I’m going to be doing a presentation on analytics in a few weeks at the SIPA Mid-Year Marketing Conference.

The presentation has ten exercises to encourage practical steps publishers can take from the data on website usage. Here’s the first one, which has to do with fine-tuning your web pages for your visitors.

Step 1

Find the top 100 search terms that bring traffic to your site and sort them by bounce rate, from lowest to highest.
 
The top terms should describe your site / coverage / expertise. “Yes, these are the people who should be coming to my site.”
 
The terms on the bottom should get progressively further away from your coverage. If you find some of your key terms towards the bottom, you’ve found a problem to solve.

Step 2
 
Group your search terms conceptually and see which group makes up the highest percentage of traffic.
 
Step 3
 
Find the landing page(s) associated with that group of keywords.

Step 4
 
Review those landing pages to see how they can be optimized for people searching on those terms.
 
For example, you might add links to related content on your site. If you have any related products, be sure to add links from the landing page to the product page(s). If you don’t have any related products, consider an affiliate relationship with someone who does.