Blogging Tip – Know What People Are Looking For With Search Meter
One of the big tips that so-called “Blogging Gurus” are fond of giving is that you should write posts that address what your readers are looking for. What they seldom, if ever, address is just how exactly it is that you’re supposed to know what people are looking for on your blog.
It used to be that comments that people leave on your posts was a good way to get an idea of what people are interested in but these days comment spam is rampant, more comments are worth only the time it takes to delete them because more often than not it’s just used as an excuse to get a link to their site.
One good way is to pay attention to your site statistics and keep track of which posts get the most views. The more people read something (especially if they leave real comments), the more you can consider the topic of that post to be something that you should consider writing more about.
I have found however that there’s one really excellent way to know what visitors to your blog are looking for. It’s a WordPress plugin called “Search Meter“.
This little gem sits there quietly in the background and keeps track of what terms people use when they use your blog’s search function.
Not only does it put a widget on your dashboard that gives a quick listing of “Searches in the Last 7 Days”, it can also give you a list of the searches people have done in the last 30 days.
In both cases it shows how many times each keyword was used and how many results were found that match.
However I think that one of the absolute best features is the “Unsuccessful search summary”.
This is a list of searches that people have done on your blog that had zero results. If you think about it, this is a gold mine of things to write about. If you look at unsuccessful searches and find that the term “blue widgets” was used 83 times with zero results then you might be well advised to write something about blue widgets.
It’s a great way to find out not only what people are interested in but also what they are looking for and not finding.
It’s not an ultimate solution but it does give you a bit of valuable insight and can be a very useful tool in your blog.
Search Meter can be found here http://thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/search-meter-wordpress-plugin/
