Traffic is really the simple way to analyze the success of your blog. It’s not a perfect way to analyze the success, but it’s simple and in most cases leads to the sales and growth that any marketing initiative aims to achieve.
There are a few ways that a blog can benefit your company without huge amounts of traffic. If you’re in a super targeted industry you may only get a few pageviews, but those could lead to introductions to prospects. Sometimes a brand will often see an increase in homepage visits after years of regular blogging. Someone reads a post, leaves and comes back a month later by googling the brand name. The blog doesn’t often get credit.
But in general, traffic is a good way to assess the success of your blog and its posts.
Here are a few other thoughts on analyzing your blog content.
1. Overall Traffic
Start by looking at the overall traffic of all of your blog posts. Usually what you’ll see is that about 20% of your posts make up about 80% of your blog traffic. Even Steven Spielberg doesn’t have a hit every time. Look at what posts have been bringing in the most traffic. You should see that certain topics are doing well. You’ll see that certain styles of posts are doing well such as lists or how-to posts and things like that.
It could be that a post or two really did well on social media while others are doing well with SEO. Maybe you’ve shared more in an email newsletter than others. You’ll see all kinds of insights like this.
2. Traffic Trends
Then take one more step and start looking at the traffic trends over time. Often what happens with a popular post is that it was doing really well for a few months. Maybe in social. Maybe in search. But over time the traffic may have gone down. It’s good to watch these trends to learn what might have more staying power and things like that.
3. Evergreen Topics
And building on that last point is the importance of really seeing what has been evergreen on your blog. The more evergreen posts you can create in the future the more success you’ll have in bringing in more longterm traffic. It can be good to have a really popular post for a month. But it is often better to have successful posts over the long-term.
4. Competition
Sometimes what often happens with search traffic is that you catch on to a topic that was underserved. You answer a question with a blog post that lots of people were asking and that weren’t finding answers. But other businesses and bloggers are smart. They eventually catch on to the gap in information and look to fill it. Even if you remain in a strong position in the search rankings, the competition will take traffic.
It’s like being the only candy bar in the store for a month and then having dozens of other options come in the next month. You might still be the best, but the landscape has changed and instead of getting all of the attention you have to stand out against all the others.
It could be an indication that the topic and style of post was good, but maybe isn’t an area of focus for the future.
5. 90/10 Rule of Blog Titles
As you start to see what is working and what isn’t working you’ll start thinking about future blog titles. I still recommend following a 90/10 sort of rule with those titles. Focus 90% of your efforts on what is working. But still keep about 10% of so open for total experimentation.
You know what has worked and that will likely keep working for the most part. But you don’t know with certainty what the future will be like. So it’s good to experiment to build data so that when something hits you can expand upon it.
There is a local beer brand where I live that has been around for 100+ years. They make the same original that they’ve always made. But over the decades they have released new experimental beers. Most don’t hit with drinkers much, but several years ago they made one that really hit. And it’s been their top seller ever since.
6. Updating Blog Posts
As you go through old posts you will find opportunities to update some. Again, you might run into a situation where the topic has become saturated. That might not be a situation to spend time updating the content. You might be better served by focusing on new content.
But look at the competition. If it’s not too crazy it might make a lot of sense to update a post that has slipped. Or maybe you see a post that did just okay, but now you see opportunity to update it and take advantage of just a little competition.
Conclusion
It’s a really good idea to review the traffic to your blog posts. I think doing it every year works for most companies. That gives the situation enough time to change and to provide data that can help you determine how best to spend your energy in the future. You can gain insights into areas where you can expand. And you can possibly see opportunities to update old content.
But the big thing is that you’ll learn about your audience. Your prospective clients. That is where you gain the most both for blogging and really for your business in general.