Pete Ericson and a co-host break down organic traffic trends using period-over-period comparisons to spot which landing pages are rising or falling. They suggest temporarily paywalling your best-performing articles to convert more readers into paid subscribers, and show how to build an organic customer profile for seasonal analysis.
Chapters
The next module that I'm loading up here is all about organic traffic. So why don't you tell us about this page?
Yeah, this one is fun as well. So here we're going to look period over period because we feel that looking at trends in a small window like this creates more actionable data. So if we see sessions are trending way down, we know something might be wrong and we can take action on it. We can also see pages on the right hand side. So these are the landing pages, the organic search pages that are performing well. We can see that maybe a particular page is trending down in a large way and that can give us reason to go back to that page and adjust some, you know, either the content or the title or whatever it might be to kind of help it rise up. A very actionable page. And something that, you know, I think a lot of folks don't dive into, but they really should is the search engine optimization of their pages and site.
You know, I also think it from a subscription standpoint as well, you could. I'm just looking at the top article here and I see that, you know, it's trending up. It's the number one landing page for search and it's also trending up. And as a. If, if I were this publisher, I might consider locking down this page to see if that triggers any paid subscriptions.
Yep.
You could do that just for the short term, correct?
Yeah, that's a great idea. In another way to leverage the paywall to really drive subs.
Yep. Awesome.
Okay, here we also have a quick organic customer profile breakdown, which I think is interesting. I don't think it's something you look at too often. We do have clients that look at it from a time period perspective and they'll look at, you know, if Q4 is really big for them, they'll go back and look at last year's Q4 and try to understand a little bit about their, their customer profile during that time period when some folks are shopping for gifts or whatever it might be. And that can be an interesting way to look at it, but otherwise it's, yeah, it's neat to look at and we leave it here just as a reference.
Yeah, the period over period comparisons are great.
