About a week or so ago, I saw a tweet on Twitter from my friend Shashi, Network Solution’s Social Media Swami, with an interesting dilemma: he saw on that people were coming to his blog after searching for the phrase “what does interspersed mean”. Interestingly enough, what he said caused me to write this post. The issue is that if you find people coming to your site through search terms, should you address these people by having relevant content? Well the answer is maybe.
Maybe? That’s right. Let me explain taking this blog as an example:
Nearly every day I check the web analytics on TheLetterTwo.com just to see whether or not I’ve received any new traffic. I look at the page views, unique visits, referrers, and other demographics available to me. Another area that I examine is the search terms. This month alone, I’ve received a few that ties into existing blog posts, but there are some that may not fully address the search. Here are some of the search terms that may have led people to my site in the month of October:
- What is Yaari
- How many people visited my blog
- reply edit flag inurl:/2008/ gaming
- touch point in reaching members
- advertising week dc
- alternative facebook ip
- best practices for setting up fan page on facebook
- can facebook companies monitor ip addresses
- cvent complaints
Out of these selected search strings that I’ve received, I can say that many of them I’ve talked about, but many only in passing. You can see that some have the word “facebook” on there. I’ve tagged many of my blog posts with “facebook” and also had the keyword plastered on several entries so that’s probably why people came to my site. The same goes with the phrases “yaari” and “visited my blog”, but the main thing I’d like to point out is that there may be a phrase that you’ve only touched on, but might be worth more investigating. Using my blog as an example again…since there’s a search string labeled “cvent complaints”, while I may have mentioned Cvent as a tool in passing, perhaps I’d like to also form some content about complaints people may have had in using Cvent.
So for non-blogs, when you look at your analytics, do not ignore what people are searching to get to your site. Web analytics is more than simple numbers telling you site traffic, it gives you a demographic to help prove or disprove your marketing strategy so you know the areas to correct, specifically as it relates to Search Engine Optimization and even Search Engine Marketing. Relevant content will help attract more people to your site and also increase your chances of having your site located near the top position on most major search engines. Don’t ignore the analytics.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.