Posts Tagged ‘google analytics’

A couple months ago, I did the problogger challenge to improve my blog. One post we wrote was about analyzing the traffic to your blog – monitoring analytics. What I failed to talk about in the post was whether or not I was actually using those analytics to make changes and improve my blog (which I am).

One of the most important pieces of my traffic that I look at, and use, are the keywords that people use to find my site.

Here is a screen shot of the top 20 keywords used this month to find my site:

There are a few things that I notice right away, some bad and some good. First, both my name and my business name are in the top 20. This means that a lot of people are looking for me, because of me and my company, not just randomly stumbling upon my site from search terms. This is fabulous because it shows that my marketing and social networking are working the way I want them to. One of the other tests I use is just google searching for myself and my website.  As long as I show up in the top links for both, I know that I am doing good. Second, most of the terms are ways I want people to find my site (creativity, marketing ideas, creative blog ideas, etc). So, how do I use it? Well, since I know that a lot of people are searching for and finding my site using the key terms that I want them to be using, I need to start writing more of those types of articles, so that I reward these searchers with more content that they want.

Now the couple bad ones: There are at least 5 of the top 20 that have absolutely nothing to do with my site, and although I have written a post about the topic, I didn’t really want that to be a search term people would use. For example, #14 is “Alice and wonderland decorations”. This is probably someone looking to find a party theme site, or perhaps a costume site. What they are going to get on my site? One post about Alice in Wonderland, and how a cake I found stemmed a creative idea. Not really what they were looking for. But, the plus side? You never know who will like what they see and decide to stay… So, how do I use this? It forces me to re-think which words I choose to use to talk about my blog posts. Even if the post is about creative proverbs, it may be better to call them “writing block breakers” as I would want people finding my articles in search for this.

Basically, whether the search terms are right for my site or not, I need to take a look at them to make sure that I always know what is going on.

Are you using your analytics?