... and increase your traffic!

Before we start, let me just say that this method is geared towards owners of Wordpress blogs.

If you want to increase the traffic to your site, you really should be looking at your traffic statistics. And I don't mean just admiring how your unique visitors or pageviews are increasing month by month. I mean you need to dig deep into the data you have and try and analyse visitor behaviour. From having a good understanding of visitor behavior, you can then discern your visitors' intentions and also how your site satisfies their needs.

If this all sounds complicated, fret not: here is a simple step by step approach to:

1. Identify what your visitors want from your site.
2. Determine whether your site is giving them what they want.

Popular Search Phrases

Before you start reaching for the Google Keywords Tool, stop! The Google Keywords Tool gives us phrases that are searched and their corresponding counts per month - in Google. We're going to have a look at what people search for when they're on our site.

To do this we're going to look at the pages our readers visit in the Top Content View (click Content on the left > Top Content). You should now see a list of URLs along with interesting data about each one. We're interested in URLs of a particular form: they must have /?s=word at the end. The /?s= indicates that a search has been performed on your site using the search box (you do have a search box enabled don't you?!) and the word is the phrase that was searched. A URL of the form /?s=word, therefore, refers to a page of search results.

So now we know what things our visitors are searching for when on our site.

The next important morsel of data is...%Exit for that page of search results. You might have initially thought that the time spent on page was a good indication of whether it satisfied our visitors, but it's not entirely the case. A short time on page may indicate that the visitor found what they wanted in the search results and quickly clicked on it. However, if the visitor exits our site from this page, we know that they found nothing of interest in our site's search results. Hence we can identify search results pages that don't satisfy as having:

• /?s=word in the URL
• % Exit = high

Content Creation Tool

That's exactly what this is - a content creation tool. How useful is that? Many web publishers struggle to find topics of interest to their readers, but here we have a method of identifying just that. We know what visitors are searching for, and we know what searches go unsatisfied. All we have to do now is write content that fits those searches.

OK, this method doesn't create the content for you, you still have to write that. But it can tell you what topics you should be writing about.