Louey's Journal

LESSON LEARNED: Traffic is in the long tails...

I've been going through my site looking at the top content and I found something very surprising:

The page on my site with the most traffic is an inner page, not the home page, with almost all the traffic coming from organic search.

The most interesting thing about it is that this page gets around 12,000 visitors per month but the KW that it's ranking for only gets 1,000 searches per month, and it only ranks 7 for that keywrod.

All the other search traffic has to come from long tails...

I have no idea what to do with this lesson but it's interesting to know.

The other really interesting thing is that this page is duplicate content that was swiped off Craig's List years ago.

Weird.
 


Louey37 said:
LESSON LEARNED: Traffic is in the long tails...

I've been going through my site looking at the top content and I found something very surprising:

The page on my site with the most traffic is an inner page, not the home page, with almost all the traffic coming from organic search.

The most interesting thing about it is that this page gets around 12,000 visitors per month but the KW that it's ranking for only gets 1,000 searches per month, and it only ranks 7 for that keywrod.

All the other search traffic has to come from long tails...

I have no idea what to do with this lesson but it's interesting to know.

The other really interesting thing is that this page is duplicate content that was swiped off Craig's List years ago.

Weird.
Click to expand...

Good stuff man. I'm doing the optimizing speed thing now too (about to post on my journal). Next thing to do is hit the content generation of long-tails.

Do you treat those pages really good and hand populate them with content?
 
Chupin said:
Good stuff man. I'm doing the optimizing speed thing now too (about to post on my journal). Next thing to do is hit the content generation of long-tails.

Do you treat those pages really good and hand populate them with content?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I do. But I'm in a different boat to most guys on here. The content on the site's been generated to feed an existing audience, rather than to just generate traffic, so every article is personally written.

If you just want to rank for long tails, then you could just pay someone but if you want to do it really well, and have a LOT of time up your sleeve, then I'd do it right.

Who'd you get to do the speed optimisation?
 
Louey37 said:
Yeah, I do. But I'm in a different boat to most guys on here. The content on the site's been generated to feed an existing audience, rather than to just generate traffic, so every article is personally written.

If you just want to rank for long tails, then you could just pay someone but if you want to do it really well, and have a LOT of time up your sleeve, then I'd do it right.

Who'd you get to do the speed optimisation?
Click to expand...

I don't have money and I've got time...

I did the speed optimization stuff myself. WC3 total cache and a few other plugins and I was good to go. I don't have just a gigantic site so it was pretty straight forward.
 
Fucking negative SEO cunts. This is just on one page.

From a peak of 823 visitors in a day to 23 in three weeks. What a pack of cunts.

PTzTDLj.png
 
UPDATE: Conversion stats are in

It seems I got a little excited with the conversion statistics when I made my bold prediction about 2.43%. The numbers are a MASSIVE improvement on what they were but not 2.43%.

WmmAIEJ.png


It's about a 4x what it was before which is still pretty fucking awesome.

The breakdown of where the conversions are happening are:
55% at the bottom of the post
25% in the sidebar
12.5% on the home page
12.5% on the download information page

I still haven't managed to get the lightbox popup to work yet. The one I purchased claimed to natively integrate with my email autoresponder provider but it turns out that it doesn't quite yet and they have to tweak it to get it to work.

I'm still shooting for a 3% optin so once the lightbox popup is installed I'll get to work on tweaking and optimising it.

A few interesting things have changes have happened since the redesign:

1. Average time on site has dropped by 25% to 1:30
2. Average pages per visit has stayed the same, despite the homepage making it far easier to access more information
3. Direct traffic is up 15% (most likely due to the higher number of subscribers coming back through links in the autoresponder sequence)

I'm still waiting to see the effects of the page speed optimisation. I'll post those when I have them.

I've also hired a dude to try and get the manual penalty revoked from my site. I'll be interested to see what kind of impact that has on the search traffic.
 
The site speed reduction results are in:

W5beTJn.png


I was hoping for a CCarter style doubling of traffic but no such luck. Traffic has stayed the roughly the same. I'll give it a few days and then post traffic screen shots.
 
Hey Louey,

Your site's redesign looks fantastic. I was on the fence about using the same theme on a new project I'm about to start, but after seeing it work so well for you, I'm totally sold on it now. Big ass featured image + infinite scroll capability? VIRAL SHIT MAH NIGGUH.

Keep up the good work, and thanks for the inspiration.
 
Mate, get the theme. It's been put together really well and it's got a lot of great functions in there that most other themes just don't have. It's also got really solid caching built in so that even though it's really image heavy, it loads pretty quickly.
 
UPDATE: Traffic leaks time

At the moment, nearly 75% of all my traffic comes from organic search which is far too high for me to be happy with. Ideally, I want it around 30% so I'm going to start getting more leaked traffic.

I've just hired a guy from oDesk who's my perfect target audience to start a forum posting campaign. Once he's comfortable with that, then I'll get him on article commenting, YouTube commenting, Reddit posting, and Facebook group posting.

Really keen to see how this goes.

Just for statistics sake, right now, over the last 30 days, I've gotten 2,786 visitors from social and referral traffic. I'll update these stats in a month.
 
Interesting little test playing out on the site at the moment.

My bounce rate is incredible high (80%) and I'm working to bring it down at the moment. One of the things I theorised that might be causing it is the large, full width, feature images at the top of every page. I theorised that they were making it harder for people to see the content and could have been leading people to leave.

So, three days ago I removed the feature images from all the pages on the site to see what effect that would have on the bounce rate.

The effect on the bounce rate has been basically negligible (1.4% decrease) but the time on site has increased by 22% and the conversion rate is up 10%.

I'll have to see how this plays out over the next week but these stats are an interesting start.
 
Louey37 said:
Interesting little test playing out on the site at the moment.

...One of the things I theorised that might be causing it is the large, full width, feature images at the top of every page. I theorised that they were making it harder for people to see the content and could have been leading people to leave.

I'll have to see how this plays out over the next week but these stats are an interesting start.
Click to expand...

You know, I've been seeing a LOT of sites using that layout. A part of me wants to say that because it's so popular, it must be converting well, but my gut says it's a waste of space. I started seeing it on Medium at first, then I came across it on Gamespot, and some sports site I can't find right now.

I wonder how the metrics actually look. It seems to be used for long-form feature type pieces, but not necessarily every article.
 
It is really varied.. nothing to do but test.

A gyu I know just ADDED a huge ass header to his site (sex dates) and his conversion rate got much better.

::emp::
 
emp said:
It is really varied.. nothing to do but test.

A gyu I know just ADDED a huge ass header to his site (sex dates) and his conversion rate got much better.

::emp::
Click to expand...

Totally, you can only test. It might be different for my site as the whole thing is based around the content. That's what people come for, that's what people stay for, so in my head, making it more prominent and accessible is the way to go.

But, one thing I know for certain with increasing conversion rates is that you know nothing until you test it. Ever. It's all just bullshit in your head until you get the stats back.
 
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