Reading LogFiles and Adding New Content to your Niche Site
I recently had a few very good questions via email that deserve a post. Randy wanted to know:
Is there a Post for Understanding your LogFiles on an Affiliate Site?
… and Arthur asked:
How will I know when to Start Adding New Content and Make Changes to my Niche Website?
I have actually spent 2 days recording a screen capture for this post. I was unhappy with the results and deleted it, at least 5 times! Instead, I am going to write it all out… there is a link to the unedited video at the bottom of this post as well.
How can I Understand my AWStats Logfiles?
I tend to stick with AWStats for all of my references to the logfiles. The main reason for this is because EVERYONE has AWStats with their hosting package. There are several others, including the very popular Google Analytics, but even on my own sites… I do not use GA until the site has proven it can and will deliver steady traffic. IF you use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your site, well, that’s another story and you should use the advanced features of Analytics to help you determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.
One of my previous posts about Understanding AWStats and the Needs of your Visitors has quite a bit of info on how to read your logs very quickly to determine how a site is performing.
When do I Start Adding New Content to my Niche Website?
(All images are from 3 of my own, some neglected, niche sites)
Basically… Always! There is never a bad time to add new content to your niche website! In fact, regardless of the amount of traffic the site is seeing, you should always have a plan to add more content to your site!
In the image to the left, you can see a site that truly sucks! It rarely gets more than 1 visitor a day and honestly, I always feel like it is a waste of my time to do anything to these low traffic sites!
The truth however is that a site like this will NEVER grow if I dont do something about it myself! The website does not know it sucks… the pages dont know they stink…Â but the the search engines sure do know it, and its really my own fault!
If you have a site more than 90 days old, getting less than 15 visitors each day… forget about adding NEW content, focus on optimizing what you have already started!
For my own sites, I use the number of visitors as a guide to how often I should make changes! You have all heard me say this 1000 times… build it, optimize it, walk away from it! Revisit the site several days later and see what it is doing… are the spiders coming? Is it being indexed? If yes… then close the browser and move on to another project until it is 30 days old!
If you return in 30 days and your visitor stats look like those above, its time to revisit your WordTracker keyword researchand figure out what went wrong! If however you are seeing a steady flow or even trickle of 25-50 visitors a day… its time to start listening to what they want and begin adding new content!
So… you went into your logfiles and you found that 25-50 (+/-) visitors are coming steadily every day! First and foremost, congrats!! Your site is growing and gaining popularity! Whether this happens at day 30 or day 180, seeing a steady flow of traffic is always good and the reason you started doing this in the first place!!
That being said… having a site that is 6 months old and seeing 25-50 daily visitors is nothing to be TOO happy about! Sorry… its just the truth. If you had done your research effectively, made changes every month and fed the demands of your existing visitors, you should be seeing a considerable amount of traffic within the first 6 months! The only real exception to this is if you are in the rare niche market that only predicts a few searches each day.
The stats above are actually from the fine-designer-shoes site, which is about 45 days old. I have used a different strategy on this site from the blog to inbound links, and I am curious as to whether the “Sandbox” will have an effect or not…
If your Site has 25-50 visitors each day – Add 2+ NEW pages each month
The image on the left is another niche site, but as you can see… there is an average of about 125-150 daily visitors coming to the site. The domain and site have been live for about 3-4 months and it is a solid performer with clicks/conversions in the EPN.
Is it just insane busy? No…. BUT, it has steadily grown from 0 visitors on launch, to more than 100/ day in less than 5 months! While 125-150 is still not going to allow me to retire at 45 (my longtime goal) it does show the promise in a site that makes me want to invest more than just 1 hour a month!
On a site like this, I will actually go in and add 1-2 new pages every week, based on existing search engine traffic.
If your Site has 100-200 Daily Visitors – Add 1-2 NEW Pages EVERY WEEK!
How Can I Determine the Best Content to Add?
OK, I’m now a victim of my own posts! LOL I know I recorded a video in the past on one of my sites, GetARacecar. I talked about looking through your stats and capitalizing on existing terms bringing traffic, to make new terms. In that post, I referred to “Used race cars”, which at the time, I ranked #92 for the term. Since that post (45-60 days ago) the site now ranks #4 in G! Anyhow… In the video, (which I cannot locate) I talked about one of the most important sections of your logfiles… the search keyword / phrase section.
Ultimately, the site for this image is not doing that well overall. The domain is 4 years old… and has been a BANS store for about 7 months. Currently, it gets about 50-75 daily visitors… and needs to be worked on!
When I view the keywords/phrases portion of AWStats to locate some easy targets, I can determine that there are some words that are well saturated throughout the site already and what I need to focus on now are some of the longer tailed phrases that will bring more visitors/buyers!
“General Terms = General Traffic”
In this case… I see the keywords: ”wholesale, clothing, closeout, apparel, & merchandise” are fairly well saturated and come up very often in the search PHRASES on the left side of the image. “Mens & Hats” on the other hand, while high on the words list, are nowhere on the top 10 phrase list! Time to head to wordtracker!
In wordtracker… I will join the very common saturated words with the words “hat” and “mens”, to find some longer tailed keyphrases and add 3-5 pages to the site in less than 30 minutes! Lets walk through it real quick:
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Go to your Wordtracker keyword research account.
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Type the following terms into the seed box:
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mens clothing
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mens wholesale
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mens closeout
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mens apparel
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wholesale hat
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closeout hat
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Click on Research, then Click on evaluate.
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Delete EVERY Term with less than KEI of 1.0, and less than 10 daily predicted searches.
