Grow Your Blog By Capitalizing on Search Trends: Part 1 of 3

Posted by Jason Burns

February 6, 2008

I have been mulling around this blog topic for awhile, trying to find a way to approach it that was unique and useful. We all follow our blogs closely, but as with anything, it’s what you do with that information that matters. In this article I will break down what trends you should be following, how to capitalize on those trends, and how to make your readers "read deep."

Finding Your Readers
In the world of blogging, the search engine is king. This week 83% of my traffic came from search engines:

Source	Visits	% of Total
Google	18,548	94%
Yahoo!	419	2%
Live	287	1.4%
MSN	241	1.2%

Ouch, that’s pretty staggering. Clearly (and no offense to my employer…) Google is where it’s at in Organic Search. So next, let’s analyze my top 10 keyword searches and see how I am fairing in the indexing for those keywords:

Rank	Keyword	Visits	Pages/Visit	Avg Time	% New	Bounce Rate
2/3*	iPod touch games	182	1.31	0:46	97.25%	77.47%
1/4	iPod touch tips	115	1.2	0:28	94.78%	86.96%
1/7	iPod touch tricks	77	1.3	1:04	94.81%	79.22%
1/4	world of Warcraft vista	32	1.25	0:26	100%	84.22%
1/1	world of Warcraft windows vista	31	1.39	1:19	100%	67.74%
1/1	installing wow on vista	21	1.43	0:22	95.24%	85.71%
1/6	Warcraft vista	17	1.41	0:44	88.24%	70.59%
1/4	world of Warcraft on vista	16	1.25	0:35	93.75%	93.75%
1/5	wow on vista	15	1.2	0:28	93.33%	73.33%
1/6	wow vista	15	1.13	0:05	100%	93.33%

* Indicates Page and Rank (2/3 means page 2, 3rd result) of Search Result

That’s a lot of tabular crap for the beginning of a blog post, so what does it mean? Well, for starters it means I SHOULD be writing a hell of a lot more about iPod Touches and World of Warcraft on Windows Vista! Unfortunately, that’s not exactly how I run my blog, but for a blog in growth mode, with a more finite topic, the advice I am about to give can grow you from a handful of visitors to tens of thousands in a very short time.

It’s all fine and good to try and make your site rank high in specific places, but do not overlook where it is already getting indexed highly, and capitalize on that. The overall page rank of your site will grow and it will have a direct impact on how highly you rank on completely unrelated topics later.

So 94% of my traffic is coming from Google, and the iPod Touch accounts for 78% of my top 10 keywords searched. I am sure if you searched down through the complete results, you might find that many other keyword combinations outside the top 10 are seeking the same results, let’s snapshot just today:

Geeze, all in all, that’s 69 times a user was led to my site through a search engine. Think of all the results I showed up in that didn’t click through (See writing great titles and writing SEO friendly blog posts!)

So clearly my blog is hot when it comes to iPod Touch! So if I were the type of guy that was trying to be a big time pro blogger, make wads off Adsense and dominate the world (of blogging) what would I do?

Riding The Trends
Obviously at this point I would try to find a specific iPod Touch related topic and get to work writing a insightful piece about it. The important thing is that you get to writing the right way. The worse thing you can do right now is throw out a quick and nearly useless article about the iPod Touch and become a poster boy for bounce rate. This is the most important advice I can give you about any blog post you write…

If it’s not valuable content, you have already lost your reader…

Think about it, we are all guilty of it, but seriously… my bounce rate is 83.87%! That means that less than two of every ten readers look at another article on my website before leaving. There are two main reasons that would cause this:

Not enough compelling content within visibility to make the reader continue to browse my site.
Much more likely, the article is not deep enough or valuable enough to engage the reader and make him or her consider me as an authority on the topic.

#2 is your key. Your article has to provide value, and more specifically provide value within the first few paragraphs. I would guarantee if I were a professional in the field of analytics (and I just happen to be) that you could draw a direct correlation between bounce rate and RSS subscriptions. The same users that are leaving your site after reading a few paragraphs are the same readers that are not subscribing because they don’t consider your website valuable enough.

Continue to Part 2 to get the skinny on how to write articles that are search engine friendly, on topic and make your readers bookmark and subscribe in droves…

Web Authoring

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Comments

Thanks for this nice article, but statistics is what I have problem with. I mean assimilating all this facts needs a lot of concentration. Obviously, Google is still the best search engine.

Comment by Soli on March 4, 2008 @ 2:36 am

Grow Your Blog By Capitalizing on Search Trends: Part 1 of 3

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