What can you do with Google Analytics Site Content reports? From optimizing for income to improving landing and exit pages, these reports are very useful.
The Google Analytics Behavior section contain information about our site's content. The three most important reports for bloggers are the All Pages report, the Landing Pages report, and the Exit Pages report.
Get Post Topics and Types Ideas from all pages
The All Pages information in Google Analytics can give us some great content ideas for our blog. Read on to learn how.
Start by reviewing your top 25 or so posts. Analytics will default to your top 10 most visited posts, so you'll need to change the number of results you get.
Look at the bottom right corner of your screen. Click in the Show Rows box, and select the number of posts you want to review. I would start with your top 25.
As you read through the list, write down the type and topic of each post.
Some examples of post types are inspirational posts, tutorial or how-to posts, list posts, resources posts, checklist or cheat sheet posts, review posts, and problem & solution posts.
Why types of posts do you see the most? Do you see more list posts in your top 25? Or are most of them inspirational posts? What about tutorials?
Let's say that the majority of your top posts are either inspirational or tutorials. Your readers are telling you that they like your inspirational posts and your tutorials the best. They're basically “voting” on your content with their visits.
So, you should write more of those types of posts. When you're planning your editorial calendar, make sure you include at least one or two of these posts every month.
What topics are in your top posts? Are they recipes? If so, what kinds of food? Quick and easy or gourmet? Desserts or keto?
Are those top posts mostly kids' crafts or home decor? Frugal living or exotic travel?
Pick out your top two or three topics, come up with post ideas for them, and add them to your editorial calendar.
Looking at the top 25 posts on my Cub Scout blog from the last year, some of the topics are similar. I see patch placement, skits, ceremonies, pocketknife safety, hiking, and games. This gives me some great content ideas for more blog posts.
OPTIMIZE FOR INCOME
Another thing you can do with your most popular posts is to ensure they are optimized for income. You want to make sure that posts that are getting lots of visits are going to make you the most money.
Optimize for Affiliate Income
Do you have affiliate links in those posts? If you don't, add some. If you do but they aren't converting well, look for other products that may resonate more with your audience.
How long ago did you write the post? You may have become an affiliate for some new companies since you wrote it, so think about products from those new companies that might be perfect for the post.
Could you highlight the products in a different way? A lot of my affiliate links are text links within the post, but recently, I started trying something new.
I decided to highlight an affiliate offer within some of my posts. Here's the screenshot of what I did.
Here's a timesaving tip for you. Create reusable Gutenberg blocks with affiliate links in them.
Because I have several posts about the Cub Scout Blue & Gold banquet, I could put this generic affiliate link in all of them, So I turned this into a reusable Gutenberg block.
Optimize for Ad Income
If you have an ad network, check with them for recommendations on how to optimize your posts for the highest revenue. On a post-by-post basis, Mediavine (my awesome ad network!) suggests longer content, shorter paragraphs, and more images.
Do your most popular posts need more content or more images? Do you need to break up some of your paragraphs?
Another ad revenue recommendation for your blog, in general, is to have a larger font size and more space between lines.
Mobile Optimization
Not long ago, I was visiting my sister. She's not a blogger–just a regular internet user. She was reading something on her phone and said, “Evidently, some people never check their website on their phones because it's really hard to read on my iPhone.”
Mobile traffic is huge for most bloggers, but because we tend to do our work on a desktop or laptop, we don't look at our sites on mobile devices very often. But it's important!
Look at each one of your top posts on a mobile device. Have your friends look at your top posts on their phones too. Do you have a popup that's covering part of the screen? You might want to change that.
What about your social share buttons? Are they impacting your readers' ability to actually read your post?
This is a made up image that I created, but I have seen sites on mobile that have all three of these things covering up their site.
- Email signup popup
- Follower popup
- Social Share buttons
I know that the popups are VERY effective, so I'm not saying that you shouldn't use them at all. There are two things you should consider when making your decision.
First, make sure Google doesn't think your popups are intrusive. Back in 2017, they said, “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high.”
So, you'll want to ensure that any popups you use are not considered intrusive.
Second, are these popups impacting your site speed? Right now, I'm not using a popup on my Cub Scout site because it slowed the site down more than I wanted it to.
One of my pet peeves is when someone has their social share buttons on the side of the screen. It's aggravating when you can't read that side of the post because those buttons stay in the same place on the side.
Put those buttons at the top or bottom of the screen for mobile.
Show Top Mobile Pages
There are a couple of ways that you can filter your all pages report to just show mobile traffic. This is the way that I think is the easiest.
Add the Device Category secondary dimension to the all pages report to show you how many pageviews you're getting on mobile vs. desktop. Here's how you do that:
Click the down arrow in the Secondary Dimension box. Type the “device” in the search box, then select Device Category.
This will show your traffic by page and device. Now, we want to filter the results so that it will exclude all of your desktop traffic.
Click “advanced” on the right side of your results. This will open the options you see in the image below.
- Change the first box to “exclude.”
- Type “desktop” into the search box.
- Click “apply.”
Then you'll see all of your mobile traffic sorted by the number of pageviews.
Improve landing and exit pages
What can you do with the information in the Landing and Exit Pages reports? Let's start by defining what those two are.
Note: Check out this comprehensive list of Google Analytics terms and their definitions.
A landing page is the first page that someone visits on your site. You may hear folks who sell things talk about their landing pages, but they typically mean their sales page, not the first page someone visits on your blog. For bloggers, our landing pages are like a first impression.
An exit page is the last page a reader sees on our blog before they click off.
For both of these, make sure that they provide lots of value to your readers so that they'll want to stick around and read more of your content.
My friend Lynn Terry from Traveling Low Carb talks about the next best click. The “next best click” is the best place your reader can go next–their next step. To figure this out, put yourself into your reader's shoes.
For example, my most visited post is one about where the Cub Scout patches go on the uniform. If I'm the reader who is visiting that post, I'm probably sitting there with a needle and thread in my hand. And if my readers are anything like me, it's probably an hour before my Cub Scout needs to wear the uniform with the sewn-on patches.
So, my readers probably need to get them sewn on quickly. Luckily, I have another post that shares a super easy way to sew on patches. That's the next best click for readers, and I tell them to “check out the easiest way ever to sew on Cub Scout patches!”
Go through your top posts, and think about what the next best click for each one. Write it down.
Next read through the post. Do you have that next best click in there? Is it clear why your reader should click there? Make any necessary changes.
Have a friend or relative read the post. Ask them if they know where they should go next. Do they know why? If not, revise your post again.
The site content information in Google Analytics gives us some great actionable information that we can use to make our blogs better.
What have you done with the site content information from Google Analytics?
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