I love social media. I write about it all the time, I socialize my content every day, and still, the stats for most of my daily stats look like this.
SIX referrals from social media yesterday. I posted 20 things. On Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon. And I get 6 measly referrals. I’m not sure how that is possible. But the story repeats itself every day on all four of my main blogs.
When I look at the 60-day Google Analytics snapshot from the same blog the story is a little better.
Here we can see that my extensive social sharing does have some impact.
- Facebook 948 visits
- Twitter 247 visits
- StumbleUpon 117 visits. (no longer exists)
- I don’t use LinkedIn on this site because it’s about relationships and single parenting.
The real AH HA Moment is when you look at Top Searches. Even though GA no longer provides a lot of information about the searches of people who are actually logged into their Google accounts, the big driver of the site is Search. And this can be a bit frustrating when I’m working very hard to build a social community, to drive people to a Facebook group, and ask them to follow me on Twitter. When I was not publishing on this site The Whole Parent for over a year, the traffic stayed steady at about 150 viewers a day. They were finding me via search. Not new content. Not social postings.
What I can do from here is continue to optimize my site for search. I can use the webmaster tools and try to get a bit more insight into the (not provided) category. And I can optimize the few terms that are showing up so that they point to the exact posts that make the most sense.
While I believe in the power of social, and the necessary exercise of building social networks for each content channel, it is clear that my real promotional focus needs to be on continuing to improve my relationship with search engines.
I’ve got my work cut out for me. And that 21.5% is still worth working at. When you are a smaller blogger, every view is a win.
A note about content: It is the new and refreshed content that continues to build stronger search results. Google loves active content and every time I put up a new post my entire site is recrawled and indexed by Google.
A note about SEO: I use WordPress for all of my sites and the magic sauce for SEO is a plugin called Yoast SEO. Get on WordPress and get Yoast installed and then write good content. The longer the better. Google also indexes longer pieces (over 2,500 words) higher than short pieces, and of course, there are more words to index.
Know what you are writing for, focus on the “about,” and use SEO to build authority and traffic.
John McElhenney — let’s connect online
@jmacofearth & Facebook & LinkedIn & The Whole Parent
PLEASE READ: Letters to a Young Artist in the Digital Age from John Oakley McElhenney
