“I’m not getting enough web traffic to my blog! Help! Help!”

Is this you? You work your tail off building your blog, you make it real pretty, real interesting. You do some SEO stuff. Maybe it’s an adsense blog, and … you see hardly any clicks! Darn!

This would be easiest to solve if you knew the point where it’s breaking down.

For example, you know the beginning (you create a blog with some traffic-generation stuff), and you know the end (very few visitors clicking on adsense), but it’s unclear which parts of what you’re already doing are working, and which are not. That is, there are many unknown facts in between the beginning and the end.

For example –

* How many of your keyword pages are indexed in Google?

* And where are they appearing on google when you do a search on your keywords? Page one? Page 87? Page 743?

* Let’s say you have adsense on the pages. Are the adverts appearing on the adsense reflecting what you think the page is about? In other words, does Google think the page is about the same thing that you think the page is about? (If not clear about this, see our article on how to use adsense to tune up your page seo.)

* Now, if google knows what your page is about, and if google is responding to your keywords and serving you up, then do the keywords you’re targetting get many searches? How many?

* And when Google serves up your page to visitors, what is the title they read? What is the description they read? Is the title written so that the visitor says ‘Aha! Yes, that’s what I was looking for!’ And does the description *sell* the visitor of going to see your site?

We see lots of mention in forums about different ways to generate web traffic, to do search engine optimization on your wordpress blog, about how to get more visitors to your website, about using articles and backlinks and social networks. But if’ it’s not working, where does it break?

We see lots of mention in forums about checklists and about step-by-step instructions. And that’s swell when you’re thinking about what you need to do.

BENCHMARKS

However, in these site-optimization and web-traffic forums, it’s rare to see anyone discuss the concept of benchmarks in the sales process.

Wikipedia claims that the word benchmark came from marks on surveying equipment. However, we suspect that originally it was simply a mark on a work bench. For example, if you were making shoes, you might have marks on your bench that show you how long to cut a piece of leather.

A benchmark for a marketing process is finding the points from the customer’s starting place along the customer’s path to the customer’s final resting place- Oops. I mean, to the customer’s final action in buying your product.

And these points are only useful when they can be measured.

You can probably refine this quick list, but the benchmarks in getting a customer to your blog and clicking on an adsense ad would be something like this –

SAMPLE BLOG-TRAFFIC BENCHMARKS

* How many keywords are you targetting
* How many searches does each of these get per month
(But that will only be useful if competition and your skill can prevail)
* How many keyword pages indexed?
* What position on Google do your keyword-pages appear
* What title and description do your customers see?
* How many customers are clicking that title/description
* How many customers are arriving at your site
* How many are staying (versus leaving immediately)
* How many adsense adverts appear
* How many appearing adsense adverts are relevant to your keyword
* Which adsense box positions work the best?
* How many clients click on the adsense adverts?

BREAK IT DOWN TO SIMPLE, MEASUREABLE BLOCKS

If you break it down like a journey that must happen in sequence — keywords volume, google serving, titles appearing, customers choosing, customers visiting, customers staying, adsense boxes positions, adsense ads content, customers clicking adsense — then you can see which parts are working. Leave those alone.

And the parts that aren’t working? Change them. Fix it.

If you’ll make a set of benchmarks (that you can measure) along the (customer’s) path, you can see the points where it’s stuck. If you can see clearly where it’s broken, you can make it work.