Your blog site stats should be some of the main drivers of your blog marketing efforts and topic ideas. Reviewing your stats month after month, you’ll probably begin to see a trend among top posts and pages, top referrers (sites that drive traffic to your blog), trending search terms, and click-throughs. In order to manage these stats and visualize the trends, create a spreadsheet document in Excel. Each month, create a new page within this document that illustrates each stat category.
Once you have a few months’ worth of stat sheets, you can begin looking for trends in your stats.
Below is a description of what each statistic category means and how to analyze the trends you see:
Top Posts and Pages: Whether you want to look at the top posts for the last seven days, the last 30 days, or even the last year, you can do so through your blog stats. Here, you’ll see what posts were frequented the most in a certain time frame and how many visitors viewed these specific posts within that time frame.
For example, if you wanted to compare the top posts and pages in November to those in December, you could do so by viewing your Excel spreadsheet and comparing each month. You might find that a particular topic is more popular than others, which means you’ll want to continue writing posts around this hot topic. For topics that appear to lack visitors, based on your stats, you’ll want to reduce the amount of posts you write around this topic.
Top Referrers: Referrers are platforms that send traffic to your blog. You may find that from month to month you receive the most traffic (referrers) to your site from Twitter. Or, perhaps you’ll see that Facebook is the main driver of traffic. Whatever the trend is, it’s obvious that you’re getting results from a specific action you continue to take month after month. Boost your efforts on the platforms that have historically brought you the most traffic. Focusing on platforms that continue to produce your desired result is the most efficient and effective way to spend your time and efforts.
Search Engine Terms: These are the terms that people have typed into search engines to find your blog. Take note of the terms people are using to find you, and observe which keywords and phrases are the most popular. You’ll want to consider using these terms in other posts or write more posts specifically around popular search terms.
For example, let’s say you wrote a post about the origins of beer. You notice that people are searching for “beer origins,” “beer tasting,” and “origins of beer.” If this appears to be a popular search term, consider writing another post around beer.
Clicks: The number of click-throughs your readers make on your posts is measured in your stats, and you can see which links brought in the most traffic. For example, if you see that a specific hyperlinked keyword continues to be clicked in your posts, consider adding this keyword to more of your posts and hyperlinking it.
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