Quite a lot, apparently.
Recently I wanted to write a post on SEO and so I decided to check and see how well my blog was ranking for the keywords, nurse blog. A while back I had followed AskShane ’s advice on using titles to increase your SEO. I wanted to rank higher for nurse blog, and after changing my title around, I moved up to page #1 on a google search for nurse blog. Yay, me; right? Wrong! The other day I checked to see if that was still the case and I found out that Google was completely ignoring me for the search term “nurse blog.” Me! Of all people! After I toil away to bring you nurse blogger goodness at OrientedX3!
My first reaction was utter despondency. I mean, really. I’m writing a post on SEO and google is ignoring me for the search term “nurse blog.” What gives? So I decided to do some analysis.
My first step was to look at my overall stats, and sure enough, I found a sharp decline in traffic between March and April:
Now I just needed to find out why the sharp decline occurred.
My first thought was that one of my search terms was no longer relevant. Earlier, I had been getting tons of traffic from the search term Hillary Clinton Nurses Overpaid. Did my drop in traffic correspond with her dropping out of the race? Alas, no. She dropped out in early June.
Then I remembered what they say in medicine: If you hear hooves, look for horses, not zebras. So I decided to look for a more obvious reason. I knew at some point in time I had stopped posting frequently. Perhaps this corresponded to my drop in traffic?
Indeed it had! In November of last year I had ratcheted up my posting to a whopping 32 times in one month! And I was rewarded dearly for this as I saw a very nice increase in my unique visitors.
Conclusion: The more content you provide, the more traffic you will get. It’s that simple. And I know from experience this is easier said than done. But trust me, unless you really don’t care about how much traffic you get, you might want to set some blogging goals or create a blogging schedule.
I’ll leave you with this final thought: Once I stopped thinking too much about what would be the best thing to write about, and just started writing about whatever the hell I wanted to, my stats started to go up again.
Comments 6
Thanks for the advice Beth! I haven’t been posting as often but I have managed to keep up the google listings pretty well. I often Google my blog to see where it lands. I use sitemeter to track where people come from. Leaving meaningful comments on others blogs will also bring traffic. Check out my new template and give me some feedback!
Posted 25 Aug 2008 at 8:27 pm ¶As a side amusement, you still come up top on a Google of: nurse +ghoat. (if you don’t do the + google assumes ghoat must be a typo of ghost)
have fun
Posted 26 Aug 2008 at 8:14 am ¶do you feel restricted to blog more often because you self imposed an unwritten rule that you should only post nursing related blogs?
i have issues with that. i can post everyday or even more often sometimes, but i stop myself because most of the times, the thoughts in my head are not at all related to nursing, and with my blog title being all about me as a nurse, i change my mind about posting about mundane things.
Posted 26 Aug 2008 at 10:03 am ¶@Mental Father And I still rank pretty high for “lactulose enema” so that’s something to smile about!
@NPs Saves Lives: Glad to see you have your new template in place. I will check it out.
@may: Sometimes I find weird ways of tying what’s in my head to nursing, just so I can make a post about it. Lately I’ve been thinking about posting some more non-nursing things, because really, as nurses, do we want to read about nursing all the time? I think not.
Posted 26 Aug 2008 at 11:21 am ¶Nice post. Remember a lot of things go into Google’s rankings, but fresh content is certainly one of them.
Posted 28 Aug 2008 at 8:47 am ¶Hmmm… I’ve never really thought about traffic to my site. I know that it went up after being linked through CoS. If I had more time to write and to keep up with reading all these great posts, maybe I could put myself on a schedule. For now, I just do what I can…
Posted 29 Aug 2008 at 12:05 am ¶Post a Comment