If you make a living from your WordPress website(s), then you need to know what your visitors want. It’s natural to assume that you already know exactly what your visitors want. You got them to show up in the first place, right!
Except, maybe you don’t…
Assuming that you know what your visitors want is a sure-fire way to lose at least some of your visitors’ attention prematurely. And, the good news is that pinpointing your visitors’ needs and wants really isn’t all that complex.
In this article, we’ll take a look at four tools you can use to answer five specific questions about your website visitors. That way, you can make sure that you’re hitting the mark and delivering the content your visitors are googling.
1. What Are Your Visitors Looking For?
Search Console is a free service from Google that was previously known as Webmaster Tools. Search Console lets you monitor the appearance of your site in Google’s search results and keep track of the terms Googlers use to reach your site.
Many novice users confuse Google Analytics with Search Console. There’s good reason for this confusion: both services are provided by Google, and once you have both set up Search Console, data can be integrated into Google Analytics. However, if you’re just getting started with Search Console, you need to set up Search Console separately from your analytics account.
Solution: Use Google Search Console to Pinpoint the Information Your Visitors are Looking For
Search Console provides a wealth of information about the search terms that lead visitors to your site. You can sort the data to view how your site performs for each term based on the number of clicks, number of impressions, click-through-rate, and average position in search engine results. You can also filter the results by landing page, search country of origin, device, and type of search (web, video, or image).
Search Console is great for clueing you into the specific topics users are looking for when they reach your site.
Dig deep into this information and you may find some surprising topics that you didn’t realize some of your visitors were looking for. What’s even better about finding these sorts of hidden surprises is that you know it’s worth investing the time to create relevant content because Google is already sending relevant traffic your way.
2. What Content Do Your Users Like The Most (and Least)?
Google Analytics (GA) is a free service you can use to find out a great deal about your website traffic. If you’ve never set up GA before, it really isn’t that hard to get started and we’ve written a detailed tutorial that will help you get going: Getting Started with Google Analytics.
When visitors find a specific bit of content useful, they stick around for longer and view additional pages. This is good for you because it means more page views, a more engaged audience, and ultimately, more opportunities to convert visitors into customers and subscribers.
You can use Google Analytics to help you identify your best content by looking for the content with the longest average time on page and the lowest bounce rate. Then, you can study your best-performing pages for clues about what makes them so effective and put what you learn into use when you new content or improve existing underperforming content.
Solution: Use Google Analytics to Spot Your Best (and Worst) Content
Log into GA and go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. This will bring up a list of your most popular site content along with key performance metrics for each page.
As we just mentioned, the key things to look for here are the average time on page and the bounce rate. A low bounce rate and high average time on page indicate that your audience finds that particular bit of content to be extremely useful.
Another useful way to look at this data is to click on the average time on page and bounce rate columns. This will sort the data so that you can see the pages with best and worst average time on site and bounce rate values.
After sorting the data, look for any outliers. Outliers, whether positive or negative, can help you pinpoint the topics and content formats that either work really well or very poorly for your audience.
3. Is Your Content Relevant to Search Users?
Another question Google Analytics can help answer about your audience is whether or not users who reach your site via Google’s search results find your content to be relevant. To see what I mean, log into Google Analytics and go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels, and from the list of channels click on Organic Search.
When you do this, you’ll see a list that looks something like the following image:
Taking a look at the image above, what can we gather from this information?
Well, for one thing, we can gather that the analytics admin user needs to learn how to filter out the spam keyword showing up in the fifth place. In addition, it is noteworthy that a lot of traffic lands at this site using some variation of the term “centrifugal pump parts” and, quite frankly, this site sucks at meeting the needs of those search users. The time on site is quite short and the bounce rate far too high.
For this particular site, this stands as a great opportunity for improvement. Since this site already ranks highly for these specific terms, it would behoove this site’s owner to do some work better meeting the needs of search users.
