In today’s online business world, analytics is one of the most useful tools you have at your fingertips to help you understand and manipulate your business. However, if you don’t know what the metrics you’re seeing mean or how changing them could help your blog or business grow, they’re mostly useless. So for those of you just starting off with blogging, here are three ways to use your analytics to help improve your blog.
Replicate Your Most Popular Content
Within your analytics, you will have a way to see which pages or blogs are performing the best for you. These pages will have the most views, the most interactions, and the best conversion rates. And while it’s nice just to know that you have some content that’s connecting well with your audience, you can use those metrics to help plan future content that will hopefully do just as well or better. Anastasia Sidko, a contributor to SEMRush.com, shares that by looking at your pages that perform the best, you can use that information to find topics that resonate more with your audience, use internal links to move authority to other pages on your site, and stop creating content that hasn’t proved to be working. Knowing which pages are working and which aren’t can truly be invaluable information for the success of your blog.
Locate Where Most Viewership Comes From
Geolocating where your readership is coming from can be hugely helpful when creating more content. There should be a map within your analytics that will show you where your traffic is coming from all over the world. Just because your business is based in Chicago doesn’t mean that that’s where the majority of your traffic will come from. KISSmetrics.com shares that once you’re able to see where a lot of your traffic is coming from, you can then make more content that better caters to people in those areas. While this might not have been the direction you imagined your blog going, it’s always good to follow where your audience takes you if you want to be successful.
Determine Why Your Bounce Rate Is High
Another metric that you can see using analytics is your bounce rate. This number signifies how many people come to a page on your website or blog and either leave right from them or no longer continue interacting with your site. Edin Sabanovic, a contributor to Shopify.com, writes that when you have a high bounce rate, it usually indicates that something on that page isn’t working right. Especially if you have a particular action you want visitors to take from that page, you can use the bounce rate to see how effective or ineffective you are at reaching that conversion. This can help direct you on where to make improvement throughout your entire blog.
If you want to more conscientiously use analytics to improve your blogging, use the tips mentioned above to help you do just that.