On Monday morning my phone rang, I answered and heard Simple Sally’s voice.
“Hi Ed, I have some concerns about blog site performance. Can we meet?”
I said, “Sure, can you tell me the particulars of your concerns so I can do my research in advance of our meeting?”
“We are getting a good number of visitors to our blog site, but more than half are coming from my company website, we were expecting to get more traffic from the search engines. We’d like your opinion as to what is happening.”
We set up a meeting time and I started my research.
Looking at the Google Analytics for the blog, sixty percent of the blog traffic was originating from Sally’s company website. On the surface it would seem the blog site wasn’t performing, but when I looked at the company website’s Analytics account I found the answer. I made a few notes, printed a few charts and got ready for my meeting with Sally the next day.
“Sally, I am very happy to report that your blog site is performing great. At this point in time I would suggest we keep the same blog strategy.”
“But we are not gaining high search engine visibility for our blogsite.” Sally replied. “Less the 30% of our blog traffic is coming from the search engines, isn’t there something more we can do to capture traffic?”
“Because of the customer focused emphasis, search engine visibility for the blog site will take some time. You have, however, experienced a significant increase in web traffic and search engine visibility for your main web site.”
I pulled out a chart to highlight landing page visits on Sally’s main website. “You see here Sally, this chart shows your blog organization page on the main company website is receiving the third highest number of visits. You organized the blog page on your main site to reference specific articles on your blog site that are helpful to your customers. Article titles are keyword rich search phrases and because of the reciprocal link, your website has received a much higher relevancy rating.”
I continued, “We want people to find your company blog site on the search engines, but we also want your main website to become more popular because of the extra links. We have accomplished part two of our goal.”
Sally smiled. “I was so focused on the blog site performance and justifying the expense to my bosses that I forgot to look at the main website performance. I see here that web traffic has increased significantly. Should we be concerned that visitors are leaving our main website to go to the blog site?”
“We need to keep track of the “Bounce Rate“, “Pages Views“, and “Pages/Visit”. These numbers help us see if visitors are arriving on the blog site and reading more than one article. A high bounce rate means visitors are immediately leaving the site. That would be bad, considering most of the traffic originated from the main company website.”
“What is considered a high bounce rate?”
“There is no hard and fast rule. A bounce rate lower than 50% would be preferable, but for blogs, it is not uncommon to see 70% bounce rate. Visitors browsing the internet often leave sites with lots of text just because they don’t feel like reading.”
Ed Bejarana
BusinessBlogging.net
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