Happy March, friends! Welcome to the send installment of the “How To Successfully Measure Your Website Traffic” Series.

Just to give you a reminder, this monthly series is going to take you behind-the-scenes of my website traffic and compare it with the previous month to see how things are going. I do this on a monthly basis anyway, so why not take you along and give you more value?

Let’s get into February’s stats.

General stats

What’s working?

Half of the stats I’m pleased with here, but the other half I’m not. My users and sessions have increased which shows my audience is growing. Yet my pageviews are down slightly on last month and my bounce rate has increased.

I think the reason for this decrease in pageviews was for two reasons:

I didn’t publish as much content this month
I didn’t promote my content as much

What needs improving?

Again, my bounce rate is still very high so I do need to continue to put some solid strategies in place for this. I also want my pageviews to increase month on month, so I’m going to make sure I stick to my content strategy during March and promote my content even more.

Your takeaway

There are two things I quickly want to mention here: consistency and self-promotion.

If you stick to a regular schedule with your blog content, even if it’s just once a week - your audience will recognise that and they’ll come back for more. If you miss a day or a week of posting, they’re going to forget to come and look at your site.

That’s why it’s so important to maintain a publishing strategy that is best for you.

On the self-promotion front, this month just goes to show that I didn’t promote myself as much. And that’s true. Due my two rabbits passing away, I took a few days off and didn’t even look at social media.

It just goes to show that it does have an impact. But life happens and sometimes you’ve got to give yourself grace and be okay with that.

Website Traffic Sources

What’s working?

My SEO (organic traffic) is sky high again this month. But one thing I wanted to mention that I didn’t last month, was direct traffic. And specifically, how my direct traffic is higher than my social traffic.

Why is this so good? Because direct traffic is most often the result of a user entering a URL into their browser or using a bookmark to directly access the site. So my readers are actually going into their browser and typing in my website to get here.

They intentionally chose to do that.

That’s big. That’s really important traffic to have because it shows you’re building a community of loyal readers.

What needs improving?

I need to make sure I keep optimising every single blog post for SEO and promoting each piece of content as much as I can.

Your takeaway

While social and organic search traffic are both important, a lot of people fail to neglect direct traffic. This is a strong measure for you to look because it determines the loyalty of your audience.

Popular pages

Now this is VERY interesting this month, because while the top pages are still the same, they’ve had a complete switch-around! And I think I know the reason for this.

You see one of my goals for February was to add content upgrades to each of my most popular posts. There were 6 in total that I wanted to add them to, and they’re all listed here. And they’re actually the top six posts from my blog during the whole month.

Adding a content upgrade to them has made them even more valuable, which has increased the amount of traffic they’re getting.

Your takeaway

First of all, be aware of what your most popular posts are.

Once you’ve done that you can do one of two things:

Do what I did and add a content upgrade to each of them
Or if content upgrades aren’t your thing, then update the post and republish them as fresh content with the same URL - genius!

What I’ll be working on in March:

Sticking to my editorial calendar
Sticking to my social media promotional schedule
Adding more content upgrades to popular posts

I hope you found this valuable and it’s given you some things to think about. Remember to check back in at the end of March to see how I got on!

P.S. Don’t forget to join the library to get your hands on loads of free resources to help you get one step closer to a breakthrough with your online presence.

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