Today I met with a client to review the Google Analytics on her website. For a relatively new site (less than a month old at this point) it’s getting some decent traffic.
But, truth be told, a bit of that traffic comes from redirect traffic from her old domain name (about 10%). And, yes, I excluded my IP address from visitor traffic stats, so traffic from my computer wasn’t be factored in– something you want to avoid as the designer of a site that you visit repeatedly day after day.
I went over some of the statistics that were being tracked already. A bounce rate of 36% and an average time on site of almost 3:30 minutes are really good numbers to start with.
Then we looked at keywords that were bringing people to her site. No surprise that the large majority was coming from the keyword that is her name. I attribute that to her being in the business on writing and speaking of veterinary medicine issues (mostly human resources and compassion fatigue) for a few years now and has built up quite a bit of “brand awareness” for her name.
But, paging further down the list of keywords in Analytics revealed that there was a handful of keywords that lead to people immediately leaving the site. So, initially, Google ranked her site well (or good enough) on a particular keyword, but the person decided the page really didn’t have the information they were looking for.
Then, a light went on for me. (If someone else on the Net has proposed this idea I apologize for “stealing” it, but to my knowledge I don’t think I’ve read this anywhere. If this idea IS out there somewhere please leave a comment here and I’ll get back to you.)
These particular keywords would make great fodder for future content pages or blog posts. If someone was searching for something like “human resources management veterinary practice”, found her site, but immediately bounced, well that would make a pretty good keyword for future content.
Sure, so far only one person searched for the term “human resources management veterinary practice”, but her site is very young and there’s bound to be more people searching on related keywords in the coming months and years. So, getting that focused content written and on the site now will pay dividends down the road.
So, take a closer look at your traffic sources by keyword in your Analytics (you are running it the background, right?) and I’ll bet you can find a handful of these such keywords. Ones that produced a high bounce rate. You just found some great ideas for content!