Improve Your Blog With Web Analytics

Now that a quality free web analytics solution is available in Google Analytics (when it works), bloggers who previously didn't want to spend the money are now taking a good look at analytics and what it can do for them. It's neat to see some data, but how do you actually make that data work to improve your blog?

1. Increase Page Views Per Visit
   Whether your monetize through ecommerce or revenue from advertising, you most likely will benefit from visitors viewing a higher number of pages on your blog. With every statistic you aim to improve, get a baseline number and shoot to make it better. For this statistic, think about what you can do to your site to increase the number of pageviews.

   Do you have prominent links to your most popular posts? Do you link to your own posts within other relevant posts?

2. Expand Your Geographic Reach
   Look at your geographic location statistics and see what areas of the world you receive the most traffic and what areas you are weak in. What can you do to strengthen your traffic in areas where you're strong, and what can you do to improve traffic for places that you're weak?

   Are your posts aimed at only one geographic region? Brainstorm what you can post that will be interesting to bloggers in other areas. Find some blogs in those regions and comment and link to good posts. This will provide some trackbacks from your sites, and help you form some good relationships with bloggers in those regions.

3. Mine Your Referring Links
   Take a close look at what sites are referring traffic to you through normal links. Why are they doing so? Can you strengthen your relationships with those sites to get even more traffic from them? Are there more sites like their's that you could get links from that you haven't approached? Are there any types of sites you think you should be getting links from but aren't? Why not?

   If you're getting a lot of trackback links, strengthen relationships with those sites. Are you on their blogrolls? Would they add you if you asked? Try getting more trackbacks on similar sites. Are you getting any traffic from directories or blog directories? If not, submit to some of them and see what happens.

4. Mine Your Search Terms
   Just like referring links, what can you learn from your organic search terms? Can you get more traffic and better rankings for the terms that are doing well? Are there terms you're not ranking well for? Can you create more content for those?

   You probably are ranking well for some keywords you might not expect, that's one thing great about blogs. You make a random post, and start getting traffic for some keywords you mentioned. Use that power to your advantage, post about your keyword topics and use those keywords in the titles and body of the post. Expand what you post about and how you normally name your titles, you'll probably see good results.

5. Grow Your Top Content
   Look at your most heavily visited content and analyze why. Is it the most visited because of the way your site is structured? Because it has the most links to it? Or because it's the most useful or helpful content to visitors? Once you know why, expand that top content.

   Most likely your top content will be some popular blog posts you've made. Why do people keep reading those posts? Can you make more posts in that format or about that topic? Did lots of other bloggers link to it? That should be a clue it has value and you can grow your traffic by hitting that subject more often.

6. What Is Your Bounce Rate?
   After you've found your top content, this is most likely also your top entry pages to the site. This is because either links or search terms are taking people to your top content first. Most analytics tools have a "bounce" or "exit" rate. This tells you the percentage of visitors that exited on the same page they arrived on. A large percentage means that most of the people who landed on that page just viewed it and left. A low percentage means they clicked on to other parts of your site before leaving. Obviously you'd like to lower the percentage to get people to view other aspects of your site.

   Are you letting people know about other good posts or sections of your site in obvious ways from the entry pages people are arriving on?

7. Set Up Goals
   With Google Analytics and most other good analytics applications you can set up conversion goals of some type. This doesn't necessarily mean a sale, a blogger or normal site may set a goal of having someone sign up for a newsletter, view a certain number of pages, or view a particular page. Once you have these goals set, track them and improve your site to hit your goals.

   If you've got nothing to buy or for anyone to sign up for, set a goal to have visitors reach a certain number of page views, and improve your site to hit that goal. Otherwise, have subscribing to an email newsletter, downloading an ebook, or taking some sort of action to be a goal.

8. Check Your Web Design Parameters
   Most analytics apps allow you to see things like what browsers your visitors are using, what resolution their screen is set at, what version of javascript they have, what operating system they use, if they have Flash installed, and other data. Check this data periodically to make sure your site is designed to look and operate well as much of your audience as possible. There's nothing worse than finding out 30% of your audience are Apple users and you've never seen how terrible your site looks on an Apple.

   Most blog templates are fairly well-tested, but you can't be too careful. Check out your data and try to test out your site in multiple browsers and systems.

Start taking a good look at your analytics, you'd be surprised what kinds of improvements you can make with that data.