Are You Watching Your Visitors?

We’ve now come to Step 5 of my “Creating a Content Strategy” series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the first 4 so far, and found some useful ideas to grow your business.

If you’ve missed the first 4 blogs, here they are:

1. Click here for Step 1
2. Click here for Step 2
3. Click here for Step 3
4. Click here for Step 4

Today, let's talk about performance.

Step Five: Analyze and Adjust

Your website is the core of your online business… your online presence. And it holds so much information for you.

I’m sure you’ve added “Google Analytics” to your site already, but if you haven’t yet, please do. It’s free and incredibly powerful.

It may look scary at first, but take a look around and get to know some of the features.

And don’t worry if you feel overwhelmed at first, haha. That’s normal! It offers you so much data, but you won’t need all that yet.

For beginners, you can glean some basic information that could really help your content strategy. For instance, Google Analytics can give you basic information on:

• How many visitors come to your site, as a whole or by post.
• Where your visitors are coming from.
• How they move through your site.
• How long they spend on each page.
• And so on, and so on…

Once you’ve got a decent amount of content on your website, you can use the findings and reports inside Google Analytics to determine if your strategy needs improving.

In the beginning, you’ll probably want to look at your traffic volume to see if it steadily grows. This alone can give you great motivation to keep pushing forward.

Two reports you should check out are:

• All Traffic
• All Pages

All Traffic

This can be found under the “Acquisition” menu, down the left-hand side of GA’s control panel.

You’ll find 4 different reports there to tell you where your traffic is coming from. You can also see your visitor’s behaviour and conversion data here.

All Pages

This can be found under the “Behavior” menu, then under “Site Content” down the left-hand side of GA’s dashboard.

This report will show you all the pages that your visitors have looked at. You can manually set a time frame to get overall, or a specific set of data.

So What Do You Do With These Reports?

The Page Reports will show you where your visitors are landing on your website and will show you your more popular pages and posts, right?

These are the pages you should be updating and improving for better conversions.

For instance:

• Add more relevant content to make the article longer.
• Add more media such as images or videos.
• Create a better “call to action” to persuade your visitor to do what you want them to.

On the flip side, if you have posts that aren’t getting enough attention, these should be improved as well, to see if you can increase their ranking, and therefore their traffic.

Seeing which pages/posts are getting the most traffic will tell you what your audience is most interested in. These are the topics that are pulling traffic to your site. So use that data to create more content along that theme.

The traffic reports will give you data about your audience, which can also help your content strategy.

For instance:

• Create more gender and age-specific content if you see the majority of traffic in those areas.
• Create content that suits the location of your audience, if there is an obvious difference.
• Create seasonal content (niche dependant) if your traffic is higher around the holidays.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this! Using Google Analytics is a great source of information, even if it’s just using basic reports.

You don’t need to go further than this for quite some time. So don’t be nervous and dive in!

I encourage you to click around and get a feel for GA. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything. Consider it a high-tech report card for your website!

Cheers,

Suzanne