Want more traffic without any extra effort? Simply determine what content, keywords, etc. get the most attention and then focus on doing those things.
Google analytics makes this super easy.
Best Performing Keywords
The chart above shows which keywords are generating the most traffic from search engines.
50% of the top keywords that get the most traffic relate to backlink building (#3, #4, #5, #7, #9). I should write some more posts about that.
Top Traffic Sources
My top 3 traffic sources are StumbleUpon, Google, and my email list (direct). 80% of my traffic comes from these 3 sources. Perhaps I should focus on these and ignore everything else.
Another interesting thing is that I’m still getting traffic from TwiTip where I wrote a couple guest posts 9-10 months back. I think I’ll write another guest post for TwiTip.
Best Search Engine
I get 20 times as much traffic from Google as I do the next highest search engine. So any effort I spent on search engine optimization will solely focus on Google. Yahoo, Bing, etc. are a waste of time.
Note this will vary for different sites; one of my sites gets 80% of its traffic from Yahoo.
Most Popular Content
I have a few blog posts that are wildly popular and get 20 or 50 or 100 times more traffic than my average blog post. Above you can see which ones are most popular (#1 in the list is my homepage).
These topics are the ones that go viral and get lots of traffic. And 3 of them (#2, #3, #4) relate to building backlinks. This is what I need to post about.
63% of my users use Firefox
I knew Firefox was pretty popular but didn’t realize that nearly 2/3 of people use it when visiting my site.
I think it’s time to write a post detailing the different Firefox plug-ins that I use to get more traffic.
Screen resolutions
Roughly 14% of my visitors are run 1024×768 screen resolution. It’s really important to me that my visitors don’t have to scroll horizontally so I make sure my website is not more than 1,000 pixels wide.
Windows is the dominant operating system
It wasn’t really surprising that Windows is the operating system used by 3 out of 4 of my visitors.
Learn how to do awesome stuff with Google Analytics
- Google Analytics 101
- Video: How to Share Access to your Google Analytics with Other People
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the best keywords
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the best content on your site
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the top exit pages
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the best referring sites
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
For me the biggest traffic generator is the keywords list sorted by REVERSE popularity. You see all the weird random queries that people used to find your site and some of them give you ideas about what to write next, what people are interested in, that they haven't found on another site.
Slava recently posted..Mountain Treks in Northern Thailand
That's a great idea.
"keywords list sorted by REVERSE popularity"
This approach might work, but as most of the longtail phrases are only occur once (according to some Google stats), you should group some of those and develop a theme from them. Concentrating on a single, low pop keyword/phrase wouldn't help.
Good points. The idea here is that it might work for some people but you won't know if it does until you try it.
With regard to my former comment, I wanted to share this excerpt from the Oct 18 issue of Fortune (Page 8, european editon):
'Analytics: 1,995 – Number of our web pages that have received just one click over teh past 30 days. The figure more than doubles if you include both unique search terms as well as hunts or individual companies on the Fortune 500.'
Even though you have a lot of traffic for "backlink building" does that mean you should create more posts with that keyword or related keywords? Isn't it better to write about many different topics within your traffic getting niche? If you start focusing more on backlink posts won't that make your blog too much about getting backlinks, or am I totally wrong here?
I do like your suggestion of using Analytics to find what is bringing in traffic though. I will definitely start mining that information.
Andrew
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Many of my most popular posts have something to do with back link building. And much of the traffic comes from stumble upon and other social media sources. This tells me that the topic of back link building is of great interest to my readers.
With that said, I have to find a balance with my content.
Excellent post nick,
I have been using analytics on my site for a while but I just don't use it as much as I should.
Thank you. If you ever have any questions about Google analytics let me know.
Traffic depends on keywords but Your keywords need to have quality and luck. One takes time, go to for example Google AdWords and use the Keyword tool to learn about how you can get traffic by using certain keywords. So you should try this one and reply here how much improvement you will get??
Wow. Sad as this is, I don't think I've ever really used Google Analytics. I've used the keyword search tool, but that's it. I really need to look into it. Thanks for the tip!
Google analytics is awesome. You should check it out.
It can of course be a tough job to optimize for long tail phrases. On the other hand these often are the ones that leads to conversions, so it is a question of balancing effort to outcome
I usually prefer longtail phrases because they're easy to get a good ranking for and they convert well.
@Nick:
I agree that is much easier to convert for long tail phrases, and now and again I come across some, that brings quite a good amount of traffic.
Even though you have a lot of traffic for “backlink building” does that mean you should create more posts with that keyword or related keywords? Isn’t it better to write about many different topics within your traffic getting niche? If you start focusing more on backlink posts won’t that make your blog too much about getting backlinks, or am I totally wrong here?
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If you want traffic then you should write about what readers want. Does that answer your question?
But that doesn't mean backlink building posts are ALL your readers want.
Instead of plotting your future course by metrics, why don't you ask your readers what they'd like to read about. As an entrepreneur, I'd guess they're also interested in other site-building topics.
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That's good advice and something I'm trying to do.
I like how you can get an idea what kind of web browsers visitors are using. I do a lot of my website coding by hand, and I put a lot of effort into making sure that my website renders similarly regardless of what browser they use. By the way, I visit your blog quite frequently — I like how your blog is layed out (very cleanly arranged, efficient, and to the point).
I am glad you like the design!
The problem I see is that most of the “top performing keywords” (the ones with the most hits) are very generic. I am looking for keyphrasescontianing an intention to buy something which usually occurs when there are more than 2 words unsed in the search.
The reverse popularity list approach mentioned in the first comments is quite helpful and I agree that it only makes sense to group them and develop a theme from them. Usually they are too random.
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