The Power Of Slowing Down + Doing Analysis

It’s been 11 months since I joined WA and while I’ve learned a huge amount and started to make the first tiny sum from my niche site I felt I needed to take a break from learning and writing.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks analyzing the posts on my site to review which ones are working and why. Also which are not working and why.

I’m not a spreadsheet queen by any means, however I used to be a retail buyer so I get a kick out of the analysis of what’s working, why and how I can replicate the result. A website with a lot of posts is similar to a product range to me.

So I set up a spreadsheet listing all of my posts, approaching 90, and their keywords, Traffic, QSR etc and plotted what was working against those metrics. It aint an exact science that’s for sure, but neither is retail buying.

I also used a free 30 day trial from www.monitorbacklinks.com ( no affiliate link) which is primarily for monitoring backlinks, something else I’m working on. But it also shows your keyword performance/movement against your competitors.

So what did I discover from the analysis?

It quickly became clear that I need to write long posts, 3000 words if possible and generally not less than 2200 words as my niche is competitive with many large medical and government sites taking the top spots on Google.

I then identified some of my posts on Google 2nd page with low competition that I could edit by adding content to.

Getting busy I set to adding content , resubmitted them to Fetch and waited.

Lo and behold, it works.... many posts are now on page one and others have made substantial moves up the rankings.

It’s a great feeling to know you’ve beat out your competition, particularly when they are huge sites with many professional writers working for them.

Further analysis using GA and social media metrics gave me pointers about the type of posts my readers like and respond to as well as those they don’t like.

To sum up...... Yes it’s important to write and keep writing, however it’s also important to step back now and again to take time for the analysis. This enables you to make any refinements and reset course if needed.

Happy Analyzing WA’ers.