Analyzing Site Traffic and Replicating High Traffic Articles
Have you ever published an article that garnered a plethora of pageviews from Alphabet’s Google search engine? What did you do in that instance? Did you go to Google Analytics and look at that article’s sources of the traffic? Did you examine the search engine terms that brought that traffic? Did you publish additional, like-content on your website?
If you answered no to these questions, you have missed out not only on additional traffic to your website but new loyal readers of your website. This doesn’t have to be the case in the future if you turn those no’s into yes’s. In this article, we will go over how to do that in a series of easy-to-follow steps.
Site Traffic and Analysis Questions
When you receive a burst of traffic from a search engine like Google, a social news aggregation like Reddit, or IMDb, the first question that you should ask yourself is why? Why did I receive that burst of traffic? The second question: Where did it come from? The third question: How do I make this happen again, and again, and again?
Let’s examine those questions and the methods that you can take to answer them.
Site Traffic and Analysis Answers
- Step 1: Your Content
The “why” is easy. It’s your content. Your content is why you got that burst of traffic. You wrote content that people felt was valuable, they were searching for just that content, and came to your website to read what you had published. You wrote interesting copy that sparked other people’s interest. Though rudimentary, it is important that you realize this fact.
- Step 2: Analysis of Analytics
The source of the traffic to your content is where Google Analytics, or whatever traffic-tracking plugin or service that you choose to use, comes in. It will offer you invaluable data. If your site has undergone a traffic spike, the analytics will tell you when the traffic started coming in, from where, and how much of it came in from what specific source. Simplified, these analytics will tell you “who” sent you the traffic.
- Step 3: Replication
Replication of this traffic spike (or any traffic) is the key to the eventual success of your website and why many people fail as webmasters – they don’t properly use analytics data that is freely available to them in a constructive and fruitful way.
With the traffic-specific data, you can tailor-make new content specifically to the type of previously-published content, to the source of the previous traffic (Referrals in Google Analytics), to the audience of that previous traffic (Demographics), and to the search terms used to previously surface your article in search engine results pages (Search Console Data in Google Analytics).
When writing another article on the same topic (replication), if applicable, try using one (or more) of those search engine terms in the title of your follow-up article, in headers (if you use them), and in the body of your article. Be conservative with their usage, two or three times in your article is adequate. This will search engine optimize (SEO) your article title, its headers, and the content of your article.
Once the follow-up article is written, write a series of articles on the same topic or subject matter. If you are paying attention to your analytics on a daily basis, you will catch any increases in traffic, and will be able to quickly publish additional articles on that subject matter.
Subject matter replication is an especially powerful tactic if you have a related posts plugin activated on your website and it is positioned at the bottom of every article on your website. This will reduce your bounce rate by giving the site visitor additional articles to read on the same subject matter.
In Conclusion
By analyzing the sources of your website traffic and by replicating the traffic-driving content being searched for, you can give your readership the content that they want and not waste your time writing content that few people read. Your time as a webmaster is valuable. Use it efficiently.
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