Robert Stanke.com

A couple of days ago, I was reviewing my web traffic reports for January when I noticed a trend that has been occurring over the past several months that I am pretty happy about.  After a solid year of a majority of my website traffic coming from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, search engine referrals have narrowed the gap... almost to the point where I think February will be a changing of the guard.

In January, 33.49% of all my web traffic was from referring sites (Twitter, Shoemoney.com, and Facebook taking the top three spots and attributing to 53% of the total referring site traffic).  This statistic has pretty much remained the same for the past six months or so, but the one that has been creeping up and taking "market share" away from the "Other/Direct" traffic numbers has been the "Search Engine" traffic sources.  During the month of January, search engines drove 32.24% of all traffic to my site - all from organic search engine results (that means I did not buy any advertising that would have resulted in hits to my site).  Sure enough, I reviewed the keywords that were causing this traffic and everything looked legit.  99.15% of all that search engine traffic came from Google (no surprise), but in general the search engine traffic has been growing by double-digit growth since October.  At that rate, February should be when I see those two competitors switch spots in my report.

I am kind of surprised by the results, but as I look back, I shouldn't be.  Since October I have been posting at least 5-7 new blog posts per week on top of adding just plain additional pages with content to the site.  This alone has raised the amount of robot hits I get as search engines index my site for new content that they have learned is going to be there when they arrive.  On top of that, I have made a habit of being smart about keywords.  When I start a post, I do my research, seeking out what keywords are hot around that topic and placing them in my post and in the headline.  Finally, I have been following a content calendar as much as possible.  This has mostly made me stick to a routine and remember what topics are going to fit best in a given time frame.  SEO is not magic.  In fact, it is pretty simple if you stick to the basics and focus on content.  Search engines are smart now a days - they don't need additional help.  My SEO is built-in to my hosting provider, Squarespace, and they do an excellent job.

The result of all of this was great.  January produced my second-highest month ever of new traffic to my site, and the most page views ever in a month period.  New traffic up and they are staying longer.  That means my engagement level is increasing.

Things to build on for February...