Blogging with real-time data
We recently came across a great example of 1) how quickly a new blog post can appear in search results and 2) the value of HitTail’s real-time reporting.
Kenton Newby describes his experience with amazing indexing results after publishing a blog post and finding it in search results within 2 hours of posting it and at the top of the 2nd page of results for the query “define Google Analytics bounce rate”
We’ve discussed these types of cases in the past here. One of the big advantages of PPC is that you see results imm diately after you activate an ad campaign. With SEO, it usually takes longer to see the results of your work. However, blogging has shown that this gap is narrowing and that it’s possible to see the results of your SEO efforts in natural search results within hours or days of publishing.
Note that HitTail’s real-time report alerted Kenton to the fact that his blog post was getting traffic as it occurred. This realization would not have been possible using other analytics tools where there is a delay in viewing referrer data.
How do you take action on this data?
The real-time data is especially useful for bloggers who pay attention to social media and get a lot of their traffic from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. For example, if you are logged in to your HitTail account and you notice a bunch of new referrers on the Search Hits tab from StumbleUpon or Digg, you can take action immediately by bookmarking the site yourself or notifying your network to increase visibility for that blog post. This practice has the potential to create a quick short-term boost in traffic.HitTail Long Tail Marketing Tool