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Sort the terms by Google KEI and the BEST target phrases will be listed at the top of the page.
What we have done, is VERY QUICKLY found a list of long tail phrases that should be easy picking for quick rankings and visitors! Once the KEI sorted, we have the following list of terms:
From here – I Login to my Niche site and added the three new main store categories (pages) listed above in yellow. If I really want to get them indexed quickly, I will talk about the three new categories: Carhartt Mens Clothing, Wholesale Men’s Cologne and Camo Hats Wholesale in a post like this. :-)
In less than 30 minutes, I have 3 new categories that should be easy to rank for and bring a fair number of visitors for each. I will return to this same site next week and continue my expansion of the categories based on the same methods.
Lets revisit this post in a few weeks to see how this went… Incidentally, if you STILL want to watch the 15 minute, unedited video… its right here!
Mark
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Adding content to your Niche Store Website
- Adding Relevant Content to your Niche Store Website – FAST!
- Day 5 – Adding more Content and Continue Bookmarking!
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Good stuff, as always!
Question: If we incorporate blogs to our niche stores then do you suggest we add content as blog posts, or as content pages (as though there was no blog)?
Or, where does blogging come in to what you are describing? (Sorry if I’m taking this post down a road you didn’t intend to travel…)
Rochelle
hey Mark great post ..did you mean to misspell the page on your site for Carhartt Mens Clothing. the title is misspelled??
@ Mark
I live by my AWstats! Your original post on reading log files combined with becoming savvy with wordtracker, and some good old SEO and content took one of my sites from 30 unique visitors for the entire month of April to almost 700 uniques and 100 click throughs for the month of May. I have yet to make any commission of this particular site, but at the rate I’m going with solid love and care, it will blossom to an authority site in the near future!
I’m kicking ass thanks to reading the log files!
@ Rochelle –
A blog post is just as good as a store page for content! The trick is to write a blog post that is relevant to your target phrases, write content relevant…
Then link your blog post to your store category, or even a search page, focused on your target term.
A new store page, then a blog post linking back to it is awesome!
@ Otis –
Thanks for the find! Definitely not misspelled on purpose!!
@ Elijah -
I love AWStats on these sites… I tend to get lost in Google Analytics, even though I am a stat fanatic!! With AWStats, one or two clicks, scroll… everything is there “at a glance”.
Glad its working well for you!! Time to get those clicks into bids… int buyers!!
Mark
Hi, you may also use KeywordSpy for your keyword research.
Another nice post Mark. I haven’t paid too much attention to stats yet but I will start now as I have stores hitting two months old with some getting very few visits. I think this was largely down to my still learning keyword research so this was a good lesson for me. I’m off to practice on a store right now.
Boy the first site I checked sucked as bad as yours. This despite some serious link building over the last two months. Visitors are a paltry 2 or 3 a day and no sales. Now I thought I had some good keyword selections going here but obviously not. What am I doing wrong he asked rhetorically.
Mike -
Check your email…
Mark
Mark, when you identify a half dozen or so generic long tail keywords as per step 1 of your worksheet should these be used on 1 page, all pages or as anchor text when link building?
I’ve checked out some of your sites and don’t see any trends or anything glaringly obvious that I’m doing differently so I’m leaning towards offpage optimization as the problem.
I’m beginning to lean towards the opinion of an over saturated niche but SEO elite suggests I have done enough to rank for the keywords chosen. Perhaps the site needs more time. Any thoughts?
Hello Mark and thanks for all that you do! When I started I didn’t know a log file from a sitemap and still am pretty darn sketchy!!
I follow you like a hawk. When you mention adding pages(store) consistantly I remember you always saying “don’t get too many and too big”. Maybe 10 to 20 category pages. Could you please clarify a bit. Also, when you say add a main category and then sub categories underneath I am having a brain cramp(which is pretty common!!) I add a main category and then what do you mean or how do I add the sub underneath?? Now give me a little break on this long post because I haven’t ever bugged you before!!! Thanks!
When you say “From here – I Login to my Niche site and added the three new main store categories (pages) listed above in yellow.”
Can you be a little more specific on how to do this? I know how to create a page but how does it actually display the proper category page from ebay? Just by the keywords used?
Also, a little off topic but can you tell me how to display 2 ads side-by -side like you have under your header on this site? Like the Liquidation.com banner and the google banner you have next to each other.
@ Dave -
Thanks for the comment!
Let me state it here… I HATE dealing with eBay categories! LOL This is probably the reason many of my sites were not too affected by the category changes over the past month or so.
When I create a new page, there are times I will choose an eBay category from my initial store setup. (Clicking on category, during the page setup, you can choose from your predefined categories you chose during setup)
More often than not though, i will simply place a 0 (zero) in the eBay category, and narrow my results with a keyphrase. This tells BANS to search ALL of eBay for the phrase you put in the box.
(Narrow search results by reading this post: http://www.thenichestorebuilder.com/8-ways-to-search-ebay-listings-with-different-results.htm)
In regard to the banner in the header… I coded that into a set of Free Bans Templates and it is controlled from the header.php file.
Mark
So you always shoot for google KEI over 1.0 and 10 predicted searches? I think in some earlier posts you mentioned everything over google kei 0.10 can be attacked. Am I remembering wrong?
[...] Reading LogFiles and Adding New Content to your Niche Site By Mark Is it being indexed? If yes… then close the browser and move on to another project until it is 30 days old! If you return in 30 days and your visitor stats look like those above, its time to revisit your WordTracker keyword researchand … The Niche Store Builder – Succeed… – http://www.thenichestorebuilder.com [...]
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