We all think we know what our readers, Google searches, clients and fans want. Our mental capacity and information processing tells us exactly what we think is going to work. The problem with this and the way our brain works is that it is our brain, our thoughts and our assumptions – not our readers or customers’.

When getting ready to write a blog post for your business, you should always have your readers in mind. Help them solve a problem. Show them how to better use your products. Ask them questions that engage them further with your brand. It’s about them, not you.

But, if it’s about them and not you, how do you know what they are thinking?

Sometimes the answers are right in front of you, or at least on your screen and in your analytics.

For this post, I am going to use Google Analytics for the screen shots and reference. Most analytics programs offer similar features, however they may have a slightly different name or be found in a different location in your analytics dashboard.

Top Content

The first thing we are going to look at is your popular pages and popular posts. What are your viewers, readers and fans clicking through to see on your blog? Knowing this will tell you what concepts and content is more popular than others. In Google Analytics, this is found by selecting the Content menu and then Top Content as shown below.

In the example above the homepage is the most popular, as is for many blogs. Looking at the rest of the content (which may be hard to see) there are 2 articles that have to do with the music service Bandcamp (this data is from a music marketing site). The pageviews from these 2 articles account for more traffic than the rest of the pageviews combined (excluding the home page).

It would be wise to assume that creating another post on Bandcamp – maybe advanced features, or a case study of a band using the service would prove to be a great post to write in the coming future.

Keyword Analysis

The next section to take a peak at would be the keywords with which your readers are coming from. This data shows you what search engine is sending you traffic and what the searcher is typing into the box on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. Looking at this data you can see if there is a pattern with the keywords or similar keyword phrases, how long those people hung out on your site and if they bounced from your site without clicking around.

Let’s take a look at some keyword data. In the example above we are looking at the same site as above and have drilled down to search engine traffic from Google.

With this screenshot I am looking at the keyword phrase and looking for patterns or repetition. I have chosen the keyword “social media for musicians” as my winning keyword for a few reasons:

One is that in a tight niche, it has brought me 9 direct visits (doesn’t seem like a lot, however the landing page from Google takes them to a lead page that converts at over 50% – so new customers!). The great part is that they stay on my website for over 4 minutes and visit just under 2 pages everytime they come over from Google. That is a great keyword that converts!

On the corresponding screens I also see some repetition with the keywords

• music social media
• musicians and social media
• promoting my music with social media
• social music and media
• and so on.

The next step from here would be to look for ways to create more blog posts around the theme and the key phrase “social media for musicians.” Some ideas could be

• How Social Media is Changing The Music Industry
• 5 Ways to Get Social With Your Music
• Is Your Band On The Social Media Train
• and so on.

By writing these posts I am increasing the page count that Google can index on this set of keywords. The more pages in Google’s index, the more likely they are to rank them. I am also writing posts that Google traffic is looking for. By providing more resources to these viewers we have a higher chance to engage them and get them to subscribe, join the mailing list or comment.

2 Advanced Strategies

I wanted to leave you with some ideas to create new posts based on past success. There are 2 things that can help grow your blog, increase your page views and make your readers very happy.

1. Combine the Top Content with your top keywords. With this strategy you are matching your overall blog content with that of the search engines. Together they are very powerful. In the example of my music site, it would be very feasible to write a post on social media, musicians and Bandcamp. Doing so can make my readers and Google very happy and I’ll be able to engage more readers with better resources.

2. Interlink like content. Google likes links. Your readers like links. If you are writing similar posts, link to them. It will increase the visibility and the freshness of an old post and give your readers more information should they want to continue reading. There are plugins for Wordpress that make this very easy, however as an SEO minded Social Media person, I like to manually add these in the context of the post. It looks more natural and adds value and credibility to the post at hand.

How are you using Google Analytics or stats to help create your future success? Let’s talk in the comments below.

This post was written by Greg Rollett, a Social Media and music marketing consultant from Orlando, FL.

Tags: analytics, Blogging, content creation, music marketing, Social Media