blogging also ensures that your site gets indexed regularly by the search engines. If nothing on your site ever changes, the search engines also feel there’s no reason to return and re-index.

Seriously, if your goal is to increase traffic to your web site, blogging on a consistent and regular basis is really the key. Providing interesting and valuable content to your audience will encourage people to come back, to start talking about you, and to tell others about you.

Blogging alone will help to drive more traffic to your web site, but if you’re going to invest the time to blog and create content, then I’d like you to think about some other activities you can do to amplify the messages that you’re putting out there. Stay tuned for some thoughts on that next week.

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5 Ways to Determine if Your Web Site is Improving

Published on 27 September 2011 by in Blog, Creating Content, Inbound Marketing, Web Site

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asking business owners about their web site traffic and I’m really just trying to understand if they are paying any attention to it.  I ask if they have any kind of analytics installed on it and they do, but interestingly enough, most don’t know how to read it or what to do with it.

There’s no question when using a service like Google Analytics, you could very well drown in the data.  And while it’s good to know what’s going on with your site traffic, the most important thing to know is whether or not your website traffic is improving over time.   And there are 5 simple items to look at to be able to answer that question.

Google Analytics 5 Ways to Determine if Your Web Site is Improving

Is your website traffic is improving over time?

1.       Time on Site

Is it going up?  How much time are people spending on your website?  A longer time on your site typically means they’re more engaged.  Perhaps they are checking you out for a possible business engagement or they’re just really enjoying your content.

2.       Multiple Pages Up

Keep an eye on the average number of pages people are viewing.  Having visitors touch more than 1 page shows that the content has potential.  Take a look at the page that they exit to ensure it’s up to standard.

3.       Sharing of Your Content Up

Keep track of where your content is being shared.  You can do this using Google Alerts to see when your name or your company name shows up or you can look at  Inbound Traffic Sources and take a look at those sites that sources that are unfamiliar to you.  And don’t forget to monitor social media sites for your links and name mentions, etc.

4.       Links Back to Your Site Up

Keep an eye on Inbound Traffic to your site.  Take a look at those sites that don’ t look familiar to you so you can track if someone has blogged about you or mentioned you on their website.  The Search Engines do link inbound links so make an effort to develop these kinds of relationships that will drive traffic to your site.

5.       Bounce Rate Down

The Bounce Rate is defined as someone coming to the site and only viewing a single page or someone who leaves very quickly.  The easiest way to interpret this is that they got to your site and couldn’t find what they were really looking for.  Your job is to keep an eye on those pages with a high bounce rate and simply make some adjustments to the copy.  It’s important to note though that blog posts will have high bounce rates because people came for that single post and nothing else.

You don’t necessarily need an immense amount of web analytics knowledge to know whether or not your web traffic is improving.  You can prepare a simple report with the details above on a monthly and quarterly basis to track your progress.

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