I started thinking about this a few days ago after an in-depth analysis of our website traffic versus our blog traffic.
I have several thoughts on this subject, but I'm afraid it might turn into a meandering essay if I'm not careful.
For that reason, I'm going with the top 9 things to watch for when viewing your online traffic. I'll include 1-3 here and finish up the list over the next few days.
9 Ways to Evaluate Your Online Traffic
1. Benchmark your website against your corporate blogs.
This is pretty self-explanatory, but so many organizations do not do this. Typically this responsibility falls on the marketing team -- maybe they even provide weekly/monthly metrics reports. The blogs should be included in these reports, and you should constantly keep an eye on how these results compare. You might find that your website isn't needed if your business blogs are consistently outperforming it.
2. Get into the weeds.
What I mean by that is that it isn't enough to say, "The website gets more traffic than the blogs." Or, "The website gets a ton of traffic, so it's doing well."
Where is that traffic coming from? Hopefully one of your largest traffic sources is through the search engines, like Google, and you're able to determine exactly what those keywords are, how many times they referred traffic to you, and what they did once they arrived.
It's worth it to pay attention and get your hands dirty. You'll find some of your best keywords to target and keywords that aren't worth your time. This will also give you some insight into traffic quality, which brings me to my next point.
3. Focus on traffic quality -- it will lead you to quantity.
Here's an example situation:
Let's say your website gets a million visits from various traffic sources each month. Let's say your business blogs get only a fraction of that - around 100,000.
At first glance, you might think: my corporate blogging program is a deadbeat!
But then you find that visitors who arrive at the blog stay twice as long as those who arrive at the website and convert at 15% opposed to 2% on the website. That's high quality traffic, and instead of increasing your spend to get more people to your websites, it would make sense to drive more people to your business blogs.
Even if the conversion % for the blogs stays the same, by now increasing the quantity, you will be even better off. In other words - it will lead you to do more of what's really working and making more than a superficial impact on your business.
Stay tuned for 4-9 in my next two posts. Also, here is a shameless commercial plug for a new webinar you may be interested in:
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