Last month we talked about using analytics data to conquer the task of writing dynamic content and beat writer’s block.
Asking the Right Questions
We set the date range to the single day. This clears out all the information gathered about any other day since tracking begin. Our job now is to answer these questions:
Where did the visitors come from? – This points to which referrers may bring better amounts of traffic to your site.
What did they look at? – Which pages brought this amount of attention, and is it something you can replicate?
How long did they stay? – If they only stayed a few seconds, they probably didn’t find what they were looking for.
Did they visit any other pages on the site? – This indicates one of two things. One, they found what they wanted and decided to surf the site. Two, they didn’t find what they needed on that page, but thought they might be able to find it elsewhere on your site.
There are some spam tactics that are obvious like keyword stuffing, invisible text, skewed backlink profiles and the like. Some really require intent and others could be done accidentally. Because some could be done unintentionally, you really need to have some understanding of what constitutes spam and why so that you stay out of trouble. It’s not enough simply to know what some good practices are.