What’s the purpose of creating blogs within your website?
To demonstrate your expertise or credibility?
To impress people enough so that they make contact with you?
If you’re anything like many businesses, you’ll have used Google Analytics to get a general picture of how many people go no further than the blog page they landed on.
It can be a bit depressing.
You work hard to create good quality content, find ways to make it visible online (sometimes including paid advertising to drive traffic to the blog page), and so you ideally want people to engage more after landing on your blog.
There are generally two desired outcomes from people who land on your blogs:
- They like what they read and so go on to look at other pages of your website before making contact with you, either during that website visit or after further consideration at a later stage.
- They become aware of your expertise/offering (sometimes over a series of blogs that they’ve seen) and so are amenable to formation of a business relationship at a later stage.
Whether it’s outcome 1, 2, or neither, you would ideally also have Google remarketing in place so that your adverts follow those people for days, weeks, or months, after they have landed on your blog.
They may not have made contact short-term because the time wasn’t right for them, but may respond to ongoing advertising that appears in front of them (via Google remarketing) at a later stage.
Although Google Analytics gives you a view of how many people landed on, or viewed individual blog pages, that has its limitations.
With A1WebStats you can filter the data to view the blog pages that people landed on, including how many people landed on them. Then you can filter by those who went further than the blog landing page. This gives you a picture of how effective the blogs were in getting people to click deeper into your website.
However, blogs aren’t always designed to get people clicking off to other pages. They may be awareness/credibility raising articles that you’ve created, hoping that people will look at more of your website content in the future.
Ultimately though, you want people to be going beyond those blog landing pages and onto pages that help to reinforce why those website visitors should be considering making contact with you.
As an example, if you sell red widgets and have a whole section of your website dedicated to red widgets, and you have a blog that’s related to red widgets, then you ideally want those people to click beyond your blog and to your red widgets pages.
If you sold red widgets then A1WebStats would help you to analyse this as follows:
- Identify the number of people who landed on the blog related to red widgets.
- Filter the data to show only those who got as far as the red widgets section of your website.
- See how that looks as a percentage of all those who landed on the blog page.
What does that percentage look like? 10%, 5%, less?
Should the red widgets website owner expect a high percentage of people to go beyond their blog page and into the red widgets section?
No, not really.
But, if that red widgets blog had been created as a method to pull people into the website, then ideally some of those people would be looking at the red widgets section, and not just the blog they landed on.
After all, you do need to get a return on investment on the time/resources you’ve put into your blogs.
Ideally, you want to prove that, over time, your blogs have been a contributing part of the journey that led to someone becoming a new customer. You can do this with the A1WebStats system because you can see all the previous visits from an IP address, which may include the person going to your blog page(s).
So what do you do in this scenario? …
- People land on a blog page.
- Those people would ideally click through to another specific part of your website.
- They don’t take the path you want them to.
While it’s tempting to pepper your blog with links to another part of your website, it can appear to be too ‘salesy’ and people may feel that they’ve clicked through to something that’s deliberately been engineered to get them to your product or service page.
While that (creating a link within the blog) is an option, what else can you do?
Is there space on your blog page, where you could place something that will be of interest to your website visitor?
If there is, what would interest them?
Maybe one of the following, presented as images somewhere on the blog page, may interest them (using red widgets as an example) …
- See 54 testimonials from our red widgets customers.
- Our red widgets distributors worldwide.
- Red widgets, blue widgets, or yellow widgets? There is a difference.
- Why red widgets cost more than blue widgets.
None of those four examples above would lead through to the main red widgets page but instead to supporting pages that don’t openly shout “buy your red widgets here!”.
Instead, they act as images that get the person (who has landed on a blog about red widgets) to click to another ‘red widgets’ part of the website that may be of interest. From that point, it may be more acceptable to have a call to action that encourages people to go to the main red widgets page.
The nature of blogging is that the opportunities are endless. Even the seemingly most boring product or service could be the subject of one or more blogs, giving a fresh angle and keeping the interest of the reader.
If you would like some help better-understanding visitors to your own blog pages, and you are using A1WebStats (either as a free trial or paying subscriber), then please do contact us – we’ll be happy to show you how the system uncovers useful information about those blog visitors.