Grow Your Blog By Capitalizing On Search Trends: Part 3 of 3
hopefully you have already read about what trends you should be following and how to write to capitalize on those trends. This last piece could possibly be the most important. It’s time we look at how to make your readers "Read Deep."
What is Reading Deep?
When your users are coming to you by way of a search engine you have one major battle to fight. The reader is usually a bit short on attention span. When your reader comes to your page, you hope they find the article compelling, but wether they do or not, you want to have a serious impact on where they go next.
My users hang around for an average of 45 seconds and view 1.27 pages and leave. Those are the averages. The scary stat is that over 8 out of 10 readers do NOT view another page before they go. 83.87% leave before they view a second page.
Beyond writing good content covered previously, one often overlooked technique is making sure your readers have somewhere to go.
The image to the left shows in green the spots on my page that would lead a reader to more content on my site.
This particular page is the initial landing page or also the top of a single page article.
That’s a pretty good list of single word links that don’t really compel a user to click them unless he or she is really hot on a particular keyword.
Let’s look at the bottom of the article. (Of course we are hoping the reader makes it that far!!)
Now we are getting some useful links. The links you see now are relevant and detailed. They are interesting to the current reader and have serious value.
If your content has caught your reader’s attention enough for them to make it this far, there is a high likelyhood that you have built some credibility with the reader and they will glance at other related topics to find more information.
Having a related topics plugin like the one I use for Wordpress is invaluable for this purpose. This might be an interesting place to use some zoning in Google Analytics to see how often your related articles sections are being used as well.
Tracking Progress
As with any other metric, averages are very hard to discern over long periods. The more numbers, the less visible the impact. One very valuable way to track these metrics is to change your default layout in Google Analytics or whatever tracking tool you use to track smaller periods of time and compare them to history.
The view above is the one that I follow daily. I have this report set up and have it emailed to me every day. It’s the best way I have found to get a glance at how my site is performing. Unfortunately this screenshot shows I am under performing to last week, but that’s the breaks of blogging. I guess it’s do as I say, not as I do!
I hope this has given a good insight into what you need to grow. Being a blogger is a task you have to be dedicated to and diligent about. Being a significant blogger is even more demanding. The principles I have laid out for you are going to help you grow. You will find that not implementing these regularly and consistently will lead to a traffic plateau. I am currently at that Plateau, while my traffic is growing, it’s relatively stable.
I will be implementing some of my ideas here as I have more time to spend with my site again (starting a new job in a demanding field is tough!) and I will document my progress so please subscribe and watch these tips take effect.
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