Back on July 1, we re-launched this blog after a an 18-month hiatus. We renewed our commitment to writing quality content that we hope will be helpful for business owners. The added hope was that the blog would increase and better our brand’s presence in search. In terms of numbers, our goal was, and continues to be, to write at least 8 blog entries per month.
We now stand at a little over 90 days since the re-launch. It’s a good time to take a step back and look at how the blog is affecting our website’s presence in organic search. Is the blog helping us cast a wider net (like it should)? Is it too early to tell?
I assembled some really interesting and telling statistics for brand5.com taken from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. They compare the three months prior to the blog’s relaunch (April 1 – June 31) to the three months since the relaunch (July 1 – September 30):
TRAFFIC
71% increase in Overall Traffic
391% increase in Organic Traffic
373% increase in Google Organic Traffic
480% increase in Yahoo Organic Traffic
1,650% increase in Bing Organic Traffic
Assessment: These are all very encouraging numbers. Let’s be honest, Brand5 doesn’t attract rediculous traffic. So it’s not like this increase has us scrambling for more servers. Nonetheless, these are really serious increases for us. More traffic means more chances for business. This is exactly what we want.
SITE USAGE
1% increase in Pageviews
15% increase in Bounce Rate
48% decrease in Average Time Spent on the website
Assessment: This is really valuable stuff. I was surprised that Pageviews weren’t significantly higher. If you look deeper into the numbers, you can see what’s happening. People are finding our blog entries through search. They are not entering the site via our home page (which would probably lend itself to longer visits with more pages viewed). They read the blog entry and they leave. This is hugely important for us because it tells us we aren’t doing enough to keep people on our site. We aren’t doing enough to either tie-in our services or to get people to read other blog entries. We’re going to address this from now on and see what happens to the numbers.
KEYWORD STRENGTH
398% increase in traffic that came from non-paid search
402% increase in the number of keywords that bring traffic to the website (for example, “web developers”)
Assessment: This shouldn’t be surprising. This tells us that our blog entries are being indexed and that people are finding them through organic search. That’s what should be happening. Between our SEO knowledge and WordPress’ search-engine friendly makeup, this should happen for everyone if they crank out quality content consistently.
VALUABLE KEYWORDS
Because of it’s popularity and importance to our industry, we’ve tried hard to gain a presence for the keyword “website development”. In April, our website was nowhere to be found. It received zero impressions. In September, it gave us the most impressions of any keyword and yielded a whopping 25% click-thru rate. Our average position for that terms had increased from oblivion to 20. It’s not on page 1, but we are inching closer.
Assessment: This is really good news. We’re starting to make a dent in our most valued keywords. This is also a reminder that this is a process. It takes time. While what we’ve seen in 90 days is encouraging, it’s going to take perhaps 3-6 more months to get the type of penetration we want.
Overall, we are proving that consistently blogging quality content can help a website’s fundamentals. I look forward to keeping you posted of our case in future months.
Have you been tracking similar stats for your blog? Let’s talk about your results in the comment section below.