How to Use Time on Site for New Ideas
One of the most common questions I get from people with small business websites (especially blogs) is “what should I write about?” They know that one of the keys to a successful website is to include lots of high-value content, but struggle to find ideas for new topics. Well, here’s a way to get some great ideas. It’s free, the answers are only a couple of clicks away and they use a nice thing called ‘time on site’…
Why is This Useful?
If you own a small business website then you need to spend your marketing time wisely and this includes time spent creating new content for your website. Rather than guessing at new ideas for content, this technique uses clues that are already there in your website traffic.
Analytics First
The key to this technique is to use the visitor analytics results for your website. If you don’t have analytics already running, you’ll need to install this first and run it for a decent slice of time – probably at least a couple of weeks. Google Analytics is very popular and works well, so I’ll use this as an example.
To install Google Analytics for your site, just head over to www.google.com/analytics and register your site. You’ll need to grab the tracking code and add it to each web page.
What to Look For
You can use the keyword traffic report as inspiration for new content. Just look under Traffic Sources -> Keywords. Take a look down the list of keywords and look for ones which match these criteria:
- They bring you a decent number of visits already (definitely more than 1)
- Average time on site is low (probably zero)
- They’re relevant to your business and your website
The image above shows the ‘time on site’ column in Google Analytics.
OK, so why are these numbers important?
It’s because these keywords are already bringing you some organic search traffic (from Google, bing, etc) but your visitors aren’t finding what they want on your pages.
You might find that these are long tail keywords, and the phrases may not appear word-for-word in your pages. You’ll probably find that the pages where they appear aren’t really focusing on these keywords as a topic. Remember that visitors scan your pages very quickly and may move away if the search term doesn’t appear in the title, or early in the page.
What to Do Next
So now you have some ideas for new keywords and topics to write about. Create some new pages around these keywords, and make sure the pages really are focused around these terms. Use the keywords in the title, and several times in the page content (and as near to the top of the page as possible)
Other Questions and Ideas
Can you use bounce rate too? It depends. Bounce rate shows the number of visitors to a page who exit your site as soon as they’ve read it. You might think that a high bounce rate shows a bad page, but for some websites it’s probably fine. Blogs are a good example of this – your readers probably come to your site to read a new post, and then move away to their next favorite blog.
So what about keywords that are already successful for your site? Maybe you have some of these – lots of visitors AND they spend a long time on your pages (i.e. time on site is high). By all means write some more content around these keywords. This comes under the heading of ‘improving what works already’, which I fully support. You should see more growth if you target the poorly-performing keywords though.
You might also see the time reported as ‘time on page’ instead of time on site. This is just the page-specific version.
Wrapping It Up
So there you go. This is a nice technique for finding new stuff to write about, and it takes away the guesswork. If you’re a small business website owner I think you’ll find this useful. Have a go and let me know if it works – you can leave a comment below or contact me directly.
[UPDATE: I got a few questions on the 'zero time on site' measurement. How can a visitor get to your site and spend zero seconds here? The answer lies in the way Google Analytics measures time on site. It looks at the time between the first page view on your site and the last page view. If only one page is looked at, there is no second page view so a zero is recorded. Visitors may be spending some time on the page, but this isn't recorded. ]
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