What do people search for on Offbeat Bride?
I spent some time peeking at my Google Site Search stats last week, and learned some things about the stuff that readers search for on Offbeat Bride. From the chart above, you can see that despite the fact that our traffic since 2009 has increased by 20% – 80% each year, the number of on-site searches have gradually declined. I like to think this is because we’ve made it easier to find content on the site without searching, but that may be optimistic of me.
Anyway, here are the top 20 search terms people have used when searching on Offbeat Bride:
My incredibly complex SEO strategy
Of Offbeat Bride’s 500,000 unique monthly users (“unique users” being an analytics term, although my users ARE very unique in a more general sense), about come to the site from a search engine.
So the question then becomes, what incredibly brilliant SEO strategy did I use to get traffic like this?
Here’s my answer…
5 ways we optimize old blog posts into super sticky landing pages
Web overlords often refer to “landing page optimization” when they talk about making users into “conversions.” The user is converted when they sign up for the email newsletter, buys the product, drinks the Kool-Aid, etc.
While blogging has its crossovers, what the Offbeat Empire wants our landing pages to do is get readers deeeeeper into the sites. We want to show them what we’ve got, what differentiates us from similar blogs, and secondarily, to get them engaged with our various communication and social media touch points. Web publishing loves something sticky.
The strategy we’re working on these days is to find older blog posts that are organically getting major traffic and, assuming that many of these readers are new to us, introduce them to the site and get them clicking on links. One example of this kind of “landing page” blog post is “Wedding invitation wording that won’t make you barf,” something Ariel originally wrote back in 2007 that still gets 47,000 unique hits a month.
Here’s how we try to get readers to stick around…
I’m the asshole without contact info on my business cards
I recently ordered a fresh batch of business cards, and when I handed one to a friend/colleague, he quipped, “Oh, you’re one of THOSE assholes — you don’t have any contact information on your card!”
He’s right, of course. My card has my name, title, and publication names … and that’s it. No email. No phone. Not even the URLs of the websites I run. Here’s why: