For the SEO nerds: I now see a significant uptick in traffic to Cyclelicious from Google Plus.
Organic search remains by far the top source of traffic for this website. Most of that is from Google, though I also get significant traffic from Yahoo and Bing.
Among social media, Facebook remains king for now in terms of people clicking through, with Twitter not far behind. Google Plus, however, is catching up very quickly. In terms of ratios, Facebook is 5 and Twitter is 4. Over the past 30 days, Google Plus has shot up from zero all the way to 3. If I look at the most recent data (traffic since Sunday), Google Plus has already passed Twitter, Yahoo and Bing for inbound traffic.
The G+ visitors tend to be firs time visitors to Cyclelicious, but the big downside: you’re only spending a few seconds here, and you tend not to click the ads or buy anything.
A word about search optimization
Back in the early days of Cyclelicious I experimented a bit with search optimization. I ranked highly for some niche keyphrases like “bicycle blog” and other bike related topics. I strongly encouraged inbound links from other blogs and websites. It was a lot of effort for little gain, so I don’t bother much anymore. I do use some web “best practices” for the purpose of cluing search engines in on the content of each page. That includes giving these pages titles and meta descriptions relevant to the page content.
I do occasionally go for pure search bait. The celebrity posts are the most obvious examples of this, but my motive is the hope that people who run across photos of their favorite celebrity on a bicycle might explore a little more and decide bikes aren’t so nerdy after all.
talk about a guilt trip 🙂 i’m never comming back … 😛
I’m checking my stats for Grid Chicago. These are my referrers for the past 30 days:
(direct) / (none)feedburner / feed
facebook.com / referral
thechainlink.org / referral (local message board and community)
google / organic
reddit.com / referral
twitter.com / referral
gapersblock.com / referral (local blog)
chicagonow.com / referral (local blog run by Chicago Tribune)
stevencanplan.com / referral (my own blog)
Looks like plus.google.com hasn’t registered in the top 10. What I’ve found with Reddit is that hits and unique visitors SPIKE but those visits don’t turn into subscribers. I measure subscribers three ways:
1. Feedburner method
2. Twitter followers
3. Likes on Facebook (although our Facebook is only 2 weeks old)
I am surprised that most people are coming directly, and secondly via Feedburner.
Guilt trip?
for not staying long enough and buying stuff 🙂
for not staying long enough and buying stuff 🙂
You just give me stuff for free. 🙂
Speaking of which — I have your Clean Bottle at the office now. Except I’m not in the office today. Can I drop by sometime?
=v= I keep coming back just to keep abreast of Kirsten Gum.
“Google Plus, however, is catching up very quickly.” That’s could be true if the current trend continues. As of this time, it has around 15M users, and that’s far behind Facebook.