Write for Your Reader: Using Google Analytics to Capture Your Audience’s Interest

Writing for your readers and not for search engines is an important part of your business and SEO strategy. When working to create content that readers will enjoy, you will need to dig into Google Analytics and learn about what interests your audience. If you are searching for ideas of what to write about, you might want to review your most viewed content and educate yourself on which blog posts receive the most social shares as well as which pages have the lowest bounce rate. This should give you an understanding of what your readers are expecting.

If you want your audience to return to your website, reviewing your most popular blog posts will give you an indication of what your audience appreciates. By extension, digging into your Analytics data you will help you discover which of your blog posts struck a chord with your readers.  In order to do this, you should review your “top content” in your Google Analytics to see which of your posts have had the most unique page views.  While reviewing Analytics, you will also be able to review which sources have sent the most traffic and which topics are most interesting to your audience.

Learning how to diagnose your most popular posts can be very important, as it will lead to more blogging success.

When looking through your most visited content you should review:

• The keywords in the article title: Review the patterns of the article titles. Try to find a pattern of which keywords get the most page views. If you have written multiple blog posts with the same keyword and those posts continue to get high traffic, you might want to consider using it again. Your audience will continue to read these posts because they are interested in the keyword topic.

•  The topic: If you wrote about the new Facebook layout changes, for example, and the post received high traffic or social shares, you might want to consider new aspects of the changes  to write about. Research a topic within the Facebook changes that has not yet been explored. If your audience is interested in learning about this topic, you should become their information expert!

• Unique page views: When evaluating your most visited content in Google Analytics, you should take a look at  “unique page views” to get a sense of which posts would be worthy of recreating. The posts that receive the most unique visits should be carefully reviewed to understand the writing quality, tone, subject matter, etc. Try to keep the writing consistent across posts to provide your audience with more of the same useful perspective they have become accustomed to.

If you want to keep your readers interested in what you’re writing about (and eager to read more), it’s useful to dig into your Google Analytics data. By understanding your most viewed content, you will be able to engage your audience of readers. By consistently giving your audience what they want, chances are they will return and possibly even share your message with others.