If you have had a website for more than a few months, you have probably heard about search engine optimization (aka SEO) and that it’s important if you want to grow your website traffic. And that’s correct! Even more so if you have a blog that isn’t part of a business, as they aren’t as easy to accidentally come across. I’ve been using SEO for a while, and it has definitely improve my traffic, but it turns out that there’s more to it than just picking and using a keyword. Last month, I decided to really up my SEO game, and I think that it has made sure that I have mastered blogging and SEO. Keep reading to find out what happened as a result of improving my SEO game and how exactly I did it.
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Blog Traffic Report
Google Analytics Statistics
Pageviews: 12,882 (+2.48% from September, +13.17% from last year)
Bounce Rate: 23.93% (-1.7% from September, +66.75% from last year)
Sessions: 6,152 (+0.6% from September, +15.85% from last year)
Users: 5,318 (+0.15% from September, +17.49% from last year)
Bloglovin: 1796 (+0.11% from September, -3.2% from last year)
Email subscribers: 700 (+1.3% from September, +29.87 from last year)
How I keep my bounce rate so low
Pageviews: 98,133 (+30.5% from September)
Sessions: 37,830 (+16.97% from September)
Users: 1,681 (-8.7% from September)
Social Media
Facebook: 1079 (+0.55% from September, +3.55% from last year)
Twitter: 3693 (+0.13% from September, +9.97% from last year)
Instagram: 2840 (+1.53% from September, +7.29% from last year)
Pinterest: 8987 (+0.43% from September, +29.68% from last year)
Tumblr: 3964 (+0.2% from September, +1.5% from last year)
How I manage social media for my blog | How to get followers on Pinterest
Top Posts
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
- What Does Endometriosis Feel Like?
- POTS and Heat Intolerance
- Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
- Fun Things To Do in Boston: A 3-Day Guide
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- My Biggest Fear Realized
- Chronically Ill Tips: What To Do If a Doctor Isn’t Listening
- Beginner’s Guide: Seronegative Rheumatoid Arthritis
- The Lifestyle Changes I Made for My Rheumatoid Arthritis
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest (58.64%): I’m really surprised that this decreased! It’s still over 50, which started when I started treating Pinterest like the search engine it is.
- Facebook (15.17%): I honestly don’t know why this basically doubled from last month!
- Search Engines (5.96%): I’m glad that this increased, but I had hoped that it would be higher.
- Twitter (1.6%): I love Twitter! I wish that it gave me a bit more blog traffic, though.
This does not include direct traffic.
How to use Pinterest for blog traffic | How to use SEO to stand out
Master Blogging and SEO in 1 Month
What I Did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Big thing: 1 month SEO challenge
- While I’ve been using SEO for years, I felt like I was getting a bit complacent with it, so I decided to basically do an SEO boot camp in October. The one I used (linked above) has 30 days of things to do. Some of them take 5 minutes, others several days. I think the reason that I didn’t get a huge traffic increase from this is that I was already doing 7 of the 30 things and another 3 are more from business websites/blogs than blogs.
- Started a free trial of Tailwind for Instagram
- Invited 30 Facebook friends to like my Facebook page
- Joined another Tailwind Tribe; I’m now at 10, the maximum for my plan
- Sponsored a pin
How to get the most out of Tailwind for Pinterest
I Haven’t Seen Results From
- Sponsored pin – Once upon a time, this helped my traffic, but not any more. I definitely won’t be doing this again, or at least for a while!
What I Can Learn This Month
- SEO can involve so much more than what I thought! I knew that SEO could be tricky – I’ve been utilizing it for years – but doing this SEO “boot camp” really emphasized that. I don’t want to give away too much because it’s not my content, but that SEO challenge was so helpful. It made me stretch my SEO muscles, in a good way. As always, I’ll keep doing the things from this challenge over the coming months. If it doesn’t help, then I’ll stop, but you generally need to do these things for a while in order to figure out if it will help.
October Goals
- 5 posts – Success! 5 exactly.
- 14,000 pageviews – Failure! Hopefully I can make that in November, though.
November goals:
- 5 posts
- 14,000 pageviews
Do you feel like you’ve mastered SEO and blogging?
Like this post? Check out:
The Best WordPress Plugins: The Plugins I Use and Love, 8 Ways To Blog Better, My Proven Method for Blogging with Limited Time, 10 Things Every Blog Needs
Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
Love how transparent you are about your stats and where you are focusing for your blog! I think it really helps drive the point home on SEO focus really helps.
This report is really helpful. Thanks for letting me know about the boot camp. Really looking forward to learning more about SEO